[Maru]

This man says a lot of things that occur to me when I read comments or discussions where how partisanship is playing out... I agree with him that our origins don't "own us", nor do they define us as individuals... that was my worldview when I decided to pick up my life @ 19 and throw myself into life in the Northeast... I wanted badly to uproot myself throughout most of my childhood... if I could afford it, I probably would've moved to a foreign country and lived there during my 20's...

There is something to be said about roots though.. and I think those attachments manifest differently in individuals and so the way we practice our customs vary individually... especially in the way that Western culture manifests individually, so our expression cannot be as easily linked to a state of mind.

I used to frequent an expat forum for people who traveled Asia and I enjoyed listening to the stories of those who have seen the world. I grew up in a 99% non-white community myself and absolutely those things have a heavy role over personal expression... but yes, I think that locking yourself (I meant "the group") to a few check boxes is not really realistic, culturally speaking, once we account for individual expression... as we learn and age, we tend to become more specific with how we express our values and individual belief structures... and so I think gestures (like hand movements, etc) and the way we carry ourselves, how we treat hierarchy and even the way we manage conversations becomes a bit more apparent the more we age and we become more sophisticated about relationships and how we express our individual personality traits... part of this is because we develop a stronger understanding of cultural and individual differences... (edit) and so we "adapt" to the world by listening to others and relating back to ourselves those differences... and then those play out in how we express and carry our demeanor...

Even at my age, I'm finding that some things about myself is becoming more or less stationary... and really I think if we're individually aware of this, it makes it much easier to accommodate understand cultural differences... it can lead to increased tolerance and the ability to benefit more from inter-personal conflict if we allow ourselves to be expressive, but also be accommodating to a wider range of expression and becoming more familiar with divergent thinking... we after all must understand the importance of custom, for all individuals, before we can adequately explain to others, much less ourselves, how those things play out in our existence... but once our values are set, it tends to becomes harder to uncheck some boxes... just because once we "root in" so to speak, it's very difficult to move house... would mean having to learn to do basic things all over again... even conversations... but yes, we need a basic understanding of local customs and idiosyncrasies, even if that's not our cup of tea individually, in order to keep relations and communications between different parties running smoothly...

Anyway, the concept of cultural appropriation as bad is a flawed idea. I haven't even begun to form much debate in my mind of how I would argue for or against such a standard and I can already see where we would have problems implementing it...

Western society in general is multimodal. Even if we were to develop a cultural identity that remained consistent across the entire US, for example, our customs would still vary widely given the way that Western philosophy emphasizes individual expression over group identity... so how can we even appropriate something into our own culture, when the culture we're appropriating into doesn't have any solid group structure or standard... given the way that it prizes individual expression over group identity. There is a sense of moral conformity that exists in the West... but even how these rules are established plays out differently individual to individual... we see how these individual differences in perspective complicate our national politics, for example... both our major parties even, its members don't all share the same set of values, or even beliefs... but there's a list of "common" positions... even though in the Republican party for example, there are Classic Liberals, but then there are evangelical conservatives and libertarians... two very different voting blocks...