Ethnicity and culture: Difference between revisions

Cultural appropriation is the act of taking things from another culture that belong only to that culture. Cultural appropriation is a mistake that nonbinary people themselves can make. There are many words for [[gender nonconforming]] [[gender identity|gender identities]] and [[gender expression|gender expressions]] that belong only to people of color, or only to a certain ethnicity or culture. People from other ethnicities and cultures aren't entitled to call themselves by those words, because they would be taking something that doesn't belong to them. For example, the gender/sexual identities of ag, [[Glossary_of_English_gender_and_sex_terminology#S|stud]], and [[boi]] originated in African-American culture, and only African-American people can call themselves by these words. Only people of color can reclaim the term [[third gender]], because Western anthropologists had only applied it to [[LGBT]] people of color in a way that othered them.

Cultural appropriation generally refers to a white person taking something that should only belong to people of color. Generally speaking, the reverse is not cultural appropriation: identities that originated among white people are available for anyone to adopt. This is because cultural appropriation is generally a problem of white oppressors taking substance away from oppressed people of color for their own use. An oppressed people can't do comparable harm to their oppressors. However, it is still a problem for people of color to appropriate from the cultures of different groups of people of color. For example, an African-American nonbinary person is not entitled to call themself Two-Spirit, as this identity can only be adopted by Native Americans. That case is still cultural appropriation.

Sometimes there is dispute about whether a word belongs only to a certain culture, and if so, to which. The word "boi" has many meanings in different groups, and there are currently people of all ethnic backgrounds who call themselves by that word. A person who studies language and tells people how they should talk (a prescriptivist linguist) may say the word should still only be used by African-Americans. A different kind of linguist, who documents how language is used, without telling people what to do (a descriptivist linguist), would have a different view. Another dispute is about the name and description of the nonbinary gender identity [[pangender]] ("pan" meaning all). Critics express the concern that this means that person also has all ethnic genders. Otherwise, such a person should only say they have "many genders," and call themself [[multigender]]. Supporters of the word "pangender" say that by "all genders," they only mean all the genders that they're entitled to, within their own ethnicity and culture.