But there's a thing in NZ, from Māori culture, what's basically a war challenge called the haka. There's lots of them, but the famous one's Ka Mate (about a bloke hiding under a woman's skirt and finding a reason to keep fighting, to culturally appropriate it).
So there's a social taboo about using it outside SRS BZNS. Plenty of drunk folk do anyway, but fuck those guys, they also puke in the streets and show their junk to random people and crowd the hospitals after having injured themselves on immobile structures. The haka was a huge deal during colonisation, because there were actual wars with actual hakas, Ka Mate written during that period. Also used by the Maori Battalion in WWII. If there's a Maori around, they'll be offered the lead, and if there's not, maybe just don't.
Right. So some British boy-band does Ka Mate and has a good laugh about ... well, fucking it up, really. That's a thing which happened. And that's cultural appropriation.
It's a bad thng, like others said, because people in the dominant group can take a symbolic thing that's meaningful for the minority group, and crap on it and laugh in front of millions of people and carry on with life like nothing happened. Because to them, it was nothing. Just a silly, slappy, stompy, shouty thing. Ha ha. Stripped of the important bit, the context. And if that keeps happening, the minority symbols get shit on one by one until there's none left that people don't just casually laugh at.
Like "Indians" fans at baseball. Ha ha, yes, genocide, LOL, chop chop, I'm an Indian.
That, dealrule, is why you can't define it ahead of time. But you'll still know it when you see it if you understand the original context. Otherwise someone who does might point it out for you.
Miley gets it because, well, she's tried to show how grown up she is by dancing like the black girls did in all those rap videos she watched as a kid. While singing a poppy thing about being powerless and sexually exploited. As if the women in the older videos weren't professionals who worked hard to get there and really had limited options as black female dancers to get anywhere different with their pants still on.
Like, it's almost cool that someone mentioned it, except the story, the context, was destroyed as the press talked about cute lil Miley wiggling her bum and how disappointed her father was (in all the press attention, no he isn't, duh). And the whole minority culture element is just voided.
That, for the whole of middle America, is what twerking is now, unless people fucking say something. Calling people on stuff like that, it's fine. And it's a free country so chop chop all you like, it's just, you're being a dick, especially now that you know.Starmaker wrote:(Hell, I still haven't seen twerking, I saw a static picture of Miley Cyrus with her ass up in the air against some dude's crotch.)
Edit, Māori spelling, funnily enough, not present for local spellchecker.