The social media phenomenon where people get so overexposed to cultural appropriation discourse that they end up embracing a thinly veiled form of American xenophobia, provincialism and lack of curiosity for other cultures is kinda like the phenomenon where people started using the language of feminism to advocate for a return to extremely American notions of sexual decency and puritanism. A lot of people superficially adopt rhetorical styles and the lingo of certain sociopolitical theories as a means of in-group signalling on social media but actually maintain largely unmodified hegemonic value systems, often because critique of those value systems does not attract the kind of attention and engagement that social media trains you to always be seeking out.
#i think about this a lot #a lot of young people raised in conservative families discover progressivism online# and adopt it as a kind of counterculture aesthetic #without actually challenging any of the values they were taught growing up #they just assimilate those values into the leftist ‘vibe’ with obfuscating language
