If sensory issues had the profile in identity politics that they scientifically merit, if they were being held in the same regard as LGBT and ethnic and religious identities, then the nastiest excluding racist aberration in identity politics, the idea of “cultural appropriation” could never have gained any traction. It would have been averted.
If all minority-aware folks recognised a biologically supported human right to make any costume choice that best fits your own physical comfort, so that costume liberty is an absolute standard and dress codes are against human rights, then all would know it was an automatic no-no to tell anyone their ethnicity or race forbade them a costume choice. It would be instantly recognised as bigoted and racism. The inconceivable reversal of logic would never have stuck that radical dogmatists started calling costumes of non-Western origin the exclusive possession of the cultures that invented them, and taking offence and crying racism when whites wear them.
It started when they stopped a Mexican restaurant in the US giving folks sombrero hats to wear, and called it a colonial oppression for anyone else than Mexicans to wear them. For a start, how did they propose to define non-Mexicans without slipping across lines of bigotry? But besides that, to tell folks by ethnicity that they can’t wear something is racism. Sombreros are a PRACTICAL invention where the wide brim’s purpose is as a sunshade. They protect against sun sensitivity. Folks can have sun sensitivity whether or not they are Mexican.
Indeed, the higher latitude roots of whiteness you have, the more sun sensitive you are biologically likely to be, hence have all the more rational practical grounds to wear sombreros, as a protection even against cancer. Whiteness is an evolutionary adaptation to low-sun cooler climates, not to highly sunny ones.
Sun sensitivity is a sensory issue. The sensory issue picture of human rights justifies sombreros and any choice serving sun sensitivity by anyone of any background.
Hence it is not racist for white Westerners to wear Indian or Japanese garments. It is racist for the cultural appropriation nonsense to tell them not to. It is racist to slag white looks in dreadlocks. An American university rumoured in YouTube comments to have actually banned them for white students needed suing, which again might have happened if the court change was not getting covered up. Likewise Quebec university’s racist banning of a white comedian, and this disgusting racial hatred by German climate change campaign Fridays For Future to singer Ronja Maltzahn for being white, by it defeating their own climate change protest !
It’s a giveaway of authoritarianism when the appropriation idea’s adherents talk of “respect”. Respect who? They are not respecting every person’s chosen visual identity. They are self-appointing as privileged gatekeepers of a gate that is nobody’s to keep: sneaking in under the radar an assumption of ownership of the items they want to control. Then acting with narcissism. Respect is a discredited concept, has been ever since the blood it poured in WW1, in the failure of nineteenth century ideas of authority. Respect is what oppressors of kids say, and ageists. It is the word that unequal kowtowing relationships revolve around. It was part of slave relationships. So nothing argued for from it can ever be an undoing of the slavery era’s values !
It becomes apartheid to keep everyone in separate boxes of only the options deemed to be their culture. It’s the opposite of cosmopolitan. The cultural appropriation believers would have banned rock music by white performers, such as Elvis, at its outset, because of the black blues influence that was always recognised in its invention.
As with Scottish nationalism’s aberration on citizenship by parental descent: exclusion is always racist, inclusion is always anti-racist. To say otherwise breaks the whole purpose of values against racism at all. Their purpose is to include and prevent exclusion! To favour exclusions from dip-in sharing of another culture’s inventions is to believe in second class citizenship and racial penalising and cultural segregation: all the evils that human rights are primarily there to make fall.
* The offence claimed to be taken, in the dogma of cultural appropriation, is taken by who? when not every member of the claimed offended group has any media voice .That is where it gets totally manipulative. It is claimed for figures who the media favour to hear and to label as “community leaders”. So, leaders? – who voted for them? They are totally self-appointed. Personally self-claimed lead voices who the media choose to cover, including because they suit the latest dogma. They decree them “community leaders”, so that not all the community have to get voiced. Selected preferred figures can be deemed to be its voice, self-fulfillingly to count that alone as the community spoken for.
In Britain this first happened after the 1985 inner city riots. It was then an attempt to bounce ethnic minority communities into feeling led, and spoken for, by media-appointed unelected figures. The obvious purpose of such a move is social control: to control what the community’s defined view is, without asking everyone in it at all.
It is the same as how radical feminists do not speak for all women, yet demand to be taken as that they do. This is why no oppressed group has community leaders. They are a wrong manipulative controlling idea, a con against being voiced citizens.
* Who has any self-appointed entitlement to guard the usage standards applied to a minority language? It can have the absurd results it has in the case of Welsh.
The sound called “post-vocalic R”, R sounded as a consonant at a syllable’s end when it is not leading into a vowel, does not flow well in the Welsh accent. As we know it is a sound standardly not made in English, but optional to make in accents whose flow it goes with. Though Scottish accents are historically one such, when rolled heavily it can be bugging, and I for one am glad that its use in Scottish accents has waned under standardising influence. In most Welsh accents, all except some of the southwest, these R’s are not sounded when speaking English. Like in most south British accents, the speech likes a fast easy flow between successive letters, that needs their sayability to match well. R naturally tries to roll into a vowel, so it collides painfully with another consonant or as a last sound, and trips up the mouth.
The common sense of not using it, that we dropped the sound at some historical time, is a nice people-driven virtue of English, and of German too. So it follows that it is not natural to its own people’s speech flow for Welsh to require this R sound. But officially it does, the official rules of Welsh say always sound every R, and it occurs horribly frequently. You can never go more than a few words in Welsh without hitting this R, and often twice in a word. Though many languages have this R, and Welsh has made me believe all languages would be better without it, usually it is because it fits into how their formative accents flow. Welsh stands out astoundingly for having it, and very frequently, in total jarring ugly collision with its own accent, making itself harder to say, and having that fact evidenced by not making the sound in another language !
The sound often sounds strained and forced. They make newsreaders sound it in Welsh placenames even when speaking English, so that serious reports on hospital scandals or airbases get spoiled when they have to stumble ridiculously and lose all narrative momentum as they impossibly force their mouths to say “MeRRthyRR” or “AbeRRpoRRth” !
Yet this view can of course make Welsh folks who are fans of the language take ethnic offence. Yet logically the ethnic offence is that difference to English for its own sake is the only possible apparent reason for enforcing this sound instead of allowing the local natural ease of speech. Welsh has very different syntax and sound systems to English, so its pride does not need this difference too, and rThe militants don’t mind it copying lots of English nouns.
Another sound some of them are miltant on is the CH: they say it has to have a throaty cackle in it. Again makes it harder to say. At Charter 88’s Welsh/Scottish pre-devolution conference in Caernarfon 1999, a language activist in the Welsh hosts insisted to the Scottish visitors that it’s wrong to say the Welsh CH just softly like the Scottish use or German, that it’s a different sound and prompted them demandingly that they must add the silly cackle.
It is these 2 unnecessary illogical ugly hard sounds that give Welsh a tongue twisting reputation, and make -ERCH and -YRCH sound like vomiting. Take them out and it becomes perfectly easy to pronounce. Which shows – follow common sense not community leaders ! Everywhere, to try to take painful post-vocalic R out of all languages and rid the world of it, follow common sense not community leaders.
* Here should be a clincher – one of the good anti-bigot inclusive values to come out of the same PC processes as can produce bigoted garbage, is personal choice of gender expression. The personal needs for self-suitable projection by sight or sound of the image that feels personally right around gender – a value that works because personal liberty is always right, personal needs. Yet a believer in cultural appropriation has actually now argued otherwise on Facebook! has written “just like dressing up as a Black person when you’re white; or a transgender person when you’re cisgender. Don’t.” – !
It’s really tragic where that comes from, too. It is actually in a post made for the good moral purpose of speaking out against making fun of skin conditions. Someone with ichthyosis rightly condemning making it the theme of a Halloween get-up. What she is speaking out on there is obviously ribaldry, a clear moral example of anti-ribald policy and the need for it, be it obviously agrees with her on that. But not knowing anti-ribald policy, she completely wrecked her message by bringing in an argument of cultural appropriation instead. Her concept of less dress liberty for white folks instantly makes her post racist.
But what the bloody hell does she, or do you, think for one second she means by “dress as a transgender person” – !!!? By definition there is no such thing as dressing as a transgender person. Transgender clothes choices are dressing to associate with a gender. Cisgender folks obviously have the same choices, and can have any cause or purpose to associate with any gender at any time. Remember gender fluidity too! To claim otherwise implies being against cross-dressing, which means becoming a socially conservative Evangelical-style bigot exactly as are transgenderism’s oppressors!! Again, the cultural appropriation concept leads your logic straight back onto nasty backwardness’s side.
It sounds like, then, she would not like my idea that a schoolkid who privately is cisgender should temporarily play transgender for the real purpose of getting allowed clothes that more suit their sensory issues, as I wish I had belonged to the present generation allowed to do, to escape from long trousers. But I suppose she thinks serving my sensory issue need is cultural appropriation of the kids with that liberty? That’s how the cultural appropriation idea is deeply sickly anti-liberty, hence evil. Applied to gender in the way she did, my sensory issue proves it a child maltreating idea.
* To summarise what is the difference between woke and progressive. Progressive will adapt to any facts, woke will turn personally nasty and cancel you for mentioning any facts outside a predecided dogma.
Progressive says men need liberating from toxic masculinity and to wear a wider range of clothes; woke says it’s always men who are privileged and even men’s far narrower range of accepted clothes than women’s is really oppressing women. Progressive says female-bodied folks are entitled to safe spaces and predators can lie about their gender identity; woke says gender lying never exists and safe spaces are safe with the other anatomy present in them. Progressive says presume innocence and never evidence a crime only from one word against another; woke says women never lie and every accused man is guilty. Progressive says there is a natural human right to protect yourself from cancer by wearing anything invented for that purpose, such as sombreros; woke says race and ethnicity and blame for your ancestors’ actions forbid arbitrary groups from wearing sombreros.
* 2 of this site’s themes point against community leaders. Both the media platform theme, on getting original issues heard, and the dress liberty theme.
court change 