When your culture is the default, it's easy to imagine you don't have one at all--but you do. It's all around you.
I don't really understand "cultural appropriation"
- Thread starter INACTIVEUSS Einstein
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dread-lock \'dred-,lak\ n (I960) 1 : a narrow ropelike strand of hair formed by matting or braiding.
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So yeah, they are ALL dreads.
Since the type of dreadlocks white people get shit for aren't braids or plaits, that definition isn't especially relevant.
Since every culture has done it most likely in all forms from the braided style to the "neglect" style, giving anybody shit for it seems pretty shit-headed.
Oh well, I'm sure they'll find a way to cope.
It was bad enough finding out Scots didn't invent bagpipes...
I'm not sure about the other types, but the type that is traditionally used in Scotland should be erased from history.
The Tom Cruise character wasn't the titular "Last Samurai", Ken Watanabe's character was. Cruise was the PoV character for the audience. He was there to give us a point of view into a culture that is alien to the movie's audience. The story is about his recovery from PTSD and Alcoholism to embrace a meaningful cause, not about him becoming a Samurai. While he develops sympathy for them and respect for their culture, he doesn't go back to America wearing a Kabuto and wielding a Katana calling himself a Samurai. As I recall he goes back to the village and marries the woman whose husband he killed (problematic in itself) and vanishes from history. That isn't appropriation. It is pandering to a white audience for sure, and romanticizing a historical culture that was far from ideal, but not appropriation.
Actually, Elvis always openly acknowledged the huge influence of gospel and rhythm and blues on his music. For that, the more prejudiced elements of white Middle America did not like him. And while his performance and music style may be considered tame by today's standards, they were definitely not seen as "sanitized" at the time. Rather, conservative white adults were quite scandalized when he came on the popular scene, as his movements were considered overly sexualized and aggressive.
"Good" boys and girls were encouraged to listen to performers with more innocent personas and mild music instead, such as Ricky Nelson or the Everly Brothers. Now that's some truly tame and sanitized stuff.
Kor
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Same thing with accents.
The Jesus thing always got me having grown up in that kind of setting with family till I left it. He was born a Jew but looked like a regular white dude and it just bugged me that pictures and paintings had this image of him when clearly if he were real he'd be dark skinned and probably have a big beard.
Although I did already write a long post about how modern post colonial terminology doesn't really apply in antiquity, and I think that remains true, there is a sense, now I think about your post, in which the medieval Roman Catholic Christian imagery, iconography and culture is itself a massive cultural appropriation from Jewish messianic, apocalyptic zealots. They took one of many examples from the time of messianic cult figures and adapted him as their own, erasing his competition, changing the story, the appearance of the characters and the interpretations of the events to suit their own norms and declaring ownership of the culture that went with it. Suddenly we have a perfectly groomed lily white Jesus with nails through his palms, Roman oppressors presented at least neutrally if not actively positively, while the Jewish characters who retain their cultural identity and appearance are consistently responsible for everything bad that happens, and festivals, creeds and customs which draw heavily not on Jewish Law but on the pagan practices of the existing dominant culture. Then in the true style of their much later imperialist descendants, crushed the culture from which they lifted their acquisition, and scattered its descendants around the world.
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You're making the peaceful Christian message sound like Constantine had the thing cobbled together to justify Imperial crackdown on the variegated societies in the Roman Empire to a single version of religious, cultural and political authority?
Pat Boone makes the Everlys and Ricky Nelson look like raving maniacs.
Jesus adapts to his audience. In Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia he was often drawn to look like the people who live there. It's only through the dominance of Western Europe that "White Jesus" has become the "default" version.
This. The Everlys and Ricky Nelson are among the more solid white artists to be found in the early '60s scene between '50s rock & roll and the British Invasion. It's the likes of Pat Boone, Fabian, and Frankie Avalon who were the manufactured, parent-friendly, sanitized teen idols. Boone in particular was infamous for singing cleaned-up covers of R&B songs when R&R was breaking out as a phenomenon in the '50s.Pat Boone makes the Everlys and Ricky Nelson look like raving maniacs.
Her name wouldn't be Susie or Cathy, would it?
Nah, she passed notes from one of the brothers to their girlfriends. They might be Cathy or Susie.
