Cultural appropriation is good

Cultural appropriation is a good thing.

Appropriation is how culture works. It's what culture *is*. It's why I can read the works of Greek philosophers, saved by Muslim scholars, translated into a Germanic language written with a Phoenician alphabet on an American computer network with a machine built in east Asia. It's why I am not spending my days as a hunter gatherer (or by now, more likely dead). Pick whatever examples you like - Cultures that don't appropriate things they like from other cultures are rare; and mostly extinct. It goes both ways, too; over the millennia both conqueror and conquered (as well as more ambiguous interactions) have taken useful things from each other.

Sure it is bad to grab small recognizable bits of other people's cultures for the purposes of mockery, or to whip up hate. But we can call that out for what it is - mockery and hatred - instead of trying to make an offense out of something that is as intrinsically human as any of the things we try to use as definitions. And if you see someone trying to grab a bit of another's culture and doing it badly - help them! Tell them what they have missed! And if they refuse to learn or fail to improve... that's their loss, or possibly their considered decision. Every generation appropriates some of the previous generation's culture and makes up some of its own; every generation complains that the next is getting it wrong.

The "appropriation" complaint usually comes from eager defenders of some minority's rights against the dominant hordes. But there's an inverse version of the same complaint that comes from people who I can best sum up as bigots. It's usually aimed at underprivileged minorities, and it goes something like "if these people don't like our culture, they shouldn't be using iPhones/electricity/cars etc. We invented those". But they didn't invent those things either. Very few people have invented anything so dramatic. Some people who spoke the same language as the bigots invented them, perhaps, or people with roughly the same skin tones, or who worked in the same country. Chances are that the bigots would be very unhappy at being forced to adopt the same culture as the actual inventor of their favorite thing, and would find it impossible to simultaneously adopt the culture of more than one or two big inventions.

So go ahead. Make your rock and roll with a tune pinched from Bach and lyrics from Li Bai. Put a bagpipe solo in. Make a Bollywood style video clip for it but use Samba dancers. If it sounds good, it IS good.