Cultural appropriation?

You’re drunk, go home.

Listening to youtuber Smoothiefreak (@AkilahObviously on Twitter) it seems as if only people of color have a unique culture, while white people shamelessly try to steal it.

But I am white, I am Italian, I have a culture.

Wikipedia defines cultural appropriation as “the adoption of elements of one culture by members of a different cultural group, especially if the adoption is of an oppressed people’s cultural elements by members of the dominant culture.”

This means that my culture has been “appropriated” over and over again for decades.

We have never been the dominant culture in any of the countries to where we immigrated, yet Italian restaurants are all over the world, and are rarely owned by Italians.

Is this a bad thing? Does it mean they are stealing my culture?

Of course not.

I still have access to my culture, no matter how bad American pizza tastes (or how popular it is).

One can not steal culture, because culture is nothing that can be owned.

The only way to steal it is to prohibit it, not to adopt it.

American pizza can be pretty horrible, but Americans like it, and it takes nothing away from how amazing Italian pizza tastes. If anything it adds authenticity to the original recipe.

One does not need to identify as Italian or spend time in Italy to eat Italian food.

If like many SJWs state cultural appropriation is decontextualization, then I too would be guilty of decontextualizing several aspects of my own culture.

Many popular Italian recipes originate from poverty and shortage of ingredients, a context I can not say I ever had to face in my life.

@AkilahObviously seems to agree with me, as she has no problem decontextualizing the cultural relevance of pizza in her videos.

I doubt she asks Italian people permission every time she eats a slice of pizza, or only eats it to celebrate her love for Italy, so I am surprised to hear her define cultural appropriation as hijacking part of a culture for personal use, without permission, not out of respect or tribute.

It would be ridiculous if I got upset over people eating food that just happened to be invented in my country, just as ridiculous as it is to get offended over somebody’s hairstyle because they don’t have the same skin color of the people who invented it.

If people believe they need to identify as part of a certain ethnicity in order to adopt aspects of its culture, no wonder some start to think of themselves as transracial.

Rachel Dolezal, former NAACP President who spent her entire career hiding the fact that she was white, is the perfect example.

Her life was strongly influenced by black culture, because of her adopted siblings and her husband, and because of her studies at historically black Howard University.

Considering the hostility white Americans are met with when they try to explore any aspect of a different culture, it is not hard to imagine why an insecure person would start seeing transraciality as a way to be accepted.

Unlike gender identity, racial and cultural identity are not something we are innately aware of, it is something that depends on where and how we are raised.

The racial and cultural identity of a Yemenite Jew will be different whether one is raised in Yemen, Israel, or the US.

Gender is something we are aware of long before we can become aware of our cultural identity, and the David Reimer case helps us understand it.

Born male, David lost his penis due to a failed circumcision.

Psychologist John Money, a prominent supporter of the Gender Neutrality theory, convinced his parents to raise David as a woman.

Dr. Money believed gender to be a social construct, that could be changed through social learning and behavioral intervention.

Dr. Money was horribly wrong, David failed to identify as female since his young childhood and transitioned to living as a male in his teenage years. He lead a conflicted and unhappy life that ended with his suicide at age 38.

People who identify as transracial should in no way be compared to those who identify as transexual, as racial perception and identity are in fact subject to social learning.

The issue of transraciality (or #WrongSkin as it is referred as on Twitter) could easily be fixed if people were more encouraged to explore multiple cultures, without feeling constricted to their own.

They should not need to identify as a different ethnicity to adopt traditions and lifestyles that fascinate them.

I strongly doubt Rachel Dolezal would have felt the need to identify as black, had she been taken seriously as a white woman in a primarily African-American environment.

The fact that in 2002 she successfully sued Howard University for racial discrimination against her indicates how her “transition” did not derive from her need to be black, but from her need to be accepted by a community.

I believe it is wonderful to maintain a strong connection to the culture one was raised in, especially while being exposed to a stronger and more dominant one, but this should not turn into cultural segregation.

Most traditions fail to maintain their original significance anyway, even inside the community that ideated them.

Preserving culture does not mean keeping it from others, it means being able to make it our own and apply it to different contexts.

It means being able to teach it and share it with those who are not familiar with it.