(Suppose I should sign up on Mudcatonce and for all since I keep coming back to read threads and have posted a few times over the years - but not right now.)

I have enjoyed the discussion in this thread since it started. Cultural appropriation as a term first showed up in my world when I took took an interdisciplinary course at uni: "Language, culture & identity". I was confused by it back then and started exploring it from as many different angles as I could find. The result is that I'm even more confused now, more than twenty years later. The big problems for me is how words like "culture", "ethnicity", "identity" and "race" get thrown around in debates like they don't need an explanation at all. Who gets to pick the tags? Why is it okay for someone else to decide what or who I am and what culture or cultures I belong to? I think both the article that Dave the Gnome linked to back in 2015 and the one that Lighter linked to now,five years later, showcase the general confusion around these concepts and how badly we really need to rethink and redefine.

At the bottom of it all lie our prejudice towards the Others and the system of racism we've built up for ourselves - I think those are monsters far too big to fight using simple tags and tokens and trying to somehow sort out what is "okay" for anyone to wear, to sing to call themselves, etc. In Sweden (and I assume in many other places) we play a little game when we have our eyes opened to a situation of inequlity: we change the terms we use to talk about it. The swedish word for "cleaning woman", "städerska", was replaced by "lokalvårdare", "caretaker of localities". It was done with the best of intentions, trying to make people look at the underpaid (mostly) women doing hard and necessary jobs with more respect, but it just ended up beng a joke. No wages were raised, and while a few more men (usually with darker skintones than the women who held the jobs traditionally) took up the brooms, they didn't do it voluntarily, with pride to call themselves lokalvårdare. People in general didn't change the way they looked at the man or woman with the mop and bucket. These days we are supposed to use the term "städare" (which is gender neutral) and the workers mostly belong to big cleaning companies and don't get hired directly by the workplaces they work in - a more modern approach to the profession that of course hasn't changed the way people look at it one bit. People in general still think of it as a low status job and are often horrible in their condenscending attitudes towards the people who do it. It is still underpaid. It is still mostly done by the same people (women of working class background, the occasional man of refugee background). A lengthy story but I wanted to make a parallell here. If Sweden doesn't once and for all start improving wages and working conditions for cleaners and start treating them like the equals of the other workers in the workplace, we will never get out of this loop. We will make up new terms and make cosmetic changes forever. And if we don't start dealing with the real problems of racist killings, immigrant unemployment rates, prejudice in courts and police force, neglect of low-income neigbourhoods and estates then we'll be forever removing offensive articles of clothing (with or without just reason) and avoiding singing the songs we love because we haven't really solved the root problems.

I, for one, will strive to listen to people when they criticise me for things like wearing a bindi, I will try to keep up the dialogue but I will refuse to simply be a tag someone else has pasted on me and prescribed a culture that I'm supposed to belong to - that is not how identities work and not how cultures work.