> To wit, the more common usage of “discrimination” has semantically narrowed — in usage — regardless of what the facelessness of dictionary definitions, often initially penned eons ago, might indicate.
This is also true of “cultural appropriation.” I find it almost poignant to see how commonly people dismiss the concept by saying that without it, we wouldn’t have tomatoes (from South America), or that the alphabetical writing system that emerged in Egypt wouldn’t have spread to most of the world, etc. But what these people are missing is that this term is used in a semantically narrower fashion than these objections apply to.
It refers to appropriation by those on top¹ from those below, especially where doing so involved profiting in a way that the latter was not able to.
> To wit, the more common usage of “discrimination” has semantically narrowed — in usage — regardless of what the facelessness of dictionary definitions, often initially penned eons ago, might indicate.
This is also true of “cultural appropriation.” I find it almost poignant to see how commonly people dismiss the concept by saying that without it, we wouldn’t have tomatoes (from South America), or that the alphabetical writing system that emerged in Egypt wouldn’t have spread to most of the world, etc. But what these people are missing is that this term is used in a semantically narrower fashion than these objections apply to.
It refers to appropriation by those on top¹ from those below, especially where doing so involved profiting in a way that the latter was not able to.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/opinion/language-race-sem....
1: [Link in the original] https://www.theweek.co.uk/cultural-appropriation