Cras wrote:
Mimi wrote:
Cras wrote:
None of them.
Ok, why? (Again, you may have already explained, but I've skimmed at best). I did see your example of a businessman opening a Jamaican food shop, why different if a business man opens a Chinese food shop?
There are tens of thousands of Chinese restaurants in the UK, almost exclusively run by people of a Chinese background. The chances of someone successfully shoving their way into that space and taking over the Chinese food market from people of Chinese descent is astonishingly unlikely. If a rich restaurant mogul looks out onto the streets of London or Birmingham right now and plans to open a restaurant, they could easily do so without having any impact on Chinese restaurants that are in place. Equally if they did put a Chinese restaurant out of business, it would have next to no impact on the Chinese community at large.
The same is not true of Caribbean restaurants. There are far fewer of them, and they have far deeper roots into their original cultures. They're not run as big businesses, there isn't the capacity there for other places to take over the slack if one or more fail.
More, it's not just the difference between the two. It's about intent. Your Greek chap opening a Chinese restaurant is doing it because there's people nearby who he think are an untapped market for Chinese food. Open a Caribbean restaurant in Brixton and the market's already there, the restaurants are already there, and you're very much going to be using the 'we're a Caribbean restaurant' as a cynical way to muscle in. As Chris said, yes it's capitalism - but it's unprincipled naked capitalism.
Ok, thank you. I think I can see what you mean at least (so don't worry about 'rambling' as it just kind of fills out your point of view).
I think I'd seen cultural appropriation as something that took away something that was 'special' to a group of people, not necessarily for monetary reasons. So, in that sense maybe I would be nervous of, for example, white Australian children making indigenous Australian style paintings at school as it was culturally insensitive. I think you're coming from the point where people are benefitting from the (sometimes sterotyped) trappings of a culture which is not their own. Would you say that is fair?
If that is the case, if Jamaican restaurant and Mexican restaurants were better established and largely owned by the people whose cultures they were benefitting from, would the examples at the university and of your hypothetical scenario no longer be problematic?