Culture is meant to be shared and almost all crossover is appreciation not appropriation.

I’m a white American but when I learned about Dia de los Muertos, I instantly loved the holiday. I’ve always been afraid of death and this is a very comforting holiday to me.

Strangely enough, this is the view shared by most People of Colour I've asked about the issue. Mostly, they just don't like it when white people get away with using aspects of non-white cultures to turn a profit or gain an advantage denied to the people of colour who's culture they are using. Modern examples are more nuanced, but I think an obvious example we can all agree on is Elvis:

White man gets famous playing music invented by black musicians, profits off the opportunities not given to those black musicians because of their skin colour.

Or, more modernly, when white folks use wrongly aspects of POC's culture that have a very special religious, spiritual, or cultural significance. eg: don't wear Native American head-dresses to Coachella as a costume. Wanna incorporate other pieces of Native American culture into that outfit, say a bracelet or necklace or a badass pair of moccasins, that's pretty okay. Even go one step further and make sure it's authentically made by someone belonging to the culture its taken from. They'd totes appreciate it.

In the end, it usually is the too-woke whites who are making the biggest hullabaloo about these things.

Obligatory I'm not a POC but I've often used the term "cultural misappropriation" if it's in bad taste/outright offensive. I think part of the problem is appropriation has such a stigma behind it yet appropriating it cultures should be celebrated.

Instead they make a mockery of the term by applying it to everything and all this does is cause resentment. It hurts the cause and the cultures they are pretending to protect. It's unfortunate because those cultures don't deserve any resentment. Especially considering they aren't the ones that really care about people sharing their culture. A Russian figure skater who loves Japan so much she did a program wearing a costume that just wrapped to the side like a kimono and of course the only ones offended were a few white people. Figure Skating is very popular in Japan and they loved it. In fact, just months before they had the world championships in Japan and Japan gave all the skaters Kimomos and took pictures of them wearing them. When we have so many instances of racism and people really mocking cultures we should focus on that. It seems like whoever put this in people's heads that their motive was keeping us all split up.

Wait what? Is that actually a thing people say? "white people have no culture"?

Oh Jesus what the ultra fuck.

Better demolish all pantheons in Greece, churches in Italy, domes in France and fucking demolish the rest of Europe because CLEARLY THERE AINT NO CULTUTE THERE AMIRITE?

God I fucking hate racism.

It's different for Europe. Race has been a huge factor in American politics for, well, as long as anybody can remember. In Europe, cultural questions don't usually revolve around people's skin colour, so much as their ethnicity. It'd be weird to call someone a "white German" because German is an ethnicity, not a skin colour.

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I remember a German girl during a cultural heritage day at our school said that white people had no culture, she was wearing a dirndl

I commonly hear people say that the Beatles should not be honored because they “appropriated” the music they played. I don’t know how to respond when people tell me that.

I think that very few people even know what cultural appropriation is. But when they see a post on Twitter they want to agree with the side that sounds morally righteous. Like op said, the line between appropriation and appreciation isn't even real.

because the poors got uppity against the banks, it was decided it was time to make the poors mad against one another and pointed out race and made those who arent white fearful of their white neighbors and then turned around and made some of those white neighbors fearful of their darker skinned neighbors.

sociology 101. divide and conquer.

Or when they just say "White People". Like, are we talking Caucasian Georgian culture? Nordic culture? Gaelic culture? The culture that emerged from the British Empire? Scottish culture? Russian culture?

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No, in America people are serious about it. I think they don't understand and can't recognize things they grew up with as culture.

Anyone who has said white people have no culture have almost certainly celebrated white peoples culture before

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White people have culture, everyone else just adopted it

they just turn around and make up claims that those bits of culture were stolen or claim that the artists were actually trans or black or asian and that whites whitewashed it.

I remember someone on social media was talking about jazz music and hip-hop soul etc and how only black people contributed to American music. I though it was so odd considering the instruments come from Europe. As does the western music scale. It’s a team effort when it comes to those kind of things. Hip-hop started because of the help from Japanese turntables. It’s a melting pot. That’s how art works.

The idea that whites( Whites who aren't marked as ethnic that is) have no culture is over 100 years old. It stems from the idea that western Anglo culture IS the modern liberal (In the broad sense) capitalist culture that everyone has adopted.

I think they mean white people in north America

When people say white people have no culture they mean that white culture is so general that its invisible and white people are seen as individulas rather members of an ethnic group.

it's for people who think they're enlightened but are still racist and bigoted who think if they apply their own racism and bigotry to be "beneficial" to the other races, it wins them good boy points.

At the end of the day they're still acting high and mighty and dictating what others should do based on skin color and race. There was a girl at my college who yelled at my mexican gf because she was eating a sandwich instead of a burrito. Then going on about how she shouldnt "dilute" herself with whiteness and embrace her heritage and only eat things from "her culture" and her "country"

My gf response with "I'm from here and they also eat sandwiches in mexico." Which sent the girl into a rage because she got backtalked by someone she saw as below her. started telling her she just didnt know what her heritage was and was grossly uninformed and that because she was from here she didnt have authority to claim that.

gf tells her "and you do?" bitch lost her shit and stormed off.

It was quite funny. This girl also was mad because she saw me hanging out with my gf. Pretended I didnt exist the entire time. It was amazing.

I’ve always found that line of questioning ridiculous for anything. Even in everyday culture most people couldn’t answer any question about why something is done a certain way, they just know that it is.

Hell, most Americans couldn’t pass a naturalization exam, and it only has basic American history and government questions on it.

The other thing is dreads don't originate with black people, and that's the hairstyle people usually get a hair up their ass about. The first evidence of dreads were in Nordic viking cultures, but they sprang up all over the world independently. They're basically what wavy or curly hair does naturally when you don't wash it for a long amount of time.

Dreadlocks have been traced back to many places, from North Germanic tribes to Sub-Saharan Africa. It's always makes me laugh when people say that white people with dreads are stealing from black heritage.

It’s a little more complicated than that. Hair has been a issue mainly because black “natural hair” has for a long time been deemed “unprofessional”. They have HAD to have protective styles for their hair in order to work, and get jobs. Only recently are we changing the stigma.

In America segregation was not that long ago and so the echoes of it are felt all over the country. I think people trip out on this because they want to have more cultural identity beyond ‘my ancestors were slaves and oppressed’. The African American community is still feeling the pain and that comes out in various ways.

For example; I was told that I was stupid when I was a kid. I wasn’t just told by one person but by my entire class, as they would team up on me about this and make fun of me (I had ADD and needed glasses and it suuuucked). Even when I went to another school people would give me shit for being stupid and so as I have grown up it has really affected my view of the world. I have gotten tons of counseling but it still rears it’s ugly head from time to time. It turns out I’m actually really smart and creative and I noticed yesterday (while talking to my life coach) that I consistently think I’m smarter than others. This is just another version of me fighting the wounds from the past but in another way. This type of pain management makes it difficult for me to be honest with myself and take responsibility for myself. I think the black community in America is having a similar experience IMHO. There isn’t something wrong with them, but this community is more reactionary than most communities I meet in the States, which points to pain.

What frustrates me about people on the other side of it is them bombarding white people with questions of “do you know the history behind that hairstyle?? Do you know what culture it came from??” Listen I’m a black woman and I don’t know where all black hairstyles come from. Say what you will about me, but I’m not going to turn around and expect people to know stuff that I don’t.<

Maybe a better question or what they are really trying to say is “do you know thar black women and men were punished and could not wear their hair like that to work years ago? Do you know that white people used to say that braids and locs were dirty? Do you know that a black boy could not wrestle and another one couldn’t participate in his graduation ceremony because of a hairstyle?

I believe that is what black people mean when they ask do you know the history. Not necessarily when the first cornrow hairstyle was created or when beads in braids became popular.

White woman here, that shirt sounds awesome and I would laugh my ass off and ask where you got it! (We're not all humourless twits, honest!)

That is completely ridiculous really. If someone takes the trouble of learning a few words of my language to greet me, that's just really sweet. If they do it to be cool or woke, then that's cool too, no harm done. But if you want to see examples of how ridiculous people can be trying to adopt or show off other cultures then look at Justin Trudeau's trip to India, it's not offensive or anything but he just looks ridiculous.

She wasn’t Indian, but had Indian ancestry

Woke westerners with immigrant ancestry are so salty they could make the ocean jealous.

That makes zero sense considering the literal meaning of the word.

I personally have never used the word, and to be honest, had to look it up. I laughed out loud when I read the meaning.

Well, that's a great issue with the first generation of immigrants. Born in India and spent my early childhood till initial teens in America, sent back to India for my early teens and around then my life on the internet started, the duality of how people who act as the culture is a part of them whilst the ones left in India are fine with most of the adoption. Now most of the horrific butchering of words and their usage isn't that appreciated (the amount of times I've experienced Trump levels of butchering of words is painful).

Besides that it's just a bit pissy about how yoga got adopted as mainly a white thing and all the culture behind it gets used as decor (when I got back from India to the states it was annoying since I was attending yoga classes forced by my parents)

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Should be #1 comment on this thread.

Some people need to be angry to be happy.

It’s something our minds do to manage pain as well. We all have pain in varying degrees and it’s easy to project that onto others through blame. That way I don’t have to take ownership of my own life because other people seem to keep ‘bringing me down’. Everyone does this, but it’s really obvious in this case.

Which is also why this thread exists, people like OP want to be mad at people who care about the structural injustices in the world by reducing their arguments to strawmen.

I agree, at my high-school students were banned from using cornrows or other similar hairstyles because it wasn’t proper and was projecting the wrong image of the school (private school for context) it was considered to be just as bad as dying it. The only acceptable styles for women were either tied up or cut short, same for men.

People still broke the rules anyways, on my last day there I had bright pink hair.

A lot of people of color get pulled out of class/kicked out of school cause of their hair or they’re not allowed to go to work with their hair naturally/wore in certain styles that are deemed “inappropriate” or “unkempt”, while in the same light someone wearing the same hairstyle who isn’t a person of color doesn’t face any repercussions or backlash for it. It’s reasonable to be upset over that.

I agree that it's bullshit when schools force kids to cut their hair for being "unkempt" or "inappropriate". However, what you described isn't typically what's happening. Schools aren't forcing blacks to cut their hair, then allowing whites to use that hair style. Instead, blacks are being told to cut their hair, then whites outside of that school are wearing that hair style. And people see this as hypocrisy when it isn't - because the white person wearing said hair style are in an environment where blacks are allowed to wear it.

When schools force black kids to cut their hair, that's wrong. If schools are forcing black kids to cut their hair but letting white kids wear their hair in the same manner, that's wrong and hypocritical. Both are forms of racism. But getting mad about whites having black hairstyles in general? Sorry, that's not justified.