I draw the line at cultural misappropriation.
But that’s a very personal and subjective line to draw. You won’t find a definition that works for everyone. If it makes you uncomfortable then by all means don’t do it.
My 5-year-old son is really into superheroes and superhero costumes - Marvel ones in particular. He has outfits for every single major superhero (Hulk, Spiderman, etc…) except Black Panther, which his mother refuses to buy for him on grounds of cultural appropriation (she and I are separated, and while I suppose I could buy him one in act of passive civil protest, this isn’t a hill I want to die on with divorce looming…). He is only dimly aware of why he isn’t allowed to dress up as Black Panther, mumbling something along the lines of ‘Mummy says I’m not allowed because it’s not appro-kriate’.
This, for me, crosses a line.
Okay, we can’t say that kids can dress up however they please with no exceptions (a 5-year-old dressed up in a KKK outfit? As a stripper?) - to be honest, I’m a little queasy about kids playing with toy guns - so there are rules as to what children can and can’t wear (and who they can and cannot pretend to be), even when it’s all just fun and games.
But to say that a white child cannot dress up and play as a black fictional character strikes me as setting a dangerous precedent, and I’m not sure I understand the logic and thought process behind it, however well-meaning it (may) be.
I’ve come to think about cultural appropriation in terms of a very specific form of cultural expression: gender. It’s wrong when someone says, “you were born this way, so you must express your gender that way”. Likewise, it’s wrong to tell someone, “because of the circumstances of your upbringing, you can’t express yourself with that way”. People need the space to explore who they are and who they want to be. Gatekeeping and shutting people down for not following norms are tools of oppression.
But, and this is a big but, people have a personal responsibility not to continue past and present oppression. That requires both self awareness of your impact on others and an open mind to hearing what others say. Having the right to do something is not justification for doing it.
I don’t think it’s all that difficult. Stealing is obviously wrong so copying a specific pattern of that is or ordinarily would be protected intellectual property would be wrong. Using another in an an insulting or degrading manner is wrong. Otherwise there’s nothing wrong to worry about. There will be instances open to interpretation, but not most of them. People should remember that Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery.
That attitude seems half-baked to me. The world will be a much better place if White kids are idolizing Black heroes and wanting to grow up to be like them, and if there’s no assumption that skin color is the defining characteristic of the hero and a prerequisite to emulating them. Lord knows Black kids have spent long enough dressing up like Spiderman and Batman, and that’s 100% fine also.
For me, it’s impossible to disucss cultural appropriation without considering historical context. Certain racial/cultural/ethnic/religious groups have had a lot more power in society than others. Taking something from a dominant group, even to mock it (zombie nun tats), isn’t going to have the same grossness as taking something from a marginalized group, even to rejoice in it (feathered headdresses). If an atheist in Chicago wears a Pope hat as a fashion statement, that comes across very differently to me than someone wearing Bindi as a fashion statement.
I think that part of the reason the concept of “cultural appropriation” is hard to explain and understand is that so many of us White, non-ethinic people have no culture of our own. That is, there’s nothing that we do, wear, etc. that is exclusively ours and that would be considered cultural appropriation if someone else did it.
And, for many people today, there’s nothing that they (or “their people,” to the extent that they even have “people”) consider sacred. So they have trouble understanding why other cultures consider certain things “sacred,” or what that means.
An exception to this might be Christians who hold certain symbols, practices, etc. of their own religion to be sacred. Are we saying it’s not that bad for non-Christians to appropriate, imitate, mock, or triviailize things that they hold sacred because Christians are dominant or mainstream? I agree it’s not the same when done to a dominant group than to a marginalized or oppressed group. But to the extent that it’s not the same, we lose the ability to make them understand by taking a “How would you feel if others did that to you?” approach.
The first essay I read on cultural appropriation was by Wendy Rose, a Native poet and anthropologist (“in that order,” she wrote) who were exasperated by how White audiences and professors so often treated her. One of her complaints was about White folks who would come up to her and say something like, “I love Native American culture so much, you know, I’m White, so I don’t have any culture.” She wrote, “Do you think maybe if a bunch of White Americans keep saying that you have no culture, maybe that belief is part of your culture?”
Instead, we gotta recognize what our culture is, like a fish recognizing the water we swim in. There’s a tremendous amount of stuff that White Americans may claim as part of our culture, from McDonald’s to the Washington Post to Tim Burton movies to Prosperity churches to e.e. cummings poetry to mint juleps and so, so much more.
The reason it’s not cultural appropriation if someone else does it is because White American Culture is the dominant culture in the United States. Cultural appropriate has a power dynamic inherent to it, and when someone from a marginalized culture participates in the dominant culture, that’s not the same thing as the reverse.
The only reason there is no exclusivity is because such cultural artifacts are ubiquitous due to an openness to cultural appropriation. I think it is a good thing. There shouldn’t be anything within my culture that is off limits to anyone else.
That’s why I qualified it with “That is, there’s nothing that we do, wear, etc. that is exclusively ours and that would be considered cultural appropriation if someone else did it.”
Any of the things you mentioned, or could mention, as White American culture, if someone from a different culture wanted to “appropriate” them, I’d say, “Sure, I don’t mind. Knock yourselves out: go ahead and appropriate the heck out of them. I don’t consider them particularly ‘mine’ or ‘my people’s’ anyway.”
Is the mullet a part of US culture?
Is cultural appropriation?
It’s like smut, I know it when I see it. But what some people call appropriation I just call cultural exchange. A lot of Americans are into yoga, did we appropriate that from India? There were Indians who came to the United States in the early 20th century teaching and encouraging Americans to take up Yoga. Did we appropriate it or did something that was shared with us become a part of our culture?
Part of the difficulty is Americans have spent the last couple generations tearing down cultural norms. Men had to wear hats here, but not there. Women had to wear bras and other body-shaping undergarments. Men had to wear suits for certain jobs and uniforms for others. Women couldn’t wear white certain times of the year. We had gender restrictions in many professions. We had gender restrictions on hair styles. We rebelled against the authoritarians and hierarchs who enforced these rules, and nowadays there is little pushback from violating those old cultural norms.
When someone says “you’re not allowed to express yourself in that way”, it raises out hackles because we’ve already fought those battles.
I’m pretty convinced that’s part of every culture. At least every culture that interacts with outsiders.
I think I draw the line at “any amount of borrowing or adapting from other cultures is fine by me”.
I like this example, but I’d interpret it slightly differently. The problem, of course, is that the guy is an asshole and offensively portraying a stereotype. But the issue isn’t whether or not someone is going to confuse him for the real thing. The issue is whether he’s being an asshole.
Some clueless guy who started wearing a sombrero because he liked it is fine. People starting restaurants with cuisine that they didn’t learn at their mother’s side is fine. Writing novels with characters who aren’t just like you is fine.
I think a focus on cultural appropriation is misguided and mostly harmful to society. I understand the impulse. “Our meaningful symbols are not your fashion”, but when well-meaning people are telling little kids that they can’t dress up as their childhood hero characters because their hair/skin are a different color: hoo boy, have you lost the plot. “Keep to your own kind” has historically not been a particularly empowering ethos for non-dominant cultures.
Ironically, I approach this issue from the opposite direction. I feel the appropriation aspect misdirects the issue.
The situations where I see a legitimate issue are when somebody is taking a symbol that holds a substantial meaning in a culture and using it in a trivial fashion. This is most likely to happen when you’re dealing with the symbols of another culture and are less likely to be aware to their meaning. But you can be culturally insensitive to your own culture (I remember when people were upset about clothing that used the American flag as its design).
The first occasion when I heard the term cultural appropriation was when a fashion designer incorporating text form the Koran in to a fabric and made dresses out of it. He said he just thought the Arabic text looked like a cool design. But many Muslims were unhappy seeing their religious scripture being used as a fashion item. And I feel they had a legitimate point.
But a sombrero is just a hat. If you’re a non-Mexican and you want to wear a Mexican hat, go ahead. You’re treating a sombrero the same way a Mexican person would. (But wearing a sombrero as part of a costume to portray a stereotype is offensive.)
So I guess my rule is that it’s okay to use things from other cultures as long as you treat them with the same respect that people of that culture would.
That’s where my final paragraph comes in, though.
Remember the Portland burrito flap?
- If you claim its yours not the others. Like say (hypothetical) Frenchmen claiming the Fez and totally French and invented in France by Fenchmen.
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