Opinion of Iggy Azalea

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Cultural appropriation is bullsh#t and anyone legitimately engaging that kind of pseudo-Maoist nonsense is terrible and should be ashamed of themselves.

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Of course cultural appropriation is a thing...

Seriously, this is baffling. People just walk around wearing Native American headdresses as a "fashion statement" but that's not cultural appropriation? What is it then, "white people just being white people"?

So should we stop Taco Bell from appropriating Mexican food for its own purposes, then?

This idea that any cultural work belongs to a certain race or whatever is bizarre and one step away from the kind of racism that says that blacks can't do certain things because they're not white.

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If Taco Bell were owned by Mexicans, it would still be Taco Bell, and thus still exploitative and committed to making a profit by paying its workers less than the value of their labor and selling other workers food that makes them sick. So I mean it really wouldn't matter, because at the end of the day the owners are still capitalist swine that deserve nothing less than the scaffold, regardless of their ethnic or racial background.

What makes one or another practice the exclusive domain of one group of people? I fail to understand the logic inherent in this bizarre concept, which seems to argue that white people should not do anything, culturally speaking, that has its origins in something nonwhite people have originally done and vice versa. To argue this is to essentially argue for erecting walls between cultural practices in an effort to preserve certain cultural practices as the exclusive domain of a particular group of people, which I regard as unhelpful and quite frankly reactionary. If you want people to understand one another, cross-cultural pollination should be rigorously promoted, not derided. I am of the understanding that the universalist project means bringing together people and creating something new and worthwhile from their experiences, be they shared or different, rather than this kind of hyper-individualist atomization in identitarian politics around which things 'belong' to which group of people.

That isn't to say that we shouldn't condemn things that are just outright egregious and bigoted. Iggy Azalea has obviously engaged in a lot of things that I wouldn't defend under any circumstances, and the same can be said for a lot of cultural figures. But this shouting down and condemnation of people without any attempt to educate them on what they're doing is wrong and why its wrong, and its twin in his cultural segregationist politics is not helping anyone. It will not end racism or any other kind of bigotry, but instead reinforce it among people who are put off by this kind of vitriolic, pomo 'left' bullsh#t

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I have no problem with people making efforts to learn about or even participate in other cultures--it's the fact that some people do it for the sake of being "cool" or "cutting edge" without really respecting the culture they're appropriating that makes me upset. I'm not saying I want "cultural segregation", I want people to co-exist and respect each other and not just make trends out of someone's religion or race or whatever. Essentially, to boil it all down, my problem isn't with white people just wearing headdresses, or Iggy Azaelea "talking black", it's with the fact that they're doing it because they think they're being innovative and that they've discovered something hip. Did you know there's a shirt being sold on some website (forget where) that has Kurt Cobain's suicide note printed on it? Why is that a thing? Why does everything have to be a trend or a fashion statement?

Who cares?