Cultural Innovation
I still find this whole notion of opposing cultural "appropriation" to be bizarre and awful. I am not really an expert, but in the few areas that I know, some of the greatest moments of cultural innovation have come from cross-pollination of cultures. For God sakes, the cultural non-appropriators would never have allowed white British boys in Liverpool and London to play black American blues, but much of modern music owes its roots to this strange synthesis. Keith Richards and Mick Jagger spent years trying to be Howlin' Wolf before anyone heard of the Rolling Stones. I know that black musicians were resentful of the appropriation in part because the white bands made so much more money than they did and killed what market demand there was for their music. But that just forced African Americans, some of the greatest musical innovators the world has known, to innovate again and again to keep ahead (e.g. Motown, funk, rap, etc).
In a previous post, I observed that the opposite of cultural appropriation is cultural apartheid. I would add that the opposite of cultural appropriation is cultural stasis and stagnation.
