Cultural appropriation is the practice of one culture adopting the traditions of another culture. In most instances, cultural appropriation occurs when a dominant group takes elements of a minority’s culture. The dominant group often has little to no understanding of the minority’s history, experiences, and traditions. Due to these facts, socially aware people tend to frown upon this phenomenon.
Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law, defined cultural appropriation as follows: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It's most likely to be harmful when the source community is a minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects.” In the United States, cultural appropriation almost always involves members of the dominant culture, which is white, “borrowing” from the cultures of minority groups. African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and indigenous peoples generally tend to be groups targeted for cultural appropriation. Black music and dance, Native American fashions, decorations and cultural symbols, and Asian martial arts and dress have all fallen prey to cultural appropriation. The author of
There are many examples of cultural appropriation throughout history. In the 1950’s for example, white musicians borrowed the musical style of their black counterparts. Because African Americans weren’t widely accepted in U.S. society at that time, record executives chose to have white recording artists replicate the sound of black musicians. This exemplifies the negative effects of cultural appropriation, as white executives never gave blacks the credit for originating these musical stylings. The result of this can be seen today, as musical forms such as rock-n-roll are largely associated with whites in spite of the fact that black musicians were pioneers of the art form. This move also had financial consequences, as many of the black musicians who helped pave the way for rock-n-roll’s success never saw a dime for their contributions to the music form. Cultural appropriation in America is still prominent, there are many examples of it in society today.
Musicians such as Madonna, Katy Perry, Miley Cyrus, and Iggy Azalea have all been accused of cultural appropriation. Madonna, for instance, popularized the form of personal expression known as voguing, which began in black and Latino sects of the gay community. Madonna has also used Latin America as a backdrop in a music video and appeared in attire with roots in Asia, as has Gwen Stefani who faced criticism for her fixation on Harajuku culture from Japan.
When singer Katy Perry performed as a geisha at the American Music Awards in November 2013, she described it as homage to Asian culture. Asian Americans disagreed with this assessment, declaring her performance “yellowface.” The Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Yang said that her performance did not celebrate Asian culture but misrepresented it entirely. He found it particularly problematic that Perry dressed as a geisha to perform the song “Unconditonally” about a woman who pledges to love her man no matter what. “The thing is, while a bucket of toner can strip the geisha makeup off of Perry’s face, nothing can remove the demeaning and harmful iconography of the lotus blossom from the West’s perception of Asian women — a stereotype that presents them as servile, passive,” Yang wrote, “and as Perry would have it, ‘unconditional’ worshippers of their men, willing to pay any price and weather any kind of abuse in order to keep him happy.”
In 2013, Miley Cyrus became the pop star most associated with cultural appropriation. During recorded and live performances, the former child star began to “twerk”, a dance style with roots in African-American culture. Writer Hadley Freeman of The Guardian particularly took issue with Cyrus’ “twerking” at the MTV Video Music Awards in August 2013. “On stage as well as in her video she used the tedious trope of having black women as her backing singers, there only to be fondled by her and to admire her wiggling derriere,” Freeman pointed out. “Cyrus is explicitly imitating crunk music videos and the sort of hip-hop she finds so edgy – she has said, bless her, that she feels she is Lil' Kim inside and she loves ‘hood music’ – and the effect was not of a homage but of a minstrel show, with a young wealthy woman from the South doing a garish imitation of black music and reducing black dancers to background fodder and black women to exaggerated sex objects.”
At the 2014 hip-hop awards Iggy Azalea, a white “hip-hop” artist from Australia, won “hip-hop album of the year” over many black artists, including Kendrick Lamar and Drake. This is where cultural appropriation gets tricky, because you cannot say that she shouldn’t be awarded because she is white, but hip-hop originated in the black community and she is taking the art form as her own and is being awarded for something that she did not create. She is imitating black artists, she is echoing the sounds of another culture but she is the one being given the credit. To simplify it even further, it can be compared to if you stood in the mirror, and your reflection won People’s magazine Sexiest Man/Woman Alive 2015 award. The copy is being rewarded for the original’s work. Instances like these are where cultural appropriation becomes a real problem because it says to young black kids, or kids of any minority, that they cannot even aspire to be a pioneer in a field that they’re ancestors created.
Cultural appropriation remains a concern for a variety of reasons. For one, this sort of “borrowing” is exploitative because it robs minority groups of the credit they deserve. Art forms, music forms, etc., that originated with minority groups come to be associated with members of the dominant group. As a result the dominant group is deemed innovative and edgy, while the disadvantaged groups they “borrow” from continue to face negative stereotypes that imply they’re lacking in intelligence, creativity and more. In addition, when members of a dominant group appropriate the cultures of others, they often reinforce stereotypes about minority groups.
Nico Lang, a guest blogger for the Los Angeles Times, pointed out in a post that cultural appropriation highlights the power imbalance that remains between those in power and those who’ve been historically marginalized. As such, a member of a dominant group can assume the traditional dress of a minority group for a Halloween party, a music performance and so on. Yet, they remain blissfully unaware of the roots of such dress and sound, and the challenges those who originated it have faced in Western culture. The victims of cultural appropriation are the members of the minorities, and normally, they have been oppressed. They are the second class citizens of this country and they have nothing else but their music, and dance, and art. Cultural appropriation perpetuates a system of white-supremacy where even the things that whites did not originate, they can steal and be recognized as the creators.