Cultural appropriation
We're each on a different path, at a different stage. Some people don't reach their own decolonization until their 40s, after years of arrested development from work, kids, just life. Others are still carrying the frameworks they picked up in their 20s, frameworks that look "incorrect" now but were where they were at the time. Culture has always moved this way. It gets borrowed, appropriated, localized, reshaped by whatever environment and life experience a person is in. That's not new. What's new is that now we can watch someone in the middle of that process, in real time, and comment on it. So when I hear "cultural appropriation" aimed at Filipino Americans exploring their own heritage, I see co-opting, exotifying, even getting it wrong, as steps on the way to understanding it better. Not the finish line. There is none