My Culture is not your prom dress 2: electric boogaloo.
As a chinese, you’re welcome to do so. It’s Lunar new year, there’s nothing special or specific about it. Pop a beer, play firework, or whatever. Make up your culture for celebrate the new year, that’s how culture is born! There’s not even a standard for it in China, different region have different way to celebrate. And each household even have their own way to celebrate! How is any of this gatekeeping make sense i don’t know.
It’s so sad to see a melting pot now call for separation.
Gatekeeping is a special form of being special
I mean, it’s not like there aren’t large communities of Asian immigrants all over the world. In most countries, and definitely the English speaking ones, I almost guarantee your country celebrates it somewhere. Beyond all the other problems with this, it erases the experiences of Asian immigrants, I live in the US and I know for a fact there’s going to be tons of celebrations here for it organized by people whose cultures it is.
Happy Lunar New Year everyone! Year of the Snake begins today. Hope it brings prosperity and good fortune to you all.
My small business needed festive graphics for social media this week and I was scrambling. Used https://www.namecheap.com/logo-maker/ideas/happy-new-year-logos/ – Namecheap’s New Year logo maker. It’s more generic “Happy New Year” than specifically Lunar New Year themed, but I customized colors to red and gold which worked decently for Instagram posts.
Anyone else doing Lunar New Year promotions or events? How are you handling festive branding on short notice?
恭喜發財! What are your traditions for celebrating today?
How pathetic do you have to be to gatekeep a celebration?
I do think it’s important that people know what it is they’re celebrating, but yeah like my local Chinese community always does a lunar new year celebration that is open to everyone. I think a lot of Chinese people (and other communities that celebrate the lunar new year, like Okinawan Korean Vietnamese and many others) see open celebration as creating more appreciation for and understanding of their culture.
I recall when I was first informed about “cultural appropriation” and how it boiled down to the concept that if a white person enjoys any aspect of a non-white culture it was an act of racism. Gotta love the gravity well of ultra liberal bullshit warping back in on itself and becoming fascism.
That’s a bullshit explanation of cultural appropriation and the person you heard it from is an idiot. Actual cultural appropriation is when you take something from another culture and either erase or overwrite its origin, so the original culture in its original form becomes forgotten.
For example, when white artists re-recorded songs from black artists and specifically removed them from the credits and claimed them as their own, that was cultural appropriation. When movie studios chopped up Indian culture and presented it in a completely distorted and inaccurate light, so much so that the original meanings were lost, that was cultural appropriation.
Simply being a participant in someone else’s cultural celebration is not cultural appropriation.
