Celebrim
Legend
Except I think he hasn't. I think he couldn't be more wrong, and the fact that you think he's right baffles me, because it would seem to be self-evidently false. For example:
Quite obviously, people aren't scared to talk about this, as we are doing it now. Indeed, though you may not know it, this is something like the 10th major conversation about it on EnWorld in the last year alone. Far from being scared to talk about this, people have repeatedly and with boldness pushed this topic on EnWorld despite the fact that in theory EnWorld is not open to political topics. Yet this particular topic and several like it still repeatedly become major topics of conversation at EnWorld. No one at all seems afraid to create a thread about it, where as I'd not be surprised if a contrarian thread denouncing it wouldn't be shut down within the first page. Moreover, this is not just going on here, but such conversations are going on continually in all public forums. So, objectively no one is scared to talk about it, despite the perceived "viotrol and hyberbole". There are things people are scared to talk about, but this isn't it. And speaking of things people aren't scared to do:
If you were speaking about any other group, you would be scared to characterize them in this way. No other group could you play a game of mad libs and replace out "aggrieved red-pill white dudes" and not have the expectation of universal disapproval and even censure. You aren't speaking like someone that is scared to voice their views. You're speaking with the full backing and weight of the most privileged sections of society - wealthy, famous, influential. You've got the opinion that is clearly the one mainstream society says that you should have.
But that doesn't bother me so much (society isn't inherently wrong) so much as the fact that your view is inherently racist. You've not only classified a group primarily by their skin color, but you've flat out assumed that everyone on one side of this debate has a single skin color. This is manifestly not true, as I can link you to plenty of people of every skin tone you could imagine, denouncing the idea of "cultural appropriation" as nonsense and indeed racist nonsense. And what's even more damning, and bothers me even more, is that you seem to think that matters. In other words, you've prejudged not only a person on the basis of their skin color, but prejudged an idea on the basis of the skin color of who has it. Likely, if you thought I had a particular skin color, how you would think about what I'm writing would be different. At the very least, that's racialist - the assumption that by a person's skin color or ethnic background alone you know something very important about there identity and the value (or lack of it) of what they are saying. The opposite would be holding that we have a universal shared common humanity, and that to the extent that we all are unique and have unique experiences we can't really know what those are unless we know the individual. So you can't know a person's skin color by knowing that they grew up upper middle class and went to a private school, and you can't know a person's skin color by knowing that their mother drug 100lb bags of cotton through the red clay as a 10 year old to help feed the family because her father couldn't get work. And if you think you can, you are a racist.
Once again, you are judging people's opinions by the color of their skin. You have a made an assumption here that no one that disagrees with you could have a legitimate basis for their beliefs and that no one who disagrees with you could have an informed opinion. I'd be careful if I were you before asserting that someone else doesn't know what they are talking about. There is almost certainly people who disagree with you that indeed deserve this description, but to assume it universally smacks once again of desiring to put people in neat little easy to understand boxes with various broad labels and stereotypes on them. Which is kinda racist, and even where such ideology doesn't touch on race, is equally as bad.
And here is the thing. Why should we assume that all those people have legitimate grievances? So far as we can tell from the admittedly one sided description of events, it doesn't appear the friend in the post that started this all has a legitimate grievance. I can imagine details that might be missing from this conversation that might change my opinion on that, but the vast majority of claims of "cultural appropriation" don't seem to come from any sort of legitimate grievance. And to an extent that a legitimate grievance might exist -for example, I'd agree that for historical reasons someone might have legitimate reason to disapprove of a caricature of a Japanese man as a short, buck-toothed, glasses wearing man squinting and saying, "So Sorry" - that legitimate grievance turns out NOT to be "cultural appropriation". Indeed, I'm hard pressed to think of one claim of cultural appropriation other than that of some black musicians deprived of their due copy rights that seems to have some legitimate basis, and even that might be better characterized as "plagiarism" if we wanted to be clearly understood what we meant about the crime here without being misunderstood and creating undo controversy.
I have a friend back on Jamaica who is a folk singer, and if a person were to take his stuff without giving him credit, that would be wrong. But it would not be wrong for a white person to popularize Jamaican folk music, especially if they did it out of legitimate respect and admiration, and in fact I can only imagine that a person doing that would be doing my friend good - since attention to his style of music would only increase the chance he'd be noticed and increase demand for his performances and the like as more people began to want to hear music of that sort. I think it is telling - and utterly damning - that if a black musician did this, even if they were not Jamaican, there would not be an automatic assumption of cultural appropriation, even if that person never spent a day on the island. Consider for example how few black Americans are accused of 'cultural appropriation' for wearing dreadlocks, even though none of them are Rastafarians or Jamaicans. For some reason, the opinion of a black American wearing dreadlocks as to whether it was OK and respectful for a white person to wear them would likely be sought out, even though that person objectively has no more 'right' (or lack of 'right') to the hair style as anyone else.
Yeah, it's going to get a lot more painful from here.
Flat out, you can't 'appropriate' a culture. It's not a thing. It's not real. It's not a legitimate grievance. And if it were, the result of applying this principle would not be the healthy result you seem to think it is.
Ditto. Except I'm fully convinced that the side that is more or less in the right is not the side that you think it is.
Yes, there is no consensus on what is or is not appropriate. But to the extent that there is no consensus about what is or is not appropriate, the crux of the matter still doesn't have anything to do with "cultural appropriation". You don't have to agree that "cultural appropriation" is even a thing, to think that there might be appropriate and inappropriate ways to portray cultural minorities. It doesn't add anything to the conversation or to ones understanding, and in fact actively detracts from it.
Go back and read what you wrote and tell me again how the lack of compassion and empathy is something you are really trying hard to address.
Those people may not be the people you think that they are.
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