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Originally Posted by Voidbarker
if you're not from a culture, you don't have any say on whether taking elements from said culture is appropriative or not, as far as i know.
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I think you're confusing offensiveness with appropriation.
True cultural appropriation more or less CAN'T be done by a single person. One person is incapable of stealing an entire concept from a whole culture. It REQUIRES systematic abuse, such as with the jazz example.
On the other hand, offensiveness is something you can't judge from the outside. If you haven't grown up in the culture, it's hard to know if you're misrepresenting something in a way that's offensive -- for example, if you wear a meaningful religious symbol as cosmetic jewelry, that could really upset someone who believes in that religion. And on the flip side, you might think something looks like it might be offensive, but if you're not from that culture you don't really know if it actually is or not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ava
That being said, I do believe in white privilege. It's obvious, when you look at TV and movies, you usually always see white people as the lead characters and if there is a black character, they are the "token" black person and they are usually biracial or very fair skinned with loose curly hair...
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Privilege in general certainly exists. Some people just have an easier time getting started than others due to the circumstances of their upbringing.
But usually when we talk about privilege from a perspective of discrimination it's not talking about individual privilege. And racial privilege is a complicated thing.
In certain contexts, white privilege certainly is a thing. In some cities, being white makes you less likely to be seen as hostile in a police encounter. Some employers do still have racist biases, despite this being illegal; some don't even consciously realize they're doing it.
But a lot of things that get chalked up to white privilege are really just statistical probabilities. For example, being white is statistically correlated with being wealthy. But there are poor white people and rich black people, and it turns out that where you grew up is a lot better predictor for financial success than race. Of course, race can influence where you grew up, so it's not completely decoupled, but it's not strong enough to say that being white is automatically a privilege when it comes to money.
And this probabilistic, non-universal nature of things makes it hard to consider racial privilege as being a meaningful attribute when discussing individual people. As is so often the case when it comes to these kinds of issues, and just like with the idea of cultural appropriation, the popular misunderstanding of what these things mean leads to them being applied in discussions that aren't appropriate. It makes innocent, well-meaning people be disparaged just because they appear to have "privilege" that they don't actually have.