Oppression Dynamics 101 – Cultural Appropriation

As we’ve covered many times at the Accredited Times, cultural appropriation is a heated and contentious topic, which often raises some interesting dilemmas. For those without a background in oppression dynamics, many of the disputes around cultural appropriation do’s and don’ts seem baffling, and those skilled in the art of small talk and never talking about anything important, are wise enough to avoid the topic altogether. But for those of you who are bold enough to step up to the plate and draw your own conclusions about what constitutes cultural appropriation and what is and isn’t allowed, the Accredited Times has put together the following short course in oppression dynamics to help you do so.

The thing to remember when considering moral disputes involving people of different oppression scores, is that the oppression pyramid forms the basis of all moral conclusions. For example, in a previous article we covered how the bulk of legal cases are settled according to the following formula:

We also covered how standards of proof are very laid back for people with high oppression scores making claims about how they’re historically oppressed, whereas people with high oppression scores are always ignored no matter how much proof they may have about their relative innocence. Using the above formula, all legal matters can be handled with relative ease, without needing to pay too much attention to the “facts” of the matter or the “evidence”. The above formula mainly takes into account what the victim is accusing the perpetrator of, or what the victim is demanding from the perpetrator, and the facts aren’t going to alter the result of the formula very much, if at all.

When it comes to cultural appropriation, the morality of the situation can be settled by a similar formula:

Acceptability scores of less than one indicate that the imitator is guilty of inappropriate cultural appropriation, and scores above one indicate that the situation can be glazed over and ignored. For scores less than one, prosecutors can then revert to the legal formula to decide how severe the punishment should be, using 1 / the acceptability score as the input for the severity of the crime.

Now for some examples. Consider a white male imitating a Native American, who’s exclusive claim to America over the Solutreans is concluded by a separate formula for historical revisionism to be covered in a later article. Referring back to the oppression pyramid, the white male has an oppression score of -1000 – 200 = -1200, where as a Native American has an oppression score of +800. As with the legal formula, we first need to convert the white male’s negative oppression score into a small positive oppression score, so his score is converted to 1 / ABS(-1200) = 1 / 1200 = 0.000833. Finally, we can now apply the cultural appropriation formula to yield an acceptability score of 0.000833 / 800 = 0.00000104125, definitely not acceptable at all! So how severe should his punishment be? Well, the white male’s very low acceptability score converts to a severity of crime score of 1 / 0.00000104125 = 960384.154. Using the legal formula, this should result in a severity of punishment of 960384.154 * (800 / 0.000833) = 922,337,722,929! Holy cow! That’s a punishment score of 922 billion! It’s hard to imagine what punishment would suffice for such a huge severity score, but drawing and quartering followed by public execution would be an absolute minimum.

Now let’s take a more benign example. An African American wearing a suit and tie and driving a car, all items supposedly (well technically actually, but white males have a low oppression score) invented by white males. Calculating it all in one go this time, we reach an acceptability score of 600 / 0.000833 = 720288, very acceptable indeed, and no punishment necessary.

I hope this clears up any confusion around issues of cultural appropriation. If you have an questions, please paste them in the comments section below.

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