When I talk about cultural appropriation, I’m not including petty little things like you hear people saying on social media just to start arguments because I am not here for that. Those conversations are for liberals to feel morally superior to whoever else. I will pick up my stuff and leave a conversation like that. I am also not talking about cultural appropriation in the context of exploiting people’s culture for money or other reasons because that is outside the intentions of this newsletter. To clarify, I am talking about the desire some people have to emulate other groups of people or nationalities. This happens a lot in the New Age community for reasons I will get into.
When you see someone doing this or if you find yourself doing this, you should probably think about what characteristics specifically you or that person see in the other culture that you want to emulate. If a person is doing noble savage and saying things like “They are happy with so little.” That's obviously problematic, but this is a hint that they subconsciously realize that their life is complex and materialistic, and desire something they perceive as more meaningful. When you see a person such as a New Age practitioner wanting to emulate India/Nepal or some other nation, it is most likely because they realize their society is devoid of spirituality and want to emulate the ways of those other nations, which leads to romanticizing and appropriating of traditions that become divorced from their context. Some people feel offended when their faith is deconstructed this way as well. At the bottom of trying to emulate these foreign cultures, there is always a question of why you want to emulate that foreign society. There is a huge elephant in the room sometimes as well, seeing as how India uses a caste system while South Korea and Japan are dystopian societies where people are worked to death. These places that people love to appropriate are not usually the freest places in the world or even the most well off. Whatever aesthetics you see need to come with a healthy dose of reality.
The reason for the desire can be a lot of things. Maybe you like traditions you see and wish you had your own. Maybe you like the lifestyle of a place or you resonate with attitudes you perceive people of a foreign place of having. Another thing that happens is that with foreign dramas and television, people develop a desire to insert themselves into Korean dramas or Anime which leads to people who want to be Japanese or Korean. They are quite literally trying to insert themselves into a foreign culture or even genre of media. You may even see modern teenage girls trying desperately to be Korean. This is usually accompanied by desiring scenarios similar to what are depicted in the media.
You should reflect with them and ask them why they have an affinity for emulating foreign cultures and what they expect to be different if they adopt those ways. Once you get it out of the way and realize what characteristics you actually like from your perception of a culture, you can work on emulating it yourself in your own appropriate way. In severe cases such as that of Rachel Dolezal, you may even have a dissociative disorder where past trauma is causing you to feel dysphoria or discomfort over your own identity.
The opposite for non-white people may also be true if they consume media and culture from the west which makes them see the western world through the idealized world of fiction, and this can lead to a desire to be western. The dynamics are a lot different when a person from a non-dominant culture wants to emulate the dominant one. In this case, a person from the third world may use western media as a form of escapism and perceive they can have a similar life to those displayed in media, even if the reality of the bourgeois economy, white supremacy and western imperialism will always stain whatever life they choose to have here. Western media towards the lumpenproletariat of the third world is almost like a form of brainwashing to make people think American life is superior.