I don't really understand the debate around cultural appropriation. There's two perspectives I agree with. We should learn and appreciate what is good from other cultures. But also when someone takes something cool from a culture and is really disrespectful about it, that sucks. So we should combine cultural ideas without being rude or uncaring to other cultures, right? If there's anything I'm missing please let me know.
@vaughan @wistahe this isn't the kind of thing you can close the book on. it's about power, money, and agency. appropriators take some aspect of a marginalized community's culture and profit from it. maybe the value flows back to the community: if it does, that's generally good. if it doesn't, people complain.
another aspect is that the mainstream can misrepresent the depth or context of some aspect of culture - I wouldn't just call that 'disrespect' since 'disrespect' sounds to me like it's active and intentional, but it can easily be done through inaction and be accidental. one unfortunate effect of that is the misrepresentation gets reflected back at the marginalized and can contribute to erasure of their culture over generations.
it keeps being an issue because it keeps happening. ¯\_༼ •́ ͜ʖ •̀ ༽_/¯
@2ck @vaughan That's true, it can be really infuriating when a large organization says that care about a group, but does nothing that would actually help! And as someone from Hawaii, seeing how the mainland portrays us can be really bothersome sometimes. I imagine it would be even harder for black communities with how black people are portrayed on the news and how little effort is done to address poverty in the United States which intersects with a lot of other prejudices.
@2ck I see it mentioned every now and then. It seems like it is a lot of the time made out to be a grand battle over what you can and can't do, but to me it seems more like misunderstandings about what is respectful or rude and people not quite agreeing over what things shows embarrassing ignorance/wonderful celebration or not.