Thread by @DawnXianaMoon

Here's why cultural appropriation hurts.

Remember the Spider-Man movie where Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) wore a cheongsam (a tight-fitting Chinese dress with a high collar)? Nicole Kidman wore one to an event. So has Emma Watson, Uma Thurman, & an unending list of celebs.

So it should be the height of cool, right? Fashionable, & worn by professionally fashionable people.

I think cheongsams are gorgeous. But I can't wear one without being seen as foreign and Other. I don't get cool, fashionable points.

(Though I might get sexy points related to being "exotic," which I don't always want to deal with.)

So I almost never get to wear a beautiful style of dress that is distinctively Chinese, because there are layers of overt and covert racism that tend to surface when I do.

And that's sad. It's a part of my heritage that has been essentially taken away from me by the dominant culture. It's a loss.

Here's what cultural appropriation is not.

It is not just any time you fuse different styles of art together from different origins. Fusion can be done respectfully and with understanding and humility. (I think about this a lot! Almost every form of art I practice is fusion.)

It can also be done in ways that make marginalized folks feel gross as they watch ppl from the dominant culture get accolades they themselves are denied.

(See: White chefs gaining cachet in the food world for making "ethnic" foods- often poorly- while Chinatowns get ostracized.)

Are the lines sometimes blurry? Yes. But if you're doing any kind of artistic fusion, at bare minimum you owe it to every culture you're borrowing from to work through the various issues at play and accord them full respect as your teachers, not the other way around.

Ultimately cultural appropriation is all about power and power imbalances. Marginalized people are required to learn the culture of dominant culture in order to survive.

So of course in the US we wear "white" clothes & speak English & groom ourselves in particular ways.

Dominant culture requires us to learn.

In modern Thailand, most people eat with forks & spoons. Why? Thais traditionally ate using their hands. But they had to use forks to get Europeans to take them seriously, because eating with one's hands was considered "uncivilized."

So they had to change. In order to survive, they had to appear "modern" and "civilized" to Western eyes. (And this strategy worked - Thailand is the only country in the region that avoided being colonized.)

That impetus to learn doesn't exist the other way around.

Cleaned up this thread and posted it to Medium:

medium.com/@DawnXianaMoon…