Is wearing a native american costume in the carnival racism?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I'm going to join the camp saying that it's perhaps not quite technically racism but still is in very bad taste. There are actually, I think, many things that get excoriated as cultural appropriation that are really more just tacky than anything else. It's less 'hateful stereotype' and more 'some douchebag Instragramming herself with sushi rolls held over her eyes'.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

(but I think people worry way too much about protecting culture, or worse, other people's culture....if the culture is that freaking important, it will stick around.  If not, it will die like all the other cultures that have died.  I have the same issue with language.  Why should we care if a language dies (assuming we have a fairly full knowledge of the language for etymology reasons), nobody is hurt by this.)

My answer to this would be that to have a world that is fertile and bountiful and teeming with a multiplicity of concepts and things is an intrinsic and important good, and that keeping 'minor' cultures and languages around is one of the best ways to accomplish this.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

(but I think people worry way too much about protecting culture, or worse, other people's culture....if the culture is that freaking important, it will stick around.  If not, it will die like all the other cultures that have died.  I have the same issue with language.  Why should we care if a language dies (assuming we have a fairly full knowledge of the language for etymology reasons), nobody is hurt by this.)

My answer to this would be that to have a world that is fertile and bountiful and teeming with a multiplicity of concepts and things is an intrinsic and important good, and that keeping 'minor' cultures and languages around is one of the best ways to accomplish this.

This would undoubtedly lead to either A) marked hostility followed by immense bloodshed, or B) societal atomization at a socially dangerous level. We would, naturally, deserve the results.

I mean, it's the classic 'would you rather live in a world that's violent or a world that's stultifying?' question. In any case though I have to believe that there's some way of avoiding rendering the world culturally flat that doesn't cause those things to happen (at least not significantly more than they already do)--or failing that that there's some sort of happy medium, but I'd rather not be a moderate hero about this if it's possible not to be.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Treating those as the sorts of things that can 'suck' or 'not suck' on any sort of 'objective' basis strikes me as...peculiar, and so does what we might call the 'Lego brick' model of culture that you're advocating. The case could also be that your food, clothing, language, etc. are experiencing domination or subjugation of some description. I understand the desire to react against some of the extremes of the weird Herderianism that this particular segment of the cultural left often descends into, but it does no good to deny that these kinds of relationships are relevant or important in our desire to disclaim those extremes.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I believe in the free market when it comes to things which aren't required to stay alive, culture being one of them. If a culture fails in the free market, clearly it sucked.

That's ludicrous.

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That isn't what I was talking about.