I was at Hot Topic and saw this cool tshirt for some band or something called Bring Me the Horizon and idk what bring me the horizon is and don’t really care but the shirt is cute so i’ll wear it
This was an experiment. See how people started getting mad at me for “buying” a Bring Me The Horizon shirt, when I said I really knew nothing about them? How I said I bought it simply because I thought it was cute? Completely disregarding who the band was?
This is how people from other cultures feel when you purchase and wear garb from their culture with no knowledge of what that garb symbolizes and means. If you wear or use something for the wrong reasons, people get mad.
This has got to be by far one of the best ways to explain cultural appropriation to people.
If the goal is to explain that “cultural appropriation” was never a problem at all, and the people complaining about it are just angry fandom gatekeepers of the sort who make every fandom they touch toxic by being horrible, then yes, it does a great job.
And honestly, for 90% of the stuff I see on tumblr that claims to be about “cultural appropriation”, that’s probably pretty accurate. There are exceptions out there, certainly. But most of the time? Yeah, this is basically what it is.