My Culture is not your prom dress 2: electric boogaloo.
As a chinese, you're welcome to do so. It's Lunar new year, there's nothing special or specific about it. Pop a beer, play firework, or whatever. Make up your culture for celebrate the new year, that's how culture is born! There's not even a standard for it in China, different region have different way to celebrate. And each household even have their own way to celebrate! How is any of this gatekeeping make sense i don't know.
It's so sad to see a melting pot now call for separation.
I do think it's important that people know what it is they're celebrating, but yeah like my local Chinese community always does a lunar new year celebration that is open to everyone. I think a lot of Chinese people (and other communities that celebrate the lunar new year, like Okinawan Korean Vietnamese and many others) see open celebration as creating more appreciation for and understanding of their culture.
This is what happens most of the time when people scream cultural appropriation. The problem is that people without understanding of the terms use the terms every day. This leads to scenarios like the one above, or where someone is getting offended you're enjoying a cultural food, or listening to a specific kind of music. Appreciating other cultures isn't appropriation.
Exactly, appropriating means to take and pretend you invented it or created it. Interacting with culture or enjoying other people's culture isn't harmful and if these people actually went to other countries they'd realize their people WANT to share their culture.
I remember someone giving a huge speech on...tumblr probably it sounds like something that would come from that shithole...that white people learning Spanish was cultural appropriation.
That's why people who do understand the terms need to call the people who don't out at every opportunity, but they won't do that because of "solidarity."
Hundred. Percent. It's astounding, I am astounded at the number of messages I have received as a result of this post exactly mirroring the less desired sentiment you've described.
But it's cool, they can go f*** themselves, there's like 2 billion people wholesomely celebrating this holiday in defiance of bigotry, so it's not a real problem.
I'm Jewish. I invite you all to celebrate any Jewish holiday. But they're all stupid religious bullshit other than the food part, so I wouldn't bother.
Well the problem is that Passover has the best food, but it's also celebrating a genocide, so I don't really have a good recommendation.
Purim maybe? It's mildly less stupid than the others since it's actually based on something that really happened? But it's still based on an arranged marriage, so even that's kind of fucked up. I don't know. The Bible is ridiculous.
Every year my mother buys jelly donuts for us when we come to visit for Hanukkah and every year, we all tell her that we don't like jelly donuts.
At least she doesn't try to cook them. She's an awful cook. And she doesn't understand food. She makes latkes in the oven (not fried) the day before we come, freezes them, then defrosts them when we come over. And we eat two and pretend we like them and cover them with enough sour cream so that we can't taste them.
We used to go home and make our own another day, but they're also kind of a pain in the ass to make, so we just deal with shitty latkes once a year now.
Her matzoh ball soup is fine, but it's very hard to fuck that up.
I give everyone a pass to wear a yarmulke if they so choose. Black people included (hey, there are black Jews anyway, like Sammy Davis, Jr.). I don't know that most black people would feel that way about Jewish people using the N-word though.
Judaism is a closed religion, lighting candles for Hanukkah is one thing and that's cool if you want to partake in some fun. Saying prayers over those candles is markedly different and definitely appropriation.
There's a whole part of Passover, inviting in strangers and caring for them, as we would have liked when we were strangers in Egypt. Entire sections of the Haggadah are didactic exercises for Jewish children, AND anyone invited to the sedar who doesn't know it's history.
When Judaism is closed it's because we're hiding from people who want us gone, not because we're some secret society.
I wouldn't call it appropriation. Appropriation would be claiming those weren't Jewish prayers or a menorah, they were Christian (or whatever).
A non-Jew saying Hebrew prayers doesn't offend me. My non-Jewish wife has done it before because she got a masters in folklore and wanted to take part. She didn't claim it as her own, she just took part in the ceremony. And plenty of non-Jewish spouses of Jews have done the same thing.
Honestly, if you're curious and you want to take part in Jewish ceremonies, go for it. Judaism is not as closed as you think. If it was, you wouldn't have famous converts like Sammy Davis, Jr. and Isla Fisher (and Ivanka Trump, unfortunately). It's not a simple process like turning around three times and saying "I'm a Jew!" but it's not exactly a ridiculous challenge either.
Nah, as a cracker ass American I think I will celebrate Lunar New Year and immerse myself in the lore and customs of people I share this plant with because history rocks my fucking socks.
Everything is already globalized and commercialized, not just the supply chain. Halloween stuff is sold over the world. Asian couples marry in a tux and white dress instead of traditional clothing. And then you have food. It's all a form of cultural appropriation.
It's moreso that consumerism and the exploitation of labor causes orders of magnitude more suffering and oppression than cultural appropriation could (putting aside whether the post is even cultural appropriation in the first place).
In a sense, she's not even bothering to think about her actual influence or changes she can make, she's just trying to look good.
"friendly reminder that if you're white, you'd better be uptight to the point of constipation at all times, except for moments of stress-induced diarrhea"
I mean, it's not like there aren't large communities of Asian immigrants all over the world. In most countries, and definitely the English speaking ones, I almost guarantee your country celebrates it somewhere. Beyond all the other problems with this, it erases the experiences of Asian immigrants, I live in the US and I know for a fact there's going to be tons of celebrations here for it organized by people whose cultures it is.
I recall when I was first informed about “cultural appropriation” and how it boiled down to the concept that if a white person enjoys any aspect of a non-white culture it was an act of racism. Gotta love the gravity well of ultra liberal bullshit warping back in on itself and becoming fascism.
That's a bullshit explanation of cultural appropriation and the person you heard it from is an idiot. Actual cultural appropriation is when you take something from another culture and either erase or overwrite its origin, so the original culture in its original form becomes forgotten.
For example, when white artists re-recorded songs from black artists and specifically removed them from the credits and claimed them as their own, that was cultural appropriation. When movie studios chopped up Indian culture and presented it in a completely distorted and inaccurate light, so much so that the original meanings were lost, that was cultural appropriation.
Simply being a participant in someone else's cultural celebration is not cultural appropriation.
Considering I've seen a lot of gatekeeping morons go on about cultural appropriation without ever mentioning that, I think most don't understand this crucial distinction.
TBH though I do find the term used to gatekeep far more than I see it used to promote respect. Most cultural arts and traditions formed from bringing a few items/ideas from other cultures back to their own and overtime they incorporated it into their own. Shit like wearing a cultures clothing item that requires significant cultural acts to obtain in said culture when you are not a patt of it, theres nuance and issues of cultural respect to talk about there. But "cultural appropriation" as a term doesnt really get used that often with that level of nuance
It's not any form of liberalism. The troll depicted in the original post, is building a strawman. A ridiculous opinion nobidy believes. The goal is simple to delegitimise the whole idea of cultural appropriation. To basically say, Disney did nothing wrong taking children's public domain folklore and locking it behind an intellectual property paywall for 100 years.
That's the real goal here. As usual the powerful taking away from the weak and saying they're not allowed to complain.
You are ultimately right, this is fasch behaviour. This is fasch wearing fake liberal faceskin.
Sorry to inform you, but I know people like this, and they're not building strawmen or false flags. They sincerely think they're helping, when all they're doing is creating strife and division.
It is. I'll elaborate. The neonazis in France, Germany, Hungary, and other places with a growing nazi problem are calling for ethnostates. One country per ethnicity. No cultural exchange, no learning from other cultures, no exchange and most of all absolutely no exchange of people.
Now if you take the idiotic idea of "cultural appropriation" to its natural conclusion, you arrive at very nearly the same idea. Hermetically closed cultures separate from each other, no exchange. Everyone only gets to enjoy the culture they happen to be born in.
This is why it is racist. Because the separation of peoples and cultures is a racist idea.
Humanity absolutely thrives when cultures mix. The whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. Racism and bigotry cease to exist the more cultures and peoples mix. And I mean mix, not live separate lives that just happen to be in the same geographic location, just to be clear.
A problem society has is often making assumptions about something rather than getting information from a direct source for example getting information from the actual people they are making assumptions about instead of making assumptions about them
Assumptions made about people instead of information coming from the people they are talking about
Whrn I was on reddit I saw this alot on reddit with foreign companies and was reading a thread where someone asked if people in Japan where racist
It was filled with people saying yes but something about the thread felt ungeniune so I went on the japanlife subreddit about this topic and they haven't experienced racism and that most of it is misunderstandings and not understanding the people
I also went to watch those videos on YouTube where people from Japan interview Japanese people and most Japanese people where not racist and it was only the rare occasional one that was but they where older people and they where in the single digits range so japan just has a few racist people like every other country and most people are open
Its typically the younger generations that are more open and I tend to see that it's the younger generations that are open in every country so I think we are just waiting for the old bigots to turn over and die
It's best just to get information about a people from the people itself instead of looking at random people's opinions online
Even countries that use the same calendar don't call it the same thing!
Korea and Vietnam each have their own Korean and Vietnamese New Years, but Malaysia literally calls it Tahun Baru Cina (I'll give you three guesses what Cina means). In fact, several countries call it something like that: Singapore and the Philippines calls it the Chinese New Year, Brunei calls it Tahun Baru Cina, etc. Meanwhile, China doesn't even call it a lunar new year, they call it the spring festival.
Lumping them all together is just something we're doing to make it easier for Americans.
Self-identification is such a bizzare polarized issue. On one side, you have sexual self-identification being embraced by the same people who bemoan cultural self-identification. I don't understand this cognitive dissonance. Alas.
It's chinese new year? Why they call it lunar year? Yes I know their calendar is running by the moon. Is "lunar year" ultra-woke to avoid a "ugly" word like "chinese"? An other case of woke racism?
It's more because so many cultures have a lunar calendar, so even though China is the largest population that uses the lunar calendar, it's not precise to just call it the Chinese New Year, since so many countries and cultures also have a lunar calendar that share significant dates.
Sorry, today it's New Year in the Chinese Calendar. It's celebrated by Chinese all over the world. And it's not even a really "lunar" calendar. More precise is to call it a "lunar-solar" calendar. Racism, not accuracy.