That's an unfortunately practical and realistic response.

Just because a thing has been done a certain way in the past does not make it ethical or socially responsible.

The slave trade survived on your exact line of thinking for hundreds of years in the face of social pressures to stop it. "That's just how it has been done, it's the way of the world."

The whole idea is to work to be a more ethical, socially conscious, society as a species. And we can only do accomplish that by honestly looking at our past actions and making active efforts to change how we interact with other peoples.

@geist171 ok but I thought we were talking about cultural appropriation.
I mean...cultures blend. Whether by force or choice. I don't understand how adopting new customs because they're better ideas or more attractive can be called "stealing". I'll welcome explanations on that.

@Freespirit64 there's a difference between cultural integration which is the blending of cultural ideas and culture theft, which is where one group adopts something created by another group and then claims credit for originating it or actively derides the contributions of the first group.

Chuck Berry was a major progenitor of rock music, but it was derided as 'the Devils music' and the people making money off him didnt compensate him correctly for his work, and then Elvis did it and everyone loved it as long as it was white people doing it it was an American Cultural phenomenon. That''s 'appropriation' or 'theft' of culture.

I love this. Thanks!

I am speaking about the phenomenon known as "culture theft" whereby members of one culture assimilate a cultural feature (music, hairstyle, fashion, etc.) and either refuse to acknowledge or deride members of the culture from which the feature was assimilated, and without attributing that culture as being the originator of the feature. The prime example I've been using so far has been the difference in how, we, culturally, approached rock and roll music as opposed to how we have culturally approached rap and hip hop.

Rock and roll was a form of music originated by black people. People like Chuck Berry, who were derided and whose musical contributions were dismissed, until Elvis Presley started to co-opt that music into country/western to create the genre we now consider "rockabilly."

Meanwhile rap and hip hop have always been attributed to black culture, and while our responses to it as a culture have been racist, white people began using the art form as a means of expression, but never actually tried to posit or claim that it started anywhere other than black culture.

Other examples are ta moko (Maori tribal tattooes) and a lot of black and latino/a hairstyle trends have seen a rise in popularity among white people, and those people, as collective demographics, seem to be a little bit pissed off about it (because it's totally an instance of culture theft. As a cultural paradigm black and brown people's hair have been regarded in a negative light for decades and all of a sudden white people are cool with it and spending millions if not billions trying to copy it.)

The theft of artifacts is an entirely separate, and entirely repugnant practice, and as an industry/business model are very frequently heavily related to/connected to war profiteering and black market operations in surplus arms and drugs.

Strongly disagree, but thanks for popping by.

I believe it's a matter of 'you took this thing that was ours, pretended it was yours and refused to acknowledge our contribution.

I think the easiest examples I can come up with are musical

Culture theft: rock and roll
Culture growth/inclusion: rap and hip hop.

We (white people) assimilated rock with rockabilly crossover artists like Elvis and ignored or derided the black contributions to the genre while lauding its white participants.

Rap and hip-hop are absolutely something that we assimilated into our culture, but we also openly acknowledge, and not always in a respectful way, that those forms of music are something we adopted from black culture, are an expression of black culture in our society, and that white people just also happen to engage it as a practice or form of entertainment.

A few different reasons actually, and black hair providers an almost TOO perfect example case here.

1. Credit. When the appropriating culture gets credit for the thing they stole. It's usually something that's been done without recognition for years, decades, or even centuries without their due, but suddenly becomes "popular" once appropriated. When cornrows suddenly become "boxer braids," Black Twitter WILL throw a fit and generations of the African diaspora WILL roll in their graves. Along with credit tends to come...
2. Compensation. Staying with the given example, black hair care is a multi-billion dollar industry. That's way too much money to accuse someone of having "very little troubling" them. An even better example here though can be found in music. It's happening with Hip Hop right now, but I'll talk about something you might be more familiar with; Rock & Roll. Rock music IS black music. It was invented by black people. White people wanted nothing to do with it -it was derided as, among other things, "devil music"- until they did. When it became clear how lucrative it could be, white people stormed the gates, Elvis Presley became "The King," and nobody remembered that this was a black genre anymore. All you have to do is look at how many Elvis songs were blatantly STOLEN from (as in previously written AND performed by) black men and women. Conversely, you can look at the looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong line of white people that Chuck Berry had to sure to get his due. To paraphrase a great Hip Hop quotable, Chuck Berry was your favorite artist's favorite artist, and they weren't even the least bit bashful about ripping him (or any other black artist) off. This naturally segues into...
3. Unequal treatment. I'll go back to the hair example because I can't think of a more poignant one. When my daughters can't wear any of their generations-old cultural hair styles, including natural (literally the way it grows out of their damn heads) to school, a professional job, or the military, but white people take them and are considered "edgy," or "stylish," or "avant-garde," (!?) how exactly am I supposed to feel?
   When the same cultural cues that see our young people harassed, criminalized, brutalized, and gunned down with impunity are taken by non-black youth and just shrugged off as "Oh, they're just kids...," how am I supposed to react!?
   So to be clear, imitation is the highest form of larceny. Let's call a spade, a spade, yeah?

@ghettophilosopher yeah music was the easiest avenue I could find to explain the distinction, and rock is one of the big glaring instances (I'd say jazz is another)

But I think we (as a culture) have done a (slightly) better job of giving credit where credit is due where rap and hip hop are concerned, even if our cultural and authoritative response to its participants is...racist and bombastic.

Baby steps, I guess?

Excellent response though.

@ghettophilosopher Maybe white people should resent black people wearing suits. Perhaps resent Jessye Norman singing opera and black actors playing Hamlet.

You mean apart from the whole 'we dropped an extinction level event on your culture twice and then as part of your surrender made you agree not to have a standing military?'

Which, make no mistake they made the best of and took the opportunity to become a global economic, artistic, and technological power in their own right.

But I would consider winning a war with nuclear armament Dominance, at least perceived Dominance.

@geist171 yep, but I'm talking about the current relationship, especially when it comes to youth culture. I'd say they unashamedly appropriate from the west without the slightest hint of cultural cringe or subservience.

@MrBeelzeebubbles I'd say it's a pretty fair exchange given all the weeaboos and fetishists we have in this country