Episode 68 - Cultural Appropriation

Our guests:
Panthea is a television, film, and theatre actor, and founder and Managing Artistic Director of Medusa Theatre Society, and Saliema and Biraima are members of the Daily Dose of Blackness podcast and media group designed to centre and celebrate Black youth experiences and struggles.

Useful Definitions:

Cultural Appropriation

The adoption, usually without acknowledgment, of cultural identity markers from subcultures or minority communities into mainstream culture by people with a relatively privileged status. Dictionary.com

Cultural Appreciation

                Respectively learning about and engaging with another culture, often with express permission. Unlike Cultural Appropriation, which is often about exploitation for profit or personal gain, Cultural Appreciation is respectful with a focus on learning and reciprocity. My definition

Eg of difference: It’s often about intent and understanding. Wearing a sari for Halloween, a holiday about humour and horror, neither of which is a respectful way to represent another culture. Vs wearing one as a guest at an Indian wedding where that is the dress code.

Acculturation

                Cultural modification of an individual group, or people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture. Merging of cultures as a result of prolonged contact. Merriam-Webster

Eg. Moving to a new country and dressing like the locals in order to fit in.

Assimilation

                The process of adopting the language and culture of a dominant social group or nation, or the state of being socially integrated into the culture of the dominant group in a society. Dictionary.com

Eg. Residential schools.

Cultural Humility

The act of hearing and appreciating the truth of people who are from different cultures or racial backgrounds. It requires making a conscious effort to learn about the values and norms upon which cultural practices you don't understand are based. When something isn't understood it can be seen as meaningless at best, offensive at worst. From a workshop but I’ve done so many in the past month I can’t remember which one.

1.       We start by reading 2 abbreviated but still long pages from the book “White Negroes: When Cornrows were in Vogue and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation” by Lauren Michele Jackson. I was going to shorten it by paraphrasing, but every word is so good I would rather share it.

“Appropriation is everywhere, and is also inevitable. Appropriation, for better and worse, cannot stop. So long as peoples interact with other peoples, by choice or by force, cultures will intersect and mingle and graft onto each other. We call hip-hop a black thing and it is, indeed, a black thing, that also emerged in neighborhoods where black and brown people homegrown and from the South, from the islands, melded together to produce the music of their experiences in shared poverty and community. Early rap was itself an appropriation of another generation’s sound – funk, soul, disco – repurposed for something different and new. Rap also revolutionized the lively form of appropriation known as sampling, a means of incorporating the past, the recent past, and other genres to make timeless music. …The idea that any artistic or cultural practice is closed off to outsiders at any point in time is ridiculous, especially in the age of the internet.
Most everyday acts of appropriation, done unconsciously, escape our notice: the word that works itself into your speech because your best friend sprinkles every other phrase with it and where they got it from they don’t even know; a new style you have grown into without thought, without a specific icon in mind, by just going with the flow of fashion; …the yoga pose you sink into after a workout; the way you shimmy when your favorite song comes on.
…if appropriation is everywhere and everyone appropriates all the time, why does any of this matter?
The answer, in a word: power.
…When the oppressed appropriate from the powerful, it can be very special indeed.
And yet.
When the powerful appropriate from the oppressed, society’s imbalances are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged.
…In the history of problematic appropriation in America, we could start with the land and crops and cuisine commandeered from Native peoples along with the mass expropriation of the labor of the enslaved. The tradition lives on. The things black people make with their hands and minds, for pay and for the hell of it, are exploited by companies and individuals who offer next to nothing in return. White people are not penalized for flaunting black culture – they are rewarded for doing so, financially, artistically, socially, and intellectually. For a white person, seeing, citing, and compensating black people, however, has no such reward and may actually prove risky.
…According to a 2018 report by the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, ‘Black households hold less than 7 cents on the dollar compared to white households’
…The research also found
.Black households with a college-educated breadwinner hold less wealth than white families whose breadwinners do not have a high school diploma.
.White households with unemployed breadwinners have a higher net worth than black households whose breadwinners work full-time.
.Controlled for income, black families save at a higher rate than their white counterparts and spend less than whites.”

2.       In “Chapter 1: The Pop Star”, Jackson discusses the use of Black music and dance in the teen pop star aiming to be seen as more mature by the music industry. She specifically calls out Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, and Miley Cyrus who all used Black music and dance to distance themselves from the Disney pop machine. This works because Black girls and young women are so often read as older and more mature than their white counterparts.

3.       In “Chapter 2: The Cover Girl”, Jackson writes extensively on how fashion is strongly influenced by black culture but almost never attributed to it.
“An August 2017 article in British GQ credited Harry Styles with bringing thick, ostentations men’s rings into fashion, like men of color on the street haven’t decorated their hands that way for decades.”
She dissects the famous monologue from Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly takes Anne Hathaway’s character down a peg by pointing out she exists in the world of fashion, whether she likes it or not, and all the choices come from the top. What the movie leaves out is all the theft those at the top do to those at the bottom to come up with those fashions in the first place.

4.       In “Chapter 5: The Meme” Jackson writes about digital blackface, the practice where racists and misogynists use generic photos to present as who they are not, often women of colour, to create disagreement among activists. The goal is to make causes look flimsy or extreme to “allies” on the border of movements who are inclined to believe hoaxes they want to be true. If a cause is written off as ridiculous, they don’t have to do the hard work of supporting it or advocating for change.

5.       In “Chapter 7: The Chef” Jackson discusses cultural appropriation in the food industry, which is summed up beautifully in this quote:
“At McSweeney’s, the novelist Rajeev Balasubramanyam offers a numbered to do list for appropriation “nonbelievers”:
1. Your new friends Bob and Rita come to lunch and you serve them idlis, like your grandmother used to make.
2. They love your South Indian cooking and ask for the recipe.
3. You never hear from Bob and Rita again.
4. You read in the Style section of the Guardian about Rita and Bob’s new Idli bar in Covent Garden… called Idli.
5. You visit Idli. The food tastes nothing like your grandmother’s.
6. Your grandmother dies.
7. Rita and Bob’s children inherit the Idli chain, and open several franchise in America.
8. Your children find work as short order chefs… at Idli.
9. Your children visit you in a nursing ghome and cook you idlis, which taste nothing like the ones you remember from your youth.
10. You die.

In the podcast episode “MSG, Korean Food, and Cultural Appropriation” from The Dave Chang show, the hosts discuss this issue and a really interesting point they make is that so many folks from families who have immigrated are ostracized for the food they prepare, which especially affects kids attending school. It’s hard enough to fit in without some kid next to you making fun of your kimchi. Shame is being tied to a part of culture that should be celebrated; delicious food. Imagine the sting when White people start to print these recipes in cookbooks, present them on cooking shows, or open restaurants specializing in the cuisine others have mocked, and they’re celebrated for it.
The issue isn’t that White folks shouldn’t be allowed to cook food from other cultures necessarily, but that the wealth gap mentioned earlier in this episode, and institutional racism mean that those same opportunities of opening a restaurant or hosting a cooking show or creating a bestselling cookbook aren’t available to folks who are probably better at representing their own cultures.
Jackson explores the history of this further in “Chapter 8: The Entrepreneur”, where she paints a picture of modern America built on actively stopping Black communities from accumulating wealth, often violently, but also bureaucratically through things like redlining.
While this book focuses on the Black experience, there are examples enough of this happening to Asian and Indigenous communities as well, and is by no means an American exclusive historical experience.
And all of this was happening during the only period of time in our system of capitalism when you could actually grow wealth in your family and community. Now everyone who didn’t get rich before the dot.com boom or isn’t born into wealth is hooped.

Further pod episodes on this topic:
Crazy Biatch Asians
Get Into It
Zora’s Daughters
Diverse Minds
First Name Basis