You're wrapping yourself in knots trying to justify something absurd. I don't recognise the "reflexive defence" you've made up there - I just think it's the age old story that people don't want to look too hard at anything that implicates them or suggests that they could in some way be 'a bad person'. And that drive unites an awful lot of people, not just people who are 'nasty bigots', but those who are opportunist populists (my comment about media folk) and a huge mass of people who adopt this kind of 'Faux Reasonablist' view of "come on, we've thought enough about things like racism and homophobia and sexism. Any more thinking is just absurd, what do they want, the end of racism?! And besides, it's making me feel a bit bad about myself now". And they would rather flee from any iota of a suggestion that they might be a 'bad person' (perish the thought!) than take seriously other people's complaints of oppression, systemic racism (which after all is what cultural appropriation is part of) etc. Because it's easier.
You've completely missed my point. I'm not talking about intention - I mean what proportion of people, if asked in the street, would say racism and sexism are
good things? - but about the concrete consequences of people's actions. Questions that take a bit of thinking about, such as "Will sharing this infantile infographic about refugees, full of specious reasoning and numbers and facts that could be complete bullshit for all I know, help reduce racism?" or "Will joining in this furious Twitter campaign to make this guy I've never heard of lose his job because he allegedly said something which, shorn of all context, could arguably be interpreted as sexist, help reduce sexism?".
Living inside your social-media echo chamber, dismissing out of hand any information that doesn't fit with your pre-existing worldview and mindlessly parroting everything your right-on friends say for fear that they might suspect you of not being right-on - now
that is the easy option.
I really don't understand what your investment is here in denying that cultural appropriation exists.
Oh come on mate, do me a favour. As I already said a few posts ago:
Mr. Tea said:
On the subject cultural appropriation in particular: I think it's obvious that it's a real thing, or at least can be
I don't know what you're trying to say in the second paragraph, tbh. What 'hysterical irreason' and 'moral relativism' are you referring to? And what kinds of ideology?
OK, a few examples totally off the top of my head.
Hysterical irreason: Feminist groups who insist that men who oppose male circumcision must somehow be
in favour of FGM, and must therefore be vigorously pilloried as vile misogynists. Or the Swedish MP who said it's morally worse for a Swedish man to rape a Swedish woman than for a Muslim immigrant to do so. Or look up 'donglegate' if you haven't heard of it. Seriously, I could go on all day.
Moral relativism: see pretty much anything Seumas Milne has ever written. People who can't accept that a country other the USA or Israel might be behind anything bad in the world and reflexively ascribe Russian attacks on Syrian hospitals (for example) to "false flag operations". People (hello zhao!) who can't even wait till the emergency response teams have finished picking up the bits of human offal following the latest jihadi bombing somewhere in Europe to start banging on about how it's all our fault, because Iraq. And so on, and so on, and so on.
Edit: I guess this is subject-creep from 'things the Right gets right' to 'things the Left gets wrong', but the two are related.