system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: cultural appropriation isn’t real, and even if it is it definitely isn’t a negative for anybody

This topic was a little more popular a few years ago within the ranks of the third-wave feminism/ BLM movements when they started to gain steam back in the early 2010’s. People say that when white people get henna tattoos or wear certain cultural garb they are “appropriating” the culture. 

Cultural appropriation is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as “the act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own; especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.” Based on this I don’t think that it merits the almost racist tone that is left around using practices, or elements of art from other cultures. 

It makes more sense to me now than ever that more cultures are spreading and being shown to more people across the world, isn’t that basically what the past 20-30 years of technological development has lead to? Being able to share ideas completely ignoring distance or time? Just instantly share ideas anytime, FROM ANYWHERE. It doesn’t surprise me that as cultures become more connected their practices and styles begin to overlap and be adopted by people who enjoy the culture or aspects of it. 

To go even further, I don’t think that you should be offended if you see someone using a bit of your culture as a part of their Image. First off, people don’t apply things to their own identity if they don’t like them in some way. Even if that’s just a style that catches someone’s eye, it’s not then the responsibility of that person to research what they’re wearing to its cultural roots. 

Now I will say that there’s a big difference between what’s called “cultural appropriation” and mocking someone’s heritage. The difference there comes when people start actively making ironic reference to the culture and the people affiliated with it. 

TL;DR: Cultural appropriation doesn’t exist, naturally culture overlaps and style webs out and diversified itself across different people groups.
gpt
> This topic was a little more popular a few years ago within the ranks of the third-wave feminism/ BLM movements when they started to gain steam back in the early 2010’s. People say that when white people get henna tattoos or wear certain cultural garb they are “appropriating” the culture.

> [...]

> It makes more sense to me now than ever that more cultures are spreading and being shown to more people across the world, isn’t that basically what the past 20-30 years of technological development has lead to?

I think it's a mistake to think that *the most common* examples of cultural appropriation brought up today, are the most central examples of *what* people see as a problem with it. 

In general, people who use newfangled concepts to complain about perceived social injustices, don't do so because they feel that injustice is worse than ever, in fact, quite the opposite, it's because they finally see an opening to complain about past injustices, and to hypercorrect about it's modern consequences. 

So maybe it's not that online information exchange has *increased* what people call cultural appropriation. Maybe you are right and the changes of the past few years were a path to a relatively fair and equitable exchange of ideas, that also made some people realize how rotten and unequal the exchange of ideas has *traditionally been*.   

A central example of cultural appropriation, would be the fate of the Kingdom of Hawaii'i. A once independent nation, unilaterally colonized by the United States at the end of the 19th century, and by the post-WWII period, gradually got turned into a tourist trap, the USA's big fancy beach, with many features of native Hawaiian culture only getting known within global culture as the iconography of "living the carefree life", and of upper-middle class American families having a great leasurely vacation. An *entire people's way of living has been turned into a theme park resort*, for the benefit of those whose ancestors stole the country in the first place. 

There *is such a thing* as an entirely innocious "exchange of ideas" . To give a related example, the history of the Hawaiian shirt is a good one. Invented by a Japanese-Hawaiian tailor,  using Japanese Kimono fabric, picturing native Hawaiian tapa designs, sewn into a western shirt's shape, it is a product that could have only born at a crossroad of cultures. 

But there is a big difference between that, an imperialist power taking over a country at gunpoint, and then *it's culture's members* commodifying it's culture's trappings at their own pleasure.