I feel compelled to throw my own two cents in here. I think your topic, cultural appropriation, touches on a bigger issue that really needs addressing. This is the current trend of allegedly “progressive” individuals/groups to use blanket/subjective terms like “offence”, “sensitivity”, “privilege”, etc to divide communities and restrict freedoms. An immediate to-hand example is in this very thread - those of a specific race and gender should be limited in their ability to decide on the topic (my phone won’t let me quote). But the topic is an objective one. The individual’s opinion and their race, gender or minority-group membership are (or bloody well should be) orthogonal.
It’s not my intention to hijack this the thread, but I do feel we need a broader discussion about the topic. To return to the topic at hand, I feel the very concept of “cultural appropriation” is a load of first-year humanities-student bollocks, labouring under the delusion their field is an engineering or scientific discipline. Now, armed with the most basic understanding of human interaction, along such lines as gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, they know how the world should be and decided it is their job to fix it.
However, substantive problems like oppression, poverty, apartheid and slavery are damned difficult to resolve. But throwing in with a bunch of yammerheads enrolled in agenda driven bullshit studies, that’s easy - once you have sufficient yammerheads, you can merrily invent new, unfalsifiable, reasons to justify labelling someone a racist, nazi or bit.
Armed with this new fallacious justification, they can now pick a target and harass the individual - and no TRUE Scotsman is innocent of what they’re wound up about this week. Screaming abuse at them in the street - after all, they’re a member of a designated (by yammerhead mob) oppressor group and have no right to exist. Hounding their employer, trolling their social media, and just generally making damned sure that your target is deprived of their employment, freedom of movement and shunned from platforms of free expression. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
All the while, you and your fellow yammerheads have created a nice little echo chamber where everyone gives your ego a good stroking for your good work standing up to the bastard. It’s already activism as intellectual masturbation, wouldn’t removing “intellectual” from that make for an interesting study.
But this of course comes back to the concept of ownership, property rights, and offence. All of which are fictitious, an individual( or group) can’t own an idea, they have exclusive right to a mode of expression. We are all the product of our influences, the sub of our experiences. We should have the right to express ourselves freely, regardless of the medium, or “cultural property” involved in that expression.
This ultimately circles back around to the concepts of ownership, property rights and offence. All are constructs of a social system - an entity can’t own an idea, nor can they have a monopoly on a mode of expression. We’re all the product of our influences ground up with the sum of our experiences. We should have the right to express ourselves freely, regardless of the medium, or “cultural property” involved in same.
The last remaining bit of the “cultural appropriation fallacy” is the matter of offence (I’m mystified that offensensitivity is MIA). Several people have already expressed that when people engage in cultural matters, it seems to be respectful/inoffensive. That’s a restrictive concept in its own right. First - something being offensive does not automatically make it bad. Shickelgruber and pals would have found the suggestion that Jews have human rights very offensive. I’m sure in it’s time a lot of people thought the idea that you could not own another person was offensive, I’m also fairly sure a lot of people were offended when someone put forward the idea that woman should vote. Today, many people find the idea that everyone should be entitled to a basic income regardless of employment to be a very offensive idea, for that matter, I believe some people will find what I have written here to be offensive. But just because these ideas are offensive dose not make them bad, if a person is offended, then before they raise issue, they should first question if the issue is what they believe. But they should never seek to restrict the freedoms of someone else just because they are offended.
But that’s just one humble programmers opinion.