Right, like a white person wearing blackface and a white person making a dumpling cookbook are simply not the same category. And I think we can recognize that while recognizing both that people who overdo the concept, neither caused fascism nor are necessarily ill-intentioned.
exactly. it's just not a useful way of framing things, not like evil or anything, but unhelpful but the idea that a few, not powerful or representative, people online complaining about a dumpling cookbook *caused global neo-fascism is wild to me
Only if, as you have said, you think the Right lacks agency
Pet peeve. But doesn’t ’cultural appropriation’ helpfully group together things where one culture’s stuff is used by another without contracted exchange or borrowing? Key is, it’s not always bad to do this, but the descriptive concept does name something not otherwise named, and that’s pretty good.
I mean, I guess if it were widely understood that it’s a non-evaluative word, but since it isn’t, the concept is unhelpful.
Neutral ‘cultural appropriation’ is helpful for killing off the concept of ‘cultural borrowing.’ You can never contract with a culture to borrow its rhythms and couldn’t give them back if you tried. Though this concept is nonsense, it gets used b/c it makes all cross-culture taking seem good/fine.