all she did was pretend to be from a country and culture she clearly loves.

Not only that: the arguments against cultural appropriation always say that the egregious offense is when people from a dominant, privileged group appropriate the culture of people from an oppressed group that historically has held minority status (real numerical minority status in a certain places, such as is the case with blacks in the US or UK, but not Africa; or de facto minority status, as in the case of women globally) and been marginalized and discriminated against.

Yes, some will accuse certain black people of "acting white," or slam Asian people for using skin whiteners and getting eye surgeries to "look Anglo," or Irish Catholic people for pretending to be English or Scottish Protestant. But that's more coz these people are seen as exhibiting negative views toward their own ethnicity and culture, not coz they are taking something that belongs to a marginalized group and exploiting and making use of it in a disrespectful way for their own ends. Generally speaking, no one cares if someone from a historically oppressed minority group apes and takes from the dominant, privileged group. After all, Ralph Lauren has built a fashion empire on appropriating the American and British WASP aesthetic; and back in the 80s and 90s, hip hop did the same with clothing traditionally associated with white American preppies.

What's interesting about H Baldwin's case is that she has been slammed for being a privileged white person from a culture and nationality (US) that has been in a/the dominant position globally for about the past 100 years who has tried to associate herself with/appropriate the culture and nationality of a different people. But what gets overlooked is that the people and nationality Baldwin picked to imitate/appropriate are not only white just like she is, but over the course of history they constituted most dominant and oppressive group on earth - the Spanish. After all, Baldwin didn't pretend to be Mexican, Dominican, Nicaraguan or Colombian; she pretended to be from Spain, the country that gave the world the conquistadors, financed Christopher Columbus and were the first to colonize the Americas.

Fact is, for hundreds of years starting in 1469 Spain was one of the greatest, most prominent and wealthiest global powers of the modern era, controlling and plundering a vast colonial empire (mostly in the Americas, but also encompassing parts of Asia such as the Philippines and a few places in Africa too) and subjecting the indigenous peoples in its territories to all sorts of horrors and injustice. Spain also was the country that started slavery in the New World. More than a century before 1619, the Spanish king Charles V in 1517 established that his subjects could use slavery in the New World, which caused many indigenous people in the Americas to be enslaved and kicked off the practice of capturing and shipping black Africans to the Americas as slaves as well.

Also, during WW2 Spain, under the dictatorship of fascist Franco, took a stance that was officially neutral, but in fact favored and aided the Axis powers in a number of ways. At one point early in the war, Franco sought to join the war as part of the Axis, but coz Franco and Hitler both had certain political and territorial aims that were at cross purposes, when the two men met in 1940 they could not work out the details of an alliance that were satisfactory to both.

My point is, today all the former European colonial powers and those who were "on the wrong side of history" in WW2, particularly the Germans, are still seen as fair game for criticism, scorn, ridicule as well as for cultural appropriation. Today many aspects of European cultures are happily embraced - appropriated - by pretty much the whole world, including a number directly associated with colonialism (Land Rover, safari clothing, the Babar books, all the movies and TV shows about explorers and pirates) and even with the Nazi regime (Hugo Boss, Bayer, Volkswagen, Siemens). So why the completely different standards when it comes to Spain - a former colonial power that once was the richest land on earth and introduced slavery to the New World and the Philippines, and which today still ranks 13th in the world in per capita GDP?

I think it's silly - and pathetic - that Hilaria Baldwin pretended she's from Spain, but it's not like Spain is a poor, oppressed country that historically been constantly picked on and downtrodden and whose people have been routinely "othered," looked down on and abused for their race/ethnicity and considered "uncivilized," inferior and "primitive." On the contrary, in the past 500 years Spain and the Spanish were the ones who did a whole lot of that shit to people of other races and nationalities. In fact, the Spanish went so far as to invent some entirely new ways of committing human rights violations against others.