This article discusses cultural appropriation. More precisely, it discusses discussions about cultural appropriation, which stress me out more than any other cultural consulting topic. The question of whether a given expression is or is not cultural appropriation, and the corollary question of whether cultural appropriation is even real or not, tend to polarize and ossify conversations between otherwise like-minded people. But what if we reframed the conversation? What if we talked about the same content, but we broke the topic of cultural appropriation down into its component parts: the distinct power dynamics, patterns, and consequences of each individual cultural exchange? What if we talked about cultural appropriation without deciding whether something is cultural appropriation or not? Does that still count as talking about cultural appropriation? Let’s find out.
Left: Helmet and shoulders of the titular bounty hunter from The Mandalorian. Right: Helmet and shoulders of the bounty hunter Boba Fett, alleged appropriator of Mandalorian culture, in the Star Wars films.
Hopefully, if this strategy works, it’ll free those of us trapped in Sisyphean cycles of identical, repeating cultural appropriation conversations in which no one learns anything, every time a high-profile fight about cultural appropriation hits social media.
Definitions
A cultural practice or cultural expression is a mode of behavior, communication, or self-assertion with origins or close associations with a certain culture. Either internal factors (e.g., we invented this article of clothing) or external factors (outsiders saw us wearing this article of clothing and now it’s a whole thing) may form those associations. They may even result from cultural exchange.
Cultural exchange is one culture’s adoption of cultural practices or expressions originating with another culture. Throughout this article, we’ll call the former culture the adopters, the latter the originators.
Cultural appropriation is an instance of cultural exchange which aggravates, entrenches, trivializes, or mocks a power imbalance between an enfranchised adopter and a systemically oppressed originator. An instance of cultural appropriation may also have positive or benign effects—for the originator, the adopter, or third parties—which exist in parallel to the appropriative dynamic. For a more academic analysis, here’s Danielle Bainbridge:
I refer to most cultural appropriations as stealth aggressions. If a microaggression is an oppressive act that takes minimal time or effort to perpetrate, then a stealth aggression is an oppressive act which is not so widely understood or obvious that mainstream society recognizes it as such. It’s unclear, arguable, something which surely has other explanations—which is what makes it so dangerous. In polite society, say at the office, you can’t call someone a racial slur without HR running up on you. But you might get away with calling someone articulate, or appropriating their culture. A stealth aggression might not hit as hard as a straight-up aggression, but many many more stealth aggressions than overt ones bypass our societal and internal filters.
“Where do you draw the line?”
We don’t. Not today, anyway.
You’ve probably heard this question echo in previous discussions of cultural appropriation. “Drawing the line,” here, means setting a standard by which to judge one or (more commonly) more instances of cultural exchange as appropriation or not. “White rappers are always appropriating culture”—that’s a drawn line, then, because of the “always.” Discourse using the language of ownership has similar force.
Like many broad generalizations, drawn lines are comforting. They afford us surety and freedom from the responsibility to judge cultural exchanges on a case-by-case basis. But I think that responsibility is crucial. Every expression’s distinctive context changes its meaning. When we draw lines, we risk crossing out context.
To guard against that possibility, for the duration of this article, we set aside the question of whether any individual instance of cultural exchange is or is not cultural appropriation. We’re not gonna discuss ownership. You can get that anywhere else on the internet. But if you decide to return to it, perhaps you’ll have better luck explaining your judgments if you cite the kind of analysis we’re about to try.
Let’s Try This Instead: Analytic Assessment
[O]ne cannot write a “General Theory of Cultural Interpretation.” Or, rather, one can, but there appears to be little profit in it, because the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them.
—Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”
The process we’ll follow instead is one of analysis, in the term’s literal sense: unbinding all the topics, patterns, and dynamics which comprise and surround cultural appropriation, scrutinizing them individually to determine how they affect, and especially how they harm, people in a practical sense. I’ve formatted those loosened threads below as questions you can use to guide and reframe your next cultural appropriation conversation. I sometimes refer to this altered process as focusing on what is appropriative rather than what is appropriation.
What’s the context? What does it look like without that context?
One of the reasons I hate to say whether hairstyles or clothing choices are or aren’t appropriation is that I’m worried someone will misinterpret what I say as a hard line I’m drawing: “Mendez says if this white person wearing a kimono is racist, then all white people wearing kimono are always racist,” etc. The context in which someone wears a kimono, though, changes the nature of the help or harm it does. A white person getting married to a Japanese person should of course feel fine about wearing a kimono. A white person who dresses in a kimono for a live-action role-playing game is less defensible, since the kimono is literally a costume. We can probably all agree that non-Mexicans purchasing some Mexican food from Mexicans, eating it, and enjoying it is a good thing. However, Donald Trump can eat a taco bowl and manage to make it racist with the context of … uh … literally every other attribute of Donald Trump.
What you’re saying and who you’re saying it to change the meaning of an expression. You should get in the habit of looking up the original context of an expression: what did it mean to the people who created it, who were around at the time? Now, in what other contexts is it likely to appear? What are the similarities and differences? What are the demographics? What are the differences in power and privilege?
Corollary: Is this a pattern?
I’m only able to notice some of the things I’ve talked about here because they’re patterns. People do certain things over and over again, and because they do them in that way, their meaning changes. If something’s happened once, it’s not likely to cause as big of a stir as if it’s part of a long, ongoing tradition of a certain kind of thing happening. Many disagreements over whether something is racist or appropriative or whatever have to do with different groups’ ability or lack thereof to recognize a pattern. Look at the disagreement over the Chinese prom dress, or Ghost in the Shell, where Chinese and Japanese living in their home countries didn’t understand why Asian Americans cared—because they aren’t used to the minority experience, where bullies mock us on the playground with cultural expressions, or where we have to struggle to get parts in Hollywood because we’re too often typecast into racial stereotypes. (We’ll discuss other problems with the Chinese prom dress a little later.)
There’s a category of racist expressions which I classify as Nice Things We Can’t Have™. A Nice Thing We Can’t Have™ is an expression which isn’t in and of itself easily identifiable as racist, but which has acquired racist dimensions through a pattern of thoughtless or racist actions somewhere else, Reddit or Fox News or wherever, which has forever ruined that nice thing for everyone. For example, I can imagine a world where I wouldn’t bristle when someone calls me articulate or well-spoken. I am articulate and well-spoken. But specious use of those words has turned them into dog whistles for lowkey, “complimentary” racism. It might not have gotten that way purposefully, but it is that way now, whether we like it or not. It’s a nice thing, but we can’t have it anymore.
Does dark elf blackface fall into that category? In case you don’t watch Community and you haven’t seen it before, some live-action role-players darken their skin with makeup to portray dark elves. Again, the problem isn’t with their intent. We get it that they want to be Drizzt Do’Urden, not the Jazz Singer. But such costuming has a bad history for reasons that have nothing to do with them. Putting on dark-colored makeup isn’t a racist expression in and of itself—but it has a context. It’s not those LARPers’ fault to begin with, but that expression falls into a pattern, and so that expression causes harm for which they are responsible.
Dark elf blackface isn’t part of the cultural appropriation conversation, really, since blackface mimics a skin color rather than a cultural expression. Instead, it’s just extremely racist. No dark elf blackface. Anyway, back to cultural appropriation.
What power dynamics differentiate adopters and originators?
As I mentioned in our definitions, the ingredient which distinguishes appropriation from exchange is a difference in power and privilege: the adopter has more of a certain form of privilege (though not necessarily all forms), the originator less. It’s frustrating enough when an instance of cultural exchange highlights that power gradient; it’s worse when the exchange aggravates it.
Given how many different axes of privilege exist, I’m not suggesting you figure out which party has more total privilege; that’ll work out as poorly as most hierarchies of oppression. But let’s look at a few kinds of power differentials and how they relate to instances of cultural exchange.
Law and Violence
Simply practicing certain cultural expressions while belonging to a marginalized population can endanger your life and liberty. The hoodie, which you’d think a pretty universal modern garment, has been linked with supposed Black criminality in cases like the Trayvon Martin shooting. Florida man Michael Dunn shot up some Black teenagers’ vehicle, killing Jordan Davis, because he found their loud rap music threatening.
But sometimes, adopters sometimes get to dodge the violent and/or legal repercussions originators face when they engage in a cultural expression. Brazilian police arrested, beat up, or murdered poor and dark-skinned capoeira players, but ignored upper-class Brazilians “slumming it” in capoeira academies. Adopters may then leverage their immunity to consequences to profit from an expression as originators cannot. If originators are lucky, the expression’s popularity among the powerful and privileged opens some doors for them as well; but all too often, it becomes free and easy only for the privileged adopters.
Ceremony and Sanctity
Cultural expressions from a sacred or ceremonial context are sometimes adopted in the context of costume, entertainment, or even ridicule. The feathered war bonnet, traditionally restricted to VIPs among the American Interior Plains’ indigenous people, is a well-known example of a ceremonial expression that has become a form of caricature in oppressors’ hands. Tā moko, the distinctive Māori carved tattoo traditionally only worn by individuals with appropriate mana, sometimes “inspires” non-Māori people’s fashion or tattoo designs.
President Barack Obama gives the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Joe Medicine Crow, the last living Plains Indian war chief, wearing Crow Nation regalia including a feathered war bonnet.
Recreating a sacred or ceremonial expression in a profane context, of course, disrespects that culture’s ceremonies, just like wearing a military medal one has not earned. If the originating religion is marginalized but the adopter’s religion is not, or even if the adopter practices that religion but is less likely to get flak for it, that’s worth considering too. This is the case with dreadlocks, a religious marker for some Rastafarians, Jains, and Hindus.
Choice and Necessity
Some cultural expressions emerge from situations of necessity. Sometimes, the originator had no choice but to invent or perform them. Other times, they’re artistic or emotional responses to dire situations. Those who adopt them by choice don’t face these limiting factors. Hip hop emerged in this way: a cry of pain and defiance from the South Bronx, suffering under Ronald Reagan and Robert Moses. Capoeira is another good example, having originated as a form of exercise, self-defense, and stress relief for enslaved Africans and the Brazilian urban poor. Even though it’s a good thing I don’t face police violence today when I play capoeira by choice, I have to understand that history to understand the game.
Money and Exposure
Marginalized expressions frequently experience a cultural watershed where a privileged outsider boosts their popularity. Sometimes that outsider even respects and centers the originators, as Debbie Harry and Elvis Presley did with hip hop and rock and roll’s Black American originators. But who gets noticed, interviewed, identified as the historical paragon, go-to expert, or honored teacher? Most importantly, who makes money off the expression? If there’s money to be made, usually the answer is “everyone” … but privileged adopters get the lion’s share of cash, control, and credit. Marginalized originators wind up in awkward positions of gratitude and resentment in tandem.
Mestre Bimba, wearing white clothing and playing a berimbau. Bimba codified the Regional system of capoeira, introducing the style to Brazilian elites and paving the way for legalization. However, his claims to have reinvented capoeira didn’t go over so well with many of his contemporaries.
I alluded earlier to the attention light-skinned and well-to-do Brazilians paid when Mestre Bimba opened a novel indoor academy that resembled East Asian martial arts schools. That interest led to Bimba’s school holding demonstrations for the police, the military, and Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. But when Vargas loosened restrictions in response, the rising tide didn’t lift all boats. Capoeira’s traditional enemies remained in charge of who could play, and where. It still wasn’t street-legal. You could only study it within the confines of formal academies, leaving old-school masters who taught their students in the street or on the docks out of luck unless they could scrape together the capital to open an indoor school. Similar obstacles face present-day Black entrepreneurs who brave stigma to take advantage of cannabis legalization.
What’s the connection between adopter and originator?
You would think this one would be obvious, but: are the adopters of the cultural expression in ongoing contact with the original culture? Did they even bother to ask someone’s permission?
You’d think. You’d think the adopters would have nothing to lose and everything to gain through contact with the originators’ culture. You’d think even at their most mercenary, they’d realize it’s a good way to get better at it, seem more authentic, build up credibility, head off misunderstandings. But the problem, then, is that originators can use ongoing contact to hold you accountable and ask you to do things differently from how you yourself want to do them. I would think that being held accountable in this way is good for me, but not everyone agrees.
The stronger that connection, and the more present that connection is on an ongoing basis, the more likely the relationship is to be equitable. That’s the kind of relationship that involves giving and acceptance, rather than taking.
What’s the tone?
This is an easy one: what’s the tone which the original and adopted versions of the expression take? Who’s centered: the performer, an ancestor, a religious figure? Is someone mocking someone else, or can one expression easily be taken out of context (see above!) as disrespectful, derisive, or mocking? I think the Chinese prom dress fiasco falls into this category. When I first heard that a white girl in Utah wore a qìpào to prom, I thought, “eh, probably fine.” Then I saw this photo she posted to Twitter.
White American teenager Keziah Daum, her date, and five other couples pose on some marble steps in a pre-prom picture. The boys are all flashing what I assume is a Utahn gang sign, and refuse to learn more about. The girls … okay, Daum herself is right in the middle in her red qìpào with her hands pressed together in a South or Southeast Asian-looking greeting, but she’s randomly sticking her hips so far out to her right that I wonder if Rob Liefeld posed this photo. I think her posture is meant to evoke Asian hyper-feminine stereotypes. The other five girls are following suit but a couple of them seem confused about how Keziah got her body even to do that, so they’re just standing there with their hands pressed together as if they’re praying.
That’s not respectful and appreciative. That’s hyper-sexualized, Orientalist exotification.
Who feels hurt, and why?
The most important takeaway for these situations is to listen to people who feel hurt for reasons having to do with their own identity. They aren’t always the loudest voices in the conversation; in fact, many of us have been trained to stay quiet to avoid censure. But the experience of individuals who feel distressed and dysphoric when they see a certain expression is invaluable to you in analyzing the harm that something does.
Hurt feelings matter. Not all hurt feelings are created equal. Not all hurt feelings are logical. But people’s emotions are fundamentally valid. The choices we make based on those emotions may or may not be. But it’s okay to feel most of the ways we feel.
In situations where cultural appropriation or offense are at stake, even if I end up disagreeing with someone, it’s always important to me to take actions which show compassion to the people who have the strongest feelings right now, especially in my immediate space, even if I end up disagreeing with them.
We actually do this naturally, I think, but when controversial issues come into play, we’re conditioned to enter into this debate mindspace where we stop. If I were at a party at your place, and a song were playing that I didn’t like, and I told you as much—not telling you what the reason was, maybe I thought it was overplayed, maybe I just thought it was annoying—you’d probably skip to the next track without a thought. If instead I told you that I didn’t like the song because I thought it was offensive, and you strongly disagreed, then you might be less likely to skip to the next track. I might have to beat you in a tiny debate first. I dunno.
This is how I felt about the controversy over “Walk on the Wild Side.” In 2017, a student group at the University of Guelph in Ontario publicly apologized for playing the Lou Reed song at an event after someone complained to them that they found it transphobic. That apology sparked a broader controversy, with source after source describing Reed’s queerness and support for queer and trans causes.
I love the Velvet Underground. Lou Reed was important to me. We were actually very briefly in a tàijí boxing class together; we didn’t interact much but he seemed weird and cool, and gave me some good martial arts advice. I think of the song as a product of its time and an explicitly pro-trans anthem, but I recognize that some of the language sounds dated. I understand how the language therein can fit into a pattern of things that, even if you understand their historical context, maybe you’re just too worn down to hear at a party right now. And even if I didn’t understand that much, it costs me nothing to skip to the next song now, and have the debate later, or never, whichever.
When I listen to you, I learn something which gives me more context and leaves me better equipped to discuss this subject next time around. I’m laying in an investment for the next conversation. That’s what this line of reasoning is all about.
Let’s Get Complicated
I’m happy to talk to you about white people in prom dresses and dreadlocks, or Native American sports team names, or Scarlett Johansson if that’s what you wanna talk about; but all that stuff is kinda 101-level, you know? Where I hope this analytical strategy takes us is the complicated places. Where expressions are simultaneously racist and anti-racist. Where different subaltern groups borrow from each other along intersectional gradients of power that leave each group empowered over the other in a different way. Where there’s contradiction, harm and help given and taken simultaneously, or long histories of borrowed expressions becoming the adopter’s cultural signifiers.
The most complex, challenging questions of cultural appropriation concern marginalized groups exchanging culture with one another. If we don’t use the strategies in this article, we can get tangled up in unanswerable questions of whether subaltern group A or subaltern group B has more power. The reality tends to be that different marginalized groups each have different forms of privilege over one another, which intersectionality then further complicates. You could have ten forms of privilege that I don’t, but if I appropriate from you along the one axis of privilege where I exceed you, I still cause harm that cements systemic oppression. Nevertheless, the dynamic between us as differently marginalized people differs from the power dynamic when a rich cisgender straight white Christian man appropriates from either of us. Again, I’m not talking about judgments, lines, ownership, better or worse. I’m breaking the relationship and the exchange down into component parts, focusing on power, harm, and consequences.
Want some complicated examples?
Did you know that many modern yoga postures originate in northern European gymnastic training, brought to India and spread by colonizers before Indian nation-builders reclaimed them?
What makes Brazilian jiu-jitsu Brazilian? Did you know it’s mostly based on jūdō, not jūjutsu? Also, why is it spelled like that?
Remember when Bruno Mars won six Grammy Awards and then suddenly everyone was talking about all the races he is? Weren’t Puerto Rican people integral to the creation of hip hop? Did you know Bruno wasn’t Black? Did you know Richard “Crazy Legs” Colón was Puerto Rican?
Spoilers for Iron Man 3: The villain called the Mandarin turns out not to be a real Asian supervillain, but instead an Anglo-Asian actor hired to play the public part of the Mandarin in order to cover up the actions of the real villain, a white Englishman. This twist highlights the way rich, powerful white capitalists shift blame from themselves onto PoC terrorists who are their own creations. This exact same twist means the movie’s only Asian character is a washed-up drug addict who’s a white guy’s pawn.
Why does the Nation of Islam love Japanese martial arts so much?
What’s going on with Awkwafina? With Lilly Singh? Is Raja Kumari different?
Why are Dragon Ball and Pokémon so weird about Black people? Is Watanabe Shin’ichirō different?
Will we ever get to talk about the Wu-Tang Clan?!
I hope you find these topics challenging and interesting. I hope they let you practice the methods we’ve discussed here. But most of all, I hope you discuss them somewhere other than the comments, OK? Take them home to your own social media. Show them to your friends. It’ll be great. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
The Antenna
Because you’ve read so far, I’ll share with you a secret. I sometimes describe cultural appropriation as an antenna. This is what I mean.
Suppose that somewhere far away from me, maybe in Sweden, a white person has dreadlocks. Suppose they come up in conversation, and I’m like, hey, what do y’all think about that? It’s not that I’m so worried about those dreadlocks and how they’ll affect me and my friends. The dreadlocks are in Sweden. I’ll get by. But I’m paying close attention to this conversation because experience has taught me that if someone leaps in to defend those white Swedish dreadlocks adamantly, that someone probably harbors some other opinions about race and identity which are more directly harmful to me and mine. The cultural appropriation discussion is the antenna that tells me whether something more dire might be out there. I wouldn’t be surprised if individuals whose views are the opposite of my own use the same topics for the opposite ends.
Gauging reactions to stealth aggressions and microaggressions is a crucial survival tool for us. These lower-stakes antennae feed us information about this social space’s threats without putting ourselves at great risk. Sometimes, when people of color make facetious comments or jokes about race, we’re consciously or unconsciously doing the same: we get crucial information from who takes the comment too seriously, who doesn’t get it, who gets it and laughs, and who gets it and laughs too much.
Take It From Me
I hope the material above helps you get more out of cultural appropriation conversations than you did before. If you want to win those discussions and convince others your viewpoint is right … I dunno, you might or might not have found what you wanted here. It probably won’t hurt. But if you want to learn from those discussions—about who engages in them and why, about what themes cultural appropriation has in common with other questions of power and identity—then I think this article will help.
I especially hope the analytic approach to cultural appropriation facilitates your conversations with people you felt like you couldn’t talk to about cultural appropriation, because their judgment differs from yours or because those conversations got uncomfortable. Next time you get together with them, next time the issue comes up, slow down and break the topic into its component parts. Don’t draw preconceived lines. Don’t pass sentences. Focus on the expression on the table and its own distinct character.
Who has the power? Who’s vulnerable to harm?
Where are the patterns? What’s the context?
How does it make you feel?
I think we can break the cycle this time. Let me know how it goes.
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