I got pretty hot-and-heavy editing together my response. If I've messed up the relationship among quoted text please forgive.
(Maybe I should stop? I know that destroying the popular but demonstrably false narratives that people here hold doesn't really win me any friends here...)
No, you shouldn't stop. Different perspectives on culture fascinate me. I'll assess the evidence you provide. If I see gaps, flaws, or hidden assumptions I'll point them out.
From my perspective the interpretations you share minimize some things that are important and emphasize some things that are not. The result is that you sound dismissive of differences between cultures. I don't think you are being dismissive - I'm saying that's how it sounds to me at first.
Norway is an ancient monoculture that deeply resents being invaded by foreign refugees, and an immensely egalitarian society that invites in huge numbers of refugees because they need help and people are people.
Norway has not even been independent for most of the past millenium. And Norway is an ammalgamation of previous tribes and petty kingdoms that inhabited the area, as is Sweden.
This is not a fair or meaningful comparison. Canada has existed in something like it's modern form for maybe 200 years? The US for maybe 300? Go much further back than that and the entire concept of a country starts to get a bit squishy compared to how we think today. While those Norse tribes certainly had differences, those were very small compared to the kinds of differences you find between next door neighbours across much of Canada.
In addition, Norway today is no longer just the descendents of those tribes. The large influx of Muslim refugees has reached a tipping point - at least in the cities - where the brown citizens are visibly everywhere. This has set up a profound cognitive dissonance in many Norwegians. It isn't a question of skin colour. It is a crisis of identity. What does it mean to be Norwegian when a sizable minority do not have nordic roots? My Norwegian family are universally disgusted by how the French deal with their Muslim population while also feeling profoundly uncomfortable with what real integration means for Norwegian culture. My child's mother is Norwegian. She married a black Guaynese woman (1st gen Canadian as a child). She had a kid with a straight mixed Brit/Indian/Afghan/Trinidadian man. A year or so ago she said, "The most common boy's baby name in Norway this year is Mohamad. Isn't that sad?" Definitely not a racist person - but she sees some of the cultural changes in Norway as a loss of what she grew up with. She is right about that, and it makes her sad.
The very concept of "cultural appropriation" is scarcely recognized outside of the US. The same goes for "white priviledge".
Close.
Cultural appropriation is not recognized outside the US because it is the first time and place in history that usurping a culture is seen as morally wrong. In part this is because white america didn't just remix aspects of black america and latino america... White america actively surpressed and isolated those cultures while doing that remixing, and then largely denied any remixing had taken place.
I think cultural appropriation is often an overblown opportunity to be offended, especially when it presumes that culture and creativity are a zero sum or even negative sum game. As noted above, in the US it has been that kind of game in the past and present. From a practical point of view I worry that minority cultures grasp at the
appearance of control over their narratives and histories, without gaining actual control over those things - because they are not controllable in the sense they want. IMO healthier approach would be more like a creative commons attribution license: if you're taking on parts of a culture that is not your own, acknowledge and celebrate those influences and sources.
Oh, and on "white privilege' - there are places where the dominant culture is immensely privileged compared to the subordinate cultures. Saudi Arabia comes to mind. The difference is that they don't give a rat's ass about what anyone else thinks about their position at the top of the food chain. America's minorities have voices, and some of the dominant culture listen to them.
The US is a xenophobic cultural steamroller that crushes or appropriates any non-white-male culture while remaining ignorant of the effects of priviledge or even the concept of priviledge.
The rest of the world doesn't really think in American racial terms. Europe in particular is divided more by ethnicity rather than American notions of race. You are super-imposing your domestic views on a part of the world that functions differently.
I didn't actually use 'race' in my descripition of the US because I'm Canadian and don't think in American terms of race. Their concept of race is barely sensible within their borders. It's almost meaningless outside them. At the same time I can understand how they use the term and what it means to them.
It isn't just Europe that is divided by ethnicity. Most of the world is like that. Places where ethnic boundaries were violated (by empire building, for example) have a lot of internal conflict.
The US is also one of the world's least racist countries.
I haven't had time to go through the source for those stats, so I can't comment. I have immediate questions about the questions though. The way they were asked could bias the results dramatically. The US and Canada are also more culturally diverse than most other places, but not in homogeneous ways. I look forward to exploring the paper.