April has finished pretty caustic for Spanish Twitter. By "Spanish", I mean both the Spanish-speaking community and the users of Spanish nationality. The reason is in the next opinions, shared through Tumblr.
After a day and a half, I reflected enough to decide to not link the author of this text, filled with a very sad ignorance of geography. I think others have already done enough to make sure "they" (I don't know which gender this person self-identifies with) knows by now that Spain is in Europe and that, either Trump or not Trump, it's pretty difficult to put a wall between this country and the USA.
That said, it would be interesting to see a wall through the ocean.
Now, my worry is other. My worry is trying to understand how a human being can, first, give such misinformed opinions with an arrogant attitude and, second, maintain them in spite of the various answers received, from the most didactic and kind to the most insulting and unrespectful, trying to prove the error in them.
As a Spaniard, I assumed the fact that lots of people had a misinformed concept of Spain when I was mature enough, around 12 years old. After all, the contrary is true: my knowledge of, say, Bhutan or Nepal is almost null. Lots of Spaniards aren't even able to locate them on a map (indeed, I have the suspicion that lots of Spaniards doesn't know how to use a map, but that would require other post). Now, I would have never imagined that communications would advance to the point that an ignorant fool would lecture me wih the revelation of Spain being at the risk of being sorrounded by a wall.
Furthermore, this has come to coincide with the fact that certain Twitter user, an American of Chinese ancestry, has featured a public lynching towards a white American girl who has commited the enormous monstruosity to put on a Chinese dress for some kind of celebration. This user, whose name I don't want to remember (*), has made a pretty interesting accusation: the girl would be stealing "Chinese culture" by putting the dress in question. A millenia-old culture, stolen by an 18-year-old girl through an apparently innocent dress! And they say Harry Potter is the most powerful wizard ever!
It isn't the first time I've seen that the accusation of cultural appropiation has created problems to people, both the "perpretators" and the accusators. It's still epic that moment where somebody got really mad with certain Tumblr user protesting relentlessly about a girl with a kimono.
In Dragon Ball, the last replier would be the hyper-legendary Super Saiyajin or something similar.
If there's something I really love about that reaction, it's how it extends about Japanese culture being the product of external influences such China or Korea. This person, whoever it may be, understands the fact that cultures aren't isolate galaxies, but fluid phenomena where their elements are mixed once, twice, three times, so many times it's indeed confusing. That's why humanities and social studies exist, after all.
Now, it seems America seems to believe firmly the contrary idea: cultures are actually isolate, so their members should be isolate. This is explained when you consider its history: the USA was built by pioneers that came from overseas and that clashed or wiped out the original inhabitants of the land. Furthermore, it exploited various loads of slave work, not always recognized honestly, in its expansion and growth: West Africans, Japanese, Filipinos, Irish...
From the start, the USA was very contrary to miscegenation. Laws against interracial marriages are pretty well known. To make things even more complicate, religion also helped to separate groups even more. While historically famous for religious tolerance, in practice Catholics and Jews married within their respective groups. It's well known that both groups were an objective in the point of view of the KKK and also explains why Irish were discriminated in spite of their whiteness. The exception were Europeans such like the Germans and the Dutch, who shared skin colour and religion. At the same time, religion also made very difficult to consider other worldviews, as they were considered proper of heathens.
This has made the USA a multicultural country, ruled by the WASP. But it's a very remarkable multicultural country where every culture can be identified as belonging to a given "racial" group. As it happens with other concepts, "race" identification depends a lot on the knowledge about a given group, and it's even recognized that it's a nineteenth-century concept that has been updated plenty of times. The word ethnics is preferred, because it also takes into consideration cultural elements, though it's still relative to the knowledge of speakers.
Because, as it happens everywhere, how the different ethnics are called in America show the influence of how statesmen classified new immigrants. Hispanic makes sense when you consider the mother tongue above everything else, but Spanish is one ot the three most spoken languages in the world, so it's expectable to find very diverse populations among its speakers. Asian is the name that identify certain type of face that is a majority in East Asia, in spite of the cultural diversity of the region. Ethnics, then, aren't absolute form the same reason that cultures aren't static: people can choose if mixing or not.
Racism combined with xenophoby, on the other hand, has always liked to mock what can't understand. "Funny" stereotypes appeared to make fun of the different, like it has been the case for millennia. All these factors, combined, somewhat explain how American culture has created the concept of cultural appropiation: a way to attack both hypocrisy and nasty jokes.
Now, this finds two problems: first, the concept of cultural appropiation doesn't make much sense outside America. Let's remind the aforementioned explanation of the origins of Japanese culture: in most of countries, learned people know that the national culture is a mixture of numerous origins. There is also the fact of regional cultures: America tends to assume that a country means a homogeneous culture, likely due to the fact that is a pretty young country.
The second problem arises when Americans somewhat expect the same attitude from people from other countries... And it isn't the case. Notice how the person of the first comment seems to state that Spanish is a language for minorities. But, as I have said later, it's one of the three most spoken. The math doesn't make sense, literally. They don't realize that Spanish is minoritary in the USA, but not in Spain. It's also notorious in the answer in the post of the girl with a kimono: there is no trace of perceived inferiority.
And it makes perfect sense: in their respetive countries, neither Spaniards nor Japanese are minorities. The same happens everywhere, but Americans don't realize it. Maybe the fact that the word "culture" seems to be applied especifically to minorities in America influences a particular mindset, so when they hear "Spanish culture", they assume it must be a minority.
But there is another reason, unrelated to racism or xenophoby: self-identification. This is likely the most important personal concept in the postmodern world. In other times, personal identity was something that only a handful of people worried about (most of people strove to survive). Nowadays, even very humble people can have some spare time to reflect who they're really. Ethnics and what Americans understand as culture have given some people the answer to their identity: "my identity is Chinese/Hispanic, even if I've always lived in America, because I will never be seen as a WASP".
I can't blame them, honestly. I can blame them for trying to lecture everybody else in this little blue planet, but they haven't created this cultural clima of obsessive individualism that finishes being narcissistc or even solipsistic. indeed, they're victims of a combination of bad education and toxic references, where it's more important to be noticed than what you're really doing.
Basically, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, culture.
* Yes, that's a reference to The Quixote. If you aren't Spanish but still use it, I'll send the PC police to your home.
Sources
The images with the very peculiar opinions come from Twitter, respectively from @gwrs_ and @LordoLordor.
The part of map showing the USA and Spain (and Portugal) is a section obtained with Google Maps.
The article about race.
The origin of the word ethnics.
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