Cultural appropriation

[Lobotomy]

Basically, I just wanted to start a thread for a broad discussion of cultural appropriation as it is something that has been discussed for a while in my community and it is relevant to leftist ideology.

Here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_appropriation) is the Wikipedia page for those who want a basic explanation.

As a white American I feel like I can't really understand cultural appropriation the way a person of another race can. For example, where do you "draw the line"? I understand how some could feel strongly about a white person having dreadlocks or using slang words from different cultures and the like, but what about jazz? Jazz was once a pretty strictly black form of music; is it cultural appropriation if a white person likes jazz? (I'm not saying I agree with that last bit at all--I'm just asking for a distinction.)

[OhYesIdid]

I suppose that it is not so unless you claim it to be a 'white' thing. Kind of like it's ok to repost so long as you link to the original creator

[Tim Finnegan]

Just on the "dreadlocks" thing, that whole cliché line of argument is pretty much total rubbish, on three counts.
Firstly, dreadlocks have never been tied to any one region, ethnicity or culture, but can be found at various times in history in Africa, India, China, Polynesia, the Mediterranean world, Mesoamerica, and so on. The only place that you don't find an indigenous tradition is Northern Europe, and it's only the limited-yet-hegemonic perspective of this cultural group that leads us to consider them something unusual.
Secondly, the current association of dreadlocks and people of African descent is itself the product of cultural appropriation, of a sort: it began when Afro-Caribbean people can to embrace unorthodox interpretations of Christianity and later Rastafarianism, borrowing on the Hebrew traditions of the Nazarites (retained today in some Islamic traditions) and on the asceticism of the Indian sadhu, (a sort of Hindu mystic who came across with Indian labourers in the later 19th century and who represented the only alternative to white Christianity in the Caribbean), and from there was adopted by non-Rastafari blacks as the more general ethnic symbol (and later simply run-of-the-mill hairstyle) that we see today. If we're going to pretend that dreadlocks are the sacred and exclusive property of one particular culture, it certainly isn't African-Americans or Afro-Caribbeans, let alone non-Rastafari ones.
Thirdly, even if that was a problem at one point, it's kind of past that. Most white people with dreadlocks wear them because they're involved in- or would like to think that they're involved in- various punk, crust, metal, folk, etc. scenes or subcultures; the stereotype of all white dreadlock-wearers as upper-middle class Bob Marley-worshipping stoner kids only holds true if your experience of wearers extends no further than obnoxious private-college tools. The uniquely African, African-American or Afro-Carribean symbolism that the style may have had thirty years ago is not something that sits on the mind of those who don't actually regard these things from behind the museum glass.

/rant

[Ocean Seal]

So long as it isn't done for the purposes of mocking another culture, or for attempting to say that you understand a culture without really even attempting to do so.
IE: Saying that one is a Rastafarian, and simply smoking weed without understanding hte religion
Claiming that one is "ghetto" without understanding all of the oppression that goes into being "ghetto". As in going around stating that it is a good thing, using racial slurs, and so on.
I'm hispanic and I'm not sure that what you define as cultural appropriation really bothers me all that much.