17 Comments
Feb 5Liked by Declan Finn

Well done.

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Feb 5Liked by Declan Finn

I can think of lots of famous examples. Many of the plays of Shakespeare, from MacBeth to Hamlet to Romeo & Juliet. The Last Mohican. Songs of Hiawatha.

And then there is the author whose works introduced me to Westerns, growing up in Holland. Not well known here but much more in Europe: Karl May. Yes, a German. He wrote Westerns, and stories of that pattern set in Arabia, China, Albania, Africa...

Also of course, many SF writers do this. Consider Larry Niven, appropriating the culture of the Kzinti.

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If we never culturally appropriated anything, Italians wouldn't be eating tomatoes or Germans eating potatoes, both brought over from the New World by the conquistadors.

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Well said, Declan!

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Zorro might get a pass, because he was Spanish, though living in California.

Rather cranky about it, too. (The being pure Spanish, I mean; not being in California. Did NOT care for these jumped-up Mexican thugs. Yes, the attempted hijacking to make him "Mexican" is annoying.)

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Note to self: look up Mr. Moto.

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And when you ask the people who are supposed to be offended by cultural appropriation, they think it's great.

Ask a japanese person if it's okay for people to wear kimono's, they say yes.

Ask a Mexican person about Zorro, it's cool.

Ask a black person about shaft, they don't care.

It's only the idiots on X that care.

If it weren't for some cultural appropriation, we wouldn't have MMA. It's mixed martial arts. We wouldn't have Karate, Kung-Fu, David Caradine couldn't have played a shaolin monk.

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