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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6697464" data-attributes="member: 4937">I think you can state this more strongly.  There are some human behaviors that appear pretty typical, an hence 'normal', that humans generally feel they ought not do however normal the behavior is - honesty is upheld as a virtue despite a general lack of evidence that honesty is more normal than lying.  So this criticism, while valid, isn't as powerful as it could be.But under the own terms of the criticism, diverse influences and non-Western cultures are called out as good things (indeed, better things than the depraved Western culture).  So the problem is not merely that the essay, and the term it is discussing, states that you may never engage in the normal behavior of borrowing ideas that intrigue and excite you - ultimately suggesting that only non-westerners should be allowed to create from a palate of non-western ideas - but that at the same time the criticism suggests that westerners are to be damned for not drawing from these more diverse sources and that a setting can be condemned a being too Eurocentric.While the original essay doesn't focus on it, the same critics are also highly critical of Western cultural assimilation of non-Western cultures and claim that this is a violent hegemony that oppresses them.  So for example, if a Japanese person where to appropriate the iconography of Western knights, devils, angels and so forth, and use it to create art, then this would be seen as being an evil perpetrated by 'the West'.  The Japanese person is in this theory denied agency, and is in fact manipulated by Western forces.  Where as, if an American person where to appropriate the iconography of Japanese samurai, oni, and kenku and use them in their art, in this theory the Japanese person still doesn't have agency and the westerner is still the active agent acting on the passive Japanese culture.   According to the theory, the only way the Japanese person can have agency is if the American explicitly goes to the person and grants them agency by asking their permission, because under this theory of 'cultural appropriation' it is ALWAYS the Westerner that is the active agent and ALWAYS the non-Westerner that is the passive agent that is acted upon. Now, not to put a too fine a point on it, but that's racism.  I mean, the thing that really strikes me about this theory is how bloody self-centered it is.  I grew up outside of the United States, and the above theory doesn't remotely describe how cultural exchange works in the real world or how much benefit accrues to a people when their cultural trappings and heritage come to the attention of larger and more prosperous cultures.  The theory is just a dandied up version of 'White Man's Burden' and 'Noble Savage' theory masquerading as decency (as those theories have before), and it's insulting to real friends of mine and real people, and believe me, this is me being really restrained in holding back from saying what I want to say.But in the face of that sort of hate speech as is in the OP, don't expect me to be silent.  Much as it claims that you can do hate speech without meaning it, so I also grant that the original poster wasn't meaning to be so condescending and hateful (to just about everyone), and unlike the essay I do think that the intention matters, but yeah, I'm not going to be meekly going, "Yeah, stop making Ska, Calypso, Jamaican Folk or Reggai influenced music unless you are a real Jamaican because it's really bad for my Jamaican musician friends for you to be like influenced by them."  (Plagiarism would be a different story, but we already have a term for plagiarism.  It's not like 'cultural appropriation' adds any clarity to that.)</blockquote>

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