Cultural appropriation comes up in the news every now and again, and seems to provoke strongly worded opinions. Miley Cyrus doesn’t appear to get it even after having had it patiently explained to her many times by people, who actually experience it. A blog post I did 2 year sago about Katy Perry’s Geisha performance of “Unconditionally” earned more than a few angry comments by people, who don’t seem to get what cultural appropriation is. So how about another example to illustrate the point? Take this picture, one of a few that a Mormon family member owns of basically white Jesus. Is this cultural appropriation?
One takeaway I have gotten from the discussion of cultural appropriation is that often a dominant culture will be able to take something from a less dominant culture without incurring the same discrimination from the culture they took it from. Let me make a prediction about the responses: There will be no neutral responses.
1. It will be “Hell Yeah!” even if they don’t agree with cultural appropriation of other sources like entertainment.
2. Some Christians may get defensive.
3. Anti-Social Justice people will still not get the point. Most likely, because they will see the title has “Cultural Appropriation”, and will cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.
4. Others won’t even read the post, and will rage comment like we at Patheos Atheist predicted when we clandestinely decided to test it.
Here are a few of the other posts testing our hypothesis:
JT Eberhard -WWJTD “Kim Davis denies a marriage license to an atheist couple.”
Kathleen Johnson -No God Blog “Sam Harris Finds Jesus; Declares Atheists are Full of Crap
Paul Loebe -Rock Beyond Belief “Dawkins is Worse than ISIS But the SJWs Are Even Worse “
Don’t reveal the test in Facebook comments. We really want to see what happens.
