Wanting To Be Indian: When Spiritual Searching Turns into Cultural Theft - By Myke Jo

[Spooner]

Since it's never appropriation when a less powerful person/culture appropriates a more powerful person/culture, it seems clear to me that claims of appropriation are secondary to the real problem of unequal power and more garden-variety oppression.  In fact, I think making appropriation such a big deal, let alone a crime, is in some ways tools the system uses to keep first-order oppressions in place by throwing a bone on these second-order oppressions that would have no substance without things like systemic discrimination, violence, etc.  I wrote an essay on this theory a few years ago.

Any arrangement enforced by law (violence) is a form of enslavement. Therefore it does not matter which culture is powerful. To make appropriation illegal is simply another form of enslavement by the ruling over another segment of the ruled. To blame the ruled segment as deserving this enslavement because of their race/heritage is simply racism. No amount of semantics can disguise this fact. Seeing the matter in terms of oppressed/oppressor is to propagate the dynamic because it focuses on seizing the reigns of power. In this sense the entire concept of appropriation is just an attempt to use soft power to convince society to turn over it's power to another group. The struggle for power and domination is an STS dynamic and should be dropped completely. This should be no surprise since social justice, appropriation, privilege theory etc comes out of social marxism which is a dualistic dogma used to dominate rather than liberate. All law is violence. Therefore any solution through law is a propagation of violence.