LOL. It’s as hard as transfinite mathematics Ari don’t you understand

“Their internal shittiness and racism is somewhat ancillary here merely because it’s not appropriation per se.”

“There is also a degree of acceptance that not all cultures are equally interested in being shared or emulated.” THIS!!! I feel like so many appropriators have a problem with being left out of the party. So they simply deny that they’re super entitled, and hide behind a lack of inspiration/imagination. I also feel…

Japanese attitudes to race, identity (and other social issues) are a can of worms all their own. Because the population is so homogenous, they can be incredibly oblivious to their own prejudices (so can we all, of course, but I found some of my otherwise very liberal Japanese friends’ attitudes breathtakingly…

You mean Blonde Asshats to grope.

This came up recently in a discussion with a friend. I guess there’s that barrier of white people still aren’t used to being told no, so we instinctively try to find ways to justify a yes. This was, more or less, the example I used:

I have a faux-retro Japan travel agency poster hanging in my dining room. I love it…

I went to Kyoto and there are a large number of companies there who will dress you up in traditional costume for a day. You can dress up in a nice kimono, but for a higher price, you can dress up like a maiko or geiko. Any geishas you would meet in the streets would actually be dressed up tourists. I went and dressed…

Those numbers are not negligible; I could compare the 23k number to a number of other key demographics in our country and it would be similar. Also if they are not outliers from other Indigenous nations in Canada (Statscan only indicates all First Nations and Inuit population numbers together in most studies) their…

~26,000, actually. They have more than one museum. They’re doing just fine without punk rock’s help, thankyouverymuch.

It’s hard on both sides of the argument, apparently.

I am about to write you a long message that I hope makes sense! Apologies in advance if it is a jumbled mess. Lots of thoughts on this.

Lots of Mohawk people in Eastern Canada and Northeastern U.S. actually. Mohawk and Algonquin are def. the two Indigenous nations I know the most people from in my area. I have no idea how they feel about punk mohawks — Coachella-type fake headdresses seem to unanimously induce eyerolls of disapproval but I gather…

Yeah. People don’t seem to want to do the work to understand this distinction. Which sucks, because doing the work teaches you a lot about other people and cultures and is an ACTUAL way of advancing our society and building more a melting pot.

“But there’s so many ways I, a White Person, am used to being a dick.” -Soperfect

dolezal is a completely separate question, i think. she’s not trying to appropriate anything - she’s trying to literally claim blackness as hers, to say she has a right to all of it by nature. essentially, she’s putting on blackface and then saying that a white woman living her entire life in blackface is the same as…

Honestly I think the biggest issue in all this is that the people whose culture is being appropriated are otherwise treated poorly by the people doing the appropriating (and US society writ large). It’s all about “you care for my appearance but you don’t care for me”.

Well said.

The fascinating thing is, reading past comment threads about this very issue, soooo many Jezebel readers would agree with the NY Times troll piece. The entire piece seems copy and pasted from this site’s community of commenters. 

When I was little I was the only white kid in the park other than my tiny, red-faced, bald sister. There was a group of older girls (young teens) that would ask my mom if they could put me on the swings and then they would play with my hair- which meant I was always trotted back to her with tight little braids. I was…

Even still, the writing of Koizumi Yakumo is not on the same playing field as the writing of Lafcadio Hearn. He got preeeeetty gross in his earlier writing for the west! Have you read Strangeness and Charm? It might as well be titled Orientalist Fetishization For Babies.