Liberal racism

I recently had an argument on facebook that i'd like share. It was in response to this article posted by an old friend of mine. I've just copy pasted the response. It fairly succinctly sums up my position on liberal cultural appropriation discourse.

Ok, your right, i didn't read the article, i have now but it essentially said the same thing.
While it explicitly says that it's not saying white people shouldn't use black people gifs, it soon after contradicts itself ("No matter how brief the performance or playful the intent, summoning black images to play types means pirouetting on over 150 years of American blackface tradition.") So which is it? it can't be both. If it is former it is just liberal racism and white paternalism. If it is the latter it is left-segregationism and toxic cultural appropriation discourse. Neither side seems like a reasonable stance to take.

The most egregious example of digital blackface is the Laqueefa example which makes the strongest argument of blackface, its obviously acting as if it were a black person behind the screen (though with a name like LaQueefa, it kinda beggars belief that anyone would think its real). The other examples of gifs being used are pretty innocuous though, they are all just tweets where a white person (judging from their DP) used a black person in a gif. The implication here is that all the wrongness thats being expressed in the article is exemplified in these tweets. That if not explicitly, the LaQueefa shit is as bad as these uses of gifs implicitly. This would then lean towards the author arguing that white people should just "stay in their lane."
It's not good enough to say that this argument boils down to "be more mindful of how you use it" when it stands upon

This article touches on two major failings of modern liberalism.
1. The individualisation of political action.
Where the pursuit of a better world is not found in collective action against big issues like systemic racism, patriarchy and capitalism, but instead a matter of living in a non-oppressive way individually. Checking yourself becomes the most important factor of liberal political action. This is raises the bar to entry into left-wing thought by requiring the poor and oppressed run through an ideological minefield where at any point they might be expelled from the left for committing wrong-think that they had no idea existed. Case in point, that black people gifs should only be used by black people.
2. Refusal of empathy.
this modern form of liberal identarianism pursues the necessary goals of an end to racism in the same way that the far-right pursues the goals of an end to miscegenation. By removing each distinct cultural background from eachothers context.
Humans can only empathise with "the other" by participating in their culture. This means eating their food, reading their books, participating in their rituals and festivals, wearing their clothes. It means gaining a taste of what its like to (in some cases literally) walk in their shoes. Cultural appropriation discourse (of which this article largely bases its rhetoric) pursues, at its extreme, a world wherein white people stay with white culture and black people are allowed to cultivate their culture without the taint of other cultures interferences. This is quite explicitly the far-right platform as well. it is this kind of discourse that simultaneously pushes centrists to the right (guilt is never a good motivating factor for getting people to join your movement) and gives well-meaning liberals the tools to act in a way that nurtures racist sentiment.
Rather than segregate our cultures and put up our walls, i think infact we should be appropriating more. There is no distinct white culture, no distinct black culture, no distinct asian, african or latino culture. To reduce any of them to those names is to reduce millions (or in some case billions) of people to cultural attitudes or rituals that are not their own. it is to homogenize the experiences of people as different as Russians and Spainards, Igbo and Zulu, Chinese and Indonesian, Mexican and Quechua.
Human culture is made of the assimilation of difference into an endless fractal of new, interesting cultural forms and organisations.
To disallow any culture to evolve is to relegate it to stagnation and marginalisation. To demand all cultures stay the same (or only innovate via the efforts of its own members) means making sure that the cultural mores will not be able to keep pace with the constant advance of cultural change.

Don't fall for this kind of shit. It is the most profoundly unradical and problematic set of beliefs someone on the left can make. It precludes collective action in favour of race based tribalism, it precludes multiculturalism in favour of segregation and worst of all it plays right into the right's hands.