General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: What the heck is a microaggression, anyway? [View all]Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)organic process.
People imitate other people (that's how things become "culture" in the first place, even among homogenous groups) people also mix and match and play off each others' ideas. Certainly a lot of rock and roll has been "appropriated" from African Americans- in the case of, say, a white singer who gets paid to sing the same songs in front of an audience, an African American isn't allowed to due to something like segregation, yeah, that's a direct example of appropriation AND, to a real degree, theft.
But other instances of cultural influence or cross-mixing are not so cut and dried. Every time one group of humans has had any contact with another- be that contact benign, oppressive, or downright hostile- nevertheless cultural cross-pollination has occurred. The Romans didn't bother to come up with their own gods, they just took the Greek ones and gave em new names. Mix country, bluegrass, and the blues, and you get rock and roll, and then punk. Animation and video games in the US are influenced by Japanese Manga. Etc.