sigelphoenix

Via Reappropriate comes a post on cultural appropriation that's just about the best I've ever seen. It's a mini-guide to evaluating your actions on the appreciation-appropriation scale - whether you're engaging in genuine multiculturalism or merely racial objectification. For example:

Are you taking into account power structures? Do you know the difference between a fourteen-year-old Turk drinking Pepsi or a Somalian farmer wearing a baseball cap and a well-to-do white lacrosse player from Houston going to practice in a shirt with slanty-eyed caricatures doing laundry on it? How about the difference between a poor-as-dirt Algerian-French man sampling Motown and American gangsta rap and copying the fashion of famous black American musicians, and a middle-class white realtor's wife from Sussex wearing saris because she's really gotten into her yoga class?

One of the things I like so much about this post is that it's specific - too often, essays on cultural appropriation resort to vague questions like "are you genuinely respecting the original culture?" To which, of course, cultural appropriators can say, "yeah, of course!" and happily carry on in their ignorance. Using examples like this makes the right kind of people uncomfortable.