Someone up thread said that white people with dreadlocks have helped black people with dreadlocks become more accepted.
That is the very essence of cultural appropriation, why should it take white people wearing a hairstyle for fashion that for black people is an affirmation of religion so that black people to gain acceptance for representing their own heritage and culture. Why is that it always takes white people doing something to confirm legitimacy.
This, this and more this. And the idea black people should somehow be pleased by this further evidence of entrenched and systemic racism in society, because hey, now white people are doing something it's not just acceptable, but cool... words absolutely fail me.
Of course something isn't necessarily cultural appropriation. But the example above is a perfect example of when it is: when something seen as ugly and inferior because it's associated with an oppressed group is taken up by a group with societal power, and suddenly becomes cool and edgy and trendy by that change, and no actual intention of supporting the original group or understanding the cultural history is intended, just a slightly transgressive fashion statement... that's appropriation.
There are some fashion brands aimed at young people (and some high end luxury ones, too) that have fetishised sexual violence, domestic violence, prostitution, and so on, always with a woman as the objectified party. They have had women on a lead, or with fanned dollar bills arranged around her pubic area, or worse. And that was to shock, but in an edgy, cool way, not in a "this is wrong" way. The moral bankruptcy of co-opting women's abuse to sell designer clothing or scent is obvious to most women, I think. Yet when it's a similar issue around race, you get some white women making the same arguments men I knew at college made about the objectifying of violence towards women.
Intersectionality is something else I think we should care about: the idea that sexism and racism are not unrelated subjects, and that if we want women to be properly and fairly represented in society, we should probably also give a damn about race, and disability, and other groups also held back by things that really shouldn't have any role to play in whether they are good at a job, or deserve fair and equal treatment. Because the thinking that allows for women to be marginalised politically and economically is the same that allows for racist oppression, too.