[mmooss]

> "Cultural appropriation" is a fancy way to say "I only want to learn from people just like me".

Cultural appropriation is learning about things only from people like you, not from the people outside your culture who created it and who may have jarring perspectives and expressions of them.

For example - just something I recently saw - lots of 1950s-60s rock musicians like Elvis and the Rolling Stones appropriated music from black musicians and cashed in on it with legions of white teens. The teens never heard the original musicians or music; they got sanitized, safe, and familiar forms of it - they never encountered much of the original culture or heard from the original people. Apparently some RS performances were note-for-note, vocal-riff-for-vocal-riff copies. (To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts.)

[spencerflem]

exactly! to the point that that music is now synonmous with Elvis and the original culture is lost.

I dont even think 'Cultural Appropriation' describes like, what we ought to do about that in any specific terms. maybe nothing. it more just identifies a problem

[groby_b]

"To be fair, the RS apparently often toured with some of the original musicians as opening acts"

What more would you like? These notes have been played this way before, therefor no other group will ever play them again?

Yes, the exploitation of other (especially minority) cultures is an issue. And that's very much not how "cultural appropriation" is used any more - it's very specifically used as "this belongs to that other group, nobody else can have it". And thus precludes any learning.

It is, in its common use, asking for fully siloed cultures. I don't think humanity benefits from those siloes.

[mmooss]

For people who are really interested: A big part of the problem is that the black blues musicians were excluded - they were kept out of the mainstream, which created opportunity for people like the RS to cash in on the black artists' music.

For example, imagine if today people of East and South Asian descent were excluded from SV. Then white developers stole their ideas and code, changed a few things and put their own name on it, and cashed in.

Art has many more cultural consequences than for-profit software, of course.

[spencerflem]

Maybe that's how its used now, but it was never the intent, and plenty of people still mean it in the original sense

[defrost]

> it's very specifically used as "this belongs to that other group, nobody else can have it". And thus precludes any learning.

Nonsense. Whoever told you that was projecting.

Nothing precludes respectful collaboration and learning, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHgdrzgtBik and numerous other examples.

Worthy of note here is the Rolling Stones learnt about US "black music" from UK record stores, many run by former post WWII US servicemen who preferred the UK to the US South and Jamacian and Trinidadian musicians from the former British slave colonies.

They attended "black" clubs and jammed with black musicians .. they had an experience uncommon in US.