Celebrim
Legend
I think there is, though you can go to Oklahoma and find plenty of young people wearing Redskin jerseys, so even in cases like that there can be divergent opinions within the community as to what goes too far. I'm not going to venture my opinions, but some of that bothers me and some of it doesn't, and I suspect people will say that my opinion doesn't matter anyway and I don't want to get into that either. But your 'gulf' to me exists even within the things you list, and even amongst people in the community they can see a gulf between things in the list.
For me, there are two critical problems here. First, the notion of 'authentic' is racist, because even if you are full blooded and born on the reservation, if your opinion isn't what it is expected to be then you are dubbed 'not authentic'. Give you an example, I knew a full blooded Comanche medicine man, who was offended by none of the things on your list. His reasoning was perhaps fairly unique, or maybe it wasn't, but the way he reasoned was that his people and the white people had fought a war - a valiant war by braves on both side - and his people had lost. As a result, the white people were counting coup against his people not out of disrespect, but because his people had fought so bravely that the victors wanted to self-identify with, and decorate their warriors with the trappings of the defeated foe. In his opinion, had his people won, they would have done the very same thing - so how could he justly complain? Is his voice 'inauthentic', whether it is the minority position or not? Or is it just another voice in the conversation? But the complexity of this topic is continually squashed by the 'authentic' argument, which involves picking and choosing who gets to decide who is authentic.
Secondly, I put little stock in any complaint where the complainer cannot provide for me a solution to the problem. Complaining without a solution is just whining at best. And the problem with 'cultural appropriation' is not only does there not seem to be any objective standard for what is or isn't 'cultural appropriation', but the act of trying not to engage in 'cultural appropriation' is also considered a crime - the crime of 'whitewashing'. In other words, you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. No matter how respectful someone tries to be, it's never enough to please everyone, and if they try to avoid the problem by not using elements from other cultural groups, then that is also considered something to take offense at. Even more damning, if someone from outside my cultural group borrows elements of some cultural or ethnic group I identify with, that isn't "cultural appropriation" but something bad I've done called "cultural imperialism". In short, the whole thing reeks of being a scam designed mainly to stir up resentment and create outrage so that certain brokers can reap benefits by claiming that they and they alone can determine what is "authentic" and bless it as good. But even when you try to play that game, some other would be broker gets upset.
At some point, it stops mattering that someone is upset despite every effort and intention of being respectful. At some point, someone's claims about their hurt feelings and their being upset moves from something I'm sympathetic to, to being a sort of moral narcissism - the sincere belief that your opinion on subjective matters is actually objective truth. Now, there are plenty of things I do believe to be objective truth, but you can usually tell the difference because you can elucidate one and share the definition so everyone can test it without asking, where as with the other the test just comes down to "because that's the way I feel about it".
There is one thing that I think can legitimately be described as "cultural appropriation" and when the term first started being used it seemed to only refer to that one thing and one thing only, and limited to that I was fine with it. That one thing and one thing only is best exemplified by the practice which was formerly common of white musicians sampling or covering black blues musicians and giving them no credit and no royalties which would have been rightly owed for their work. As a term for a particularly vicious and cynical form of plagiarism, I am ok with the term "cultural appropriation". But in that case what it is referring to is the theft of actual property from an individual. But no individual (or even a group) can claim to have intellectual property rights to a culture and the ideas produced by that culture. And the claim that somehow you are a representative of that group and the owner of their culture is to me dubious at best, and down right racist in the worst cases.
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