Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

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The issue is people being offended on behalf of others (which is itself not a bad thing: we should be conscious of where we might be using culturally significant signals inappropriately, or otherwise causing offence) but being hyper-sensitive and seeing offence where it doesn't really exist in the groups that they think they are standing up for.

> pre-occupied with continuing a culture of segregation

I think were "cultural appropriation" is being called hyper-sensitively, it is more an over-active sense of guilt-by-association[†] than any desire to segregate. This very much exists in the UK as well, though it isn't as pronounced as it seems to be in the US.

Finding the right balance point can be difficult. The dividing lines between cultural appreciation, cultural mixing, cultural appropriation, and cultural subjugation, while sometimes obvious & clear are often much more subjective.

[†] association with the past racist history of the nation and/or the many still current problems

> Finding the right balance point can be difficult. The dividing lines between cultural appreciation, cultural mixing, cultural appropriation, and cultural subjugation, while sometimes obvious & clear are often much more subjective

In my opinion, this hypersensitivity was turned into a weapon to shame people who have no ill-will. Compounded with Twitter bandwagoning, it’s downright dangerous, and now people are self-censoring anything to avoid censure

It is sometimes weaponised, often as a distraction method in political discussions, or as a defensive come-back ("yeah, I X, but you Y"), but from what I've seen it is more often people being overly sensitive and/or with too much time on their hands and looking for something to discus.

The problem is being hyper sensitive is subjective. What is hyper sensitive to you is absolutely normal to someone else. I don’t ever find it wrong to “culturally appropriate” and I don’t even know how it became a thing. I can’t actually think of any reason why it would be bad to start sharing aspects of culture whether it is clothes, music, or language. It brings people together with commonality. People enjoy copying things they like. I wouldn’t ever say someone can’t wear my outfit because my outfit is important to me. The way I see this term used in America is use by racists as a way to be racist against whites who they perceive don’t deserve the freedom to dress any way they want.

The "hyper sensitivity" also cuts both ways. There do exist hyper-sensitive people seeking out reason to be offended... and other hyper-sensitive people seeking out evidence of others' hyper-sensitivity and getting offended about that.

Both are further stirred by major media trawling through minor media and social media for something to declare as "controversial". I had never heard of the Adele thing, and a quick Google turned up a CNN article which said[1]:

> The singer was quickly accused of cultural appropriation by some users for the hairstyle and top.

How many users is "some"? A dozen? A hundred? Does it really merit "controversy"?

Much of the time, I've found, one hypersensitive person is piled on by a thousand people who have found yet more evidence that there is an enormous social effort to repress them. They rarely or never encounter anybody who actually puts them down, but they hear about somebody else, and that's repeated so often that it sounds massive.

I've even seen it here on HN an awful lot: "I can't even say X anymore without being told how bad I am by a bunch of snowflakes", blithely ignoring how much of a snowflake that makes them. All they want is to be able to say whatever they want without anybody disagreeing -- is that so wrong?

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/31/entertainment/adele-bantu-kno...

To be clear there were plenty of Black British people who were annoyed at the Bantu knots, as well as people who didn't care.

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