cazrolime | How I learned to stop worrying and not love tumblr's version of social justice

There are people on tumblr getting furious because a little girl wore a fauxhawk while being white. According to the folks who keep their oppression radars on too sensitive a setting, her parents are teaching her to steal and commit genocide because they let her get a haircut she likes.

For crying out loud, tumblr.

Why is it wrong to like something because it’s good? Why should people only be allowed to wear or like or do something if they happened to be born into the culture that originated it?

I make burritos all the damn time because they’re delicious, and because I’m in Mexico right now so the ingredients are easy to come by. But wait, I’m white, so should I not be allowed to do that? And should I start getting pissed off and offended whenever someone from the USA writes about Jack the Giant Killer and other British myths and legends, or eats fish and chips, or drinks tea, or — but wait, tea wasn’t originally English, so I should stop drinking that as well I guess.

Obviously people will have different ideas about where the limit of good taste is: for instance, I find it strange to romanticise and long after a whole culture based on liking one part of it (the way some people do with Japan). And I know I’m kinda privileged in the sense that nobody’s come into my country recently and carried off all the nicest stuff. But I have serious trouble understanding why some people think there should be these rigidly drawn lines between cultures that can never ever be crossed or else you’re being horrible and racist.

If cultures were never allowed to mix, there would be no Elvis, no TexMex, no pre-packed sushi in Tesco or tortillas in WalMart, and a hell of a lot more people who see other cultures as weird and alien because they've never been allowed to see them as familiar.

If something is good, I don’t think someone should be insulted and ridiculed for liking it because they have the wrong parents or the wrong colour skin.

And that’s my effortpost on the whole thing, I guess.

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:/

idk, like...

cultural appropriation is a real and serious problem

and i don't think little girls with mohawks are the worst of it by any means

nor are white ladies making burritos in Mexico

there is a continuum and it has a harmless end, which i think things like that are on

but it is a continuum and there is a point where it stops being harmless

and i don't think it's up to white people to be the arbiters of where that point is.

Yeah, I agree that there's a continuum of fine to harmful. That's what I was trying to get at in the beginning of the fifth paragraph. I might not've been as clear as possible about that, though, my bad.

And I agree that white people shouldn't decide where the point is, too. I don't think any one group of people should really be the arbiters of it, since the point varies between people and situations, and so there's no single correct place to point to and say 'there it is' as there would be if it was a maths problem or something.

I do think white people should be allowed to hold an opinion on it and take part in the debate, though. Not wade in and take it over and make it all about us, but take part.

it is really hard to take part without making it all about us though

because

that's how privilege works :/

That is kind of vague and I am not sure how to respond

It's possible that I've seen 'privilege' used to mean whatever the speaker wanted it to a few too many times and now I'm not sure how to interpret it on its own

Like, can we not just listen to what other people have to say, and try to understand their arguments and where they're coming from, and then also share our own thoughts and ask questions? Acknowledging that something involves you isn't the same thing as making it all about you. (And this does involve white people, because we have to understand what's going on to avoid saying and doing offensively dumb things. And understanding is reached through talking, not just through passively listening.)

/answers while tagging rp threads

i mean like...

we are saturated in this social context where our particular phenotype is given disproportionate importance

so that it seems to us, if we're not careful, like we are that important and it's not disproportionate

and again and again people try to gently take part in conversations like these, only to step on everyone's heads because they don't realize how fundamentally skewed their starting perspective is

and i guess i just don't think it's that easy to overcome that, in general

I am now picturing your comment read by Sherlock and it's beautiful.

Also that sadly makes a lot of sense. :( Though is it not possible to go into a debate that's open to white people (as opposed to a situation where people want a safe space to talk amongst themselves) and say "okay, I'm not the authority on this because there's no way I've had the experience of being for instance a black person, so I'm not going to talk as if I know better than everyone else"?

it is possible yes

it's just

yeah

also fuck i so wish i had that man's voice XD

Really difficult to do without accidentally getting preachy anyway, yeah.

I guess I'm just really not in love with the idea that what can be appreciated has to be policed, whether it's someone from the USA using English spelling because they like it, or me throwing Spanish words into conversations because I like them. And I'm even less in love with the idea that someone can say "no that's objectively wrong" and I'd be forbidden from questioning that verdict because racism.

...I will get you his voicebox for your birthday. :3