cultural exchange on even ground is great, and enables art to grow and thrive in unprecedented ways. it becomes cultural appropriation when one side of that exchange is benefiting at the expense of the other, such as if a white person incorporates another culture's arts and aesthetics into their work and makes a profit off of it while the actual people those elements came from would be persecuted for expressing them, or when such cultural elements are taken carelessly without the user knowing their context and history and importance, and made into an empty trendy aesthetic robbing something sacred of its meaning. when you engage with another culture's art, religion, language, aesthetic, etc, you must do so respectfully, on their terms. if they say something belongs to their culture alone, respect that too and keep your hands off it, especially if you belong to their oppressor class, even if you mean them no harm. there are some cultural elements that translate and integrate well with others and there are some that truly can't be understood by people who haven't lived that culture, and it's always up to the owners of that culture to decide which is which.