Thread by @LemieuxLGM

Ridiculous as Bari's latest Campus PEE CEE story is, all such stories are merely pale imitators of Conor Friedersdorf investing nearly 2,100 words losing his shit over a few students at Oberlin telling the student newspaper pulled pork and coleslaw shouldn't be called a "banh mi"

I even agree that "cultural appropriation" is an imprecise and over-used concept, but I'm not sure what it is about the phrase that makes people go absolutely crazy over perfectly reasonable statements, such as "middle aged white women should not do hip hop library orientations"

Another strategy is to uncritically cite the tweets of people yelling at clouds at stuff they just completely made up out of whole cloth. (Nobody "berated cafe workers," they gave polite feedback to administrators who agreed with them because they were self-evidently correct.)

"The pulled pork and coleslaw "banh mi" and processed chicken product on rice "sushi" were in the closet making babies and I saw one of the babies and the baby looked at me! Campus PC is COMPLETELY OUT OF CONTROL!"

Julia puts it much better than I did, but it's not hard to understand why the Smith supervisor was correct unless you're determined not to understand it.

And this all happened mere weeks after Smith completely botched its response to a student being stopped by campus security for being Black on the Smith College campus! (That Bari's martyr sided with the college on this is even more reason to question her good faith.)

So, yes, the term "cultural appropriation" has implications broad enough that you can easily generate reductio ad absurdi to rail against, but lacking a better short phrase to describe more subtle arguments it's a lot more productive to focus on the actual facts at hand