Cultural Appropriation and Social Recognition

Cultural appropriation is a contentious topic, and disagreement persists about whether and why it is morally wrong.A common view takes the wrong of cultural appropriation to consist in causing offense to members of the appropriated culture. 1 Common as this view may be, criticisms of cultural appropriation often focus on different and arguably more serious concerns than offense.Take for example Loretta Todd, a Mtis Cree scholar, filmmaker, and activist in Canada, who argues that cultural appropriation is the "inversion" of "cultural autonomy"; more specifically, Cultural autonomy signifies a right to one's origins and histories as told from within the culture and not as mediated from without.Appropriation occurs when someone else speaks for, tells, defines, describes, represents, uses or recruits the images, stories, experiences, or dreams of others for their own.Appropriation also occurs when someone else becomes the expert on your experience and is deemed more knowledgeable about who you are than yourself. 2Todd's remarks are representative of a criticism of cultural appropriation that ties its wrongness to a broader concern about cultural colonialism: roughly, the worry that the end of formal colonial rule failed to end in turn I want to thank