Why I can't stand white belly dancers (re cultural appropriation)

[AverageJoe90]

172. I'm sorry, but honestly, this whole kerfuffle is just.....well, kinda dumb, TBH.

TBH, I have no real investment in belly-dancing, but this whole argument. truthfully, rests on a rather.....silly complaint from this one individual.

Although I realize there may be a few people may strongly disagree, I will have to be truthful: Cultural "appropriation", in and of itself, is *not* and never has been, a bad thing. At all. Rather, it is how it is done that determines the morality(or immorality) of such.

Don't get me wrong here: there are are examples of bad appropriation; nobody can argue that blackface may count(depending on one's views, though some may see blackface as just plain mockery.)as one of the nastiest examples thereof. And even some non-malicious examples may still be genuinely and truly insensitive.

This, however, is definitely *not* fundamentally harmful(I might have argued otherwise some years ago, but I didn't really understand what I do now). In fact, this is hardly insensitive at all, even taking an Arabic stage name may indeed be silly. The one thing that kinda shoots the author in the foot, more than anything, is that she limits this "criticism" of hers to white women only.....even though some non-Arabic Women of Color do belly-dancing as well(just off the record, btw, I have no problem with that, either).

In fact, this whole "All 'Appropriation' = bad" argument falls flat on its face when you realize that cultural exchanges have been going on since the beginning of civilization. Take a look at Rock-and-Roll for example: African-American and "white" musicians often inspired, and borrowed from, each other to create one of the best-known music genres in the modern world. There's also examples in the culinary world, like Southern soul food(which amalgamated the cuisines of not just African-Americans and poor WASP/Scots-Irish whites, but Native Americans, etc.), or tempura(a Japanese creation partly inspired by Portuguese cooking techniques), or Currywurst(this was an West German creation inspired by British dishes), or even whole genres such as California fusion.
I hate to say this, but complaining about all 'appropriation' being automatically bad almost sounds like cultural reactionism, when one thinks about it.

All in all, I have no problem with criticizing actual examples of insensitive or even bigoted examples of appropriation; in fact, I've done just that myself. But this example isn't either. It doesn't even register.

We as feminists, as proponents of social justice, can do better than this, TBH. What we need to do is encourage respect and understanding between cultures; this kind of hyper-reactive thinking expressed in this article, unfortunately, accomplishes neither.

Take it as you will.