I thought this was about cultural appropriation, the ludicrous notion that someone is somehow stealing another’s culture by imitating it.
It's about making someone's culture a caricature in popular culture. Look at the bastardization of Cinco de Mayo. Most Americans have no clue wtf it is about. To them it's about eating Tex-Mex food (not even authentic Mexican cuisine) and getting ripped on Corona and Margaritas. More than it's about being part of a dominant class that has the social resources to profit from cultural elements that are actually used to oppress people from a non-dominant class. Redskin is a racist caricature of a native person. Miley Cyrus twerking on TV makes profitable something that was met with disgust when black people were doing it. Culture appropriation reveals the structural racism* in society by re-presenting culture queues in a bastardized way, while the source presentation of those queues is either oppressed or a source of oppression for others.
We're not going to fully analyze the issue of cultural appropriation on a message board. If you want more information about it, look into it. Read scholars who are experts on the topic. There's articles out there explaining what it is and why it's a problem. The crux of the issue is that a dominant class is in a position literally to create common meaning for cultures that are not their own. People not only interact on what they perceive, but they interact according to socially constructed meanings that they have for things. Cultural appropriation is about taking something from another culture and changing its meaning when you are not a part of that culture. It's about defining things that are sometimes sacred for one people (native headwear as a fashion statement for instance), when you have no business doing so because you are not of those people.
The reason you don't see cultural appropriation the other way around is because it is about having the power to create discourse in the Foucauldian sense. Knowledge is power and being able to give definition and meaning to things is a way of exerting power. Throughout history, that power has been used to oppress people, define them as something Other and different, but most importantly inferior. You need to be part of a dominant class in order to create those definitions in a way that are broadly adopted at best or simply accepted as given without much thought. The reason subordinate groups can't engage in cultural appropriation is that they don't have the social standing to change broad cultural definitions.
Criticism for cultural appropriation attempts to give power back to the subordinated groups to define for themselves their own culture. It's a way of addressing the power imbalance, but it's also an opportunity to preserve the dignity and respect of people to have their culture recognized by others as it is for them. Lost entirely on people who try to reverse roles is that they never conceive of reversing the power dynamic, just the situational relationships. The
problem here is fundamentally about power and ignoring that literally turns a blind eye to core of the issue.
*Note: It doesn't just need to be racism. It's about
power, so it can be any dominant position: sex, wealth, absence of disabilities, etc.
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