Let’s Take On Cultural Misappropriation
Cultural misappropriation is a hot topic despite there being no clear agreement on what it means. Basically, it seems to mean any time a dominant culture (or a member of such a culture) uses clothing, language or memes that “belong to” a non-dominant culture. For example, the actress/rapper Awkwafina (who is of Chinese descent) has been criticized for rapping in the style of most (i.e., African-American) rappers.
On the one hand I have a dog in this fight — my culture has been so completely appropriated that most people who eat bagels, call someone a “schmuck” or love pastrami don’t even recognize that these were originally ethnic signatures. Still, even here it goes over the top sometimes — for example a few years ago Jean-Paul Gaultier and other designers tried out fashions modeled on Hasidic men’s dress.
In the United States, one particularly egregious example of cultural misappropriation is the use of Indigenous style, jewelry, dress, and ritual items in a variety of settings, again to the point where we are often unaware of the material’s origins.
Sometimes people who wish to defend these actions will argue that they do what they do to “honor” the groups being plagiarized. This argument seems to me to be pretty parallel to the idea that men who catcall women are paying tribute to their beauty. Pretty thin.
Arguably, there is no reason to appropriate other groups’ cultures. Centuries ago standards of dress and grooming were rigid — if, say, an Englishman went to Turkey and dressed in a fez and other accoutrements of Turkish dress he would be subject to abuse and possibly even arrest. In the US, a Native American who attempted by dress to pass for a Caucasian could also expect to be treated badly. And herein lies the core of the issue: An Englishman in England could wear Turkish dress without any negative consequence — indeed, for a while during Victorian times it was fashionable for upper-class Englishmen to have their portraits painted in exactly that outfit! And a “white” American could dress as an Indian or even, in the case of minstrel shows, wear blackface, again with no repercussions.
That is because until very recently cultural (mis)appropriation was an unchallenged right (read “privilege” of the dominant class. When thousands of Chinese were brought over to work on the railroads, “Chinese” food (or an Americanized version of it) entered our gastronomic landscape while the Chinese themselves were discriminated against at every turn. Similar things occurred for Irish and Italian immigrants and even to the much-reviled Jews, as noted above. Apparently whatever the flaws that made them inferior to “whites,” the people of color and immigrants had fashions, music, dances, and food that whites craved.
Michael Kimmel said that “privilege is invisible to those who have it,” meaning that those who, by accident of birth, are accorded advantages don’t see those advantages, but have them and take advantage of them nevertheless. I’m not talking here about “earned” privilege — if a job requires an M.B.A., and I have one, I can expect the employer will prefer me over someone who does not hold the degree. However, instances abound of people getting preferential treatment over others based on privilege that they have not earned but that is assigned to them by accidents of birth — color, nationality, religion, height, attractiveness — the list goes on. It is from this that the “right” to hijack others’ culture stems, most flagrantly exemplified by Kipling, who even predicted the resentment of targeted groups, laying the groundwork for blaming the victim:
Take up the White Man’s burden —
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard
From The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” first published in The Times (London) on 4 February 1899, and in The New York Sun on 5 February 1899.
So what should we do? Stop eating Bagels, refuse to listen to rap by non-African American artists, wear only Brooks Brothers clothes? No, I think not. But we can recognize and genuinely honor the fact that we have that food, that music, those clothes because, initially at least, they were stolen from the people who created them and then given by their descendants. We should distinguish between religious object (the tallit of Hasidim, the medicine and ceremonies of the Indigenous people of North America, the observance of Dia de los Muertos by Latinx people to name a few) and those things like foods and décor that do not have spiritual or religious ties. We should join Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinx-Americans in demanding that roles in movies and plays that depict these groups be played by people who identify as those groups and not by “whites” in makeup.
Sure — cultural misappropriation is not violence on a par with rape, lynching, and murder, but it is violence nonetheless — it’s time we recognized that racial, cultural, and gender violence takes many forms and hits many targets — emotional targets, psychic targets, and spiritual targets — and respect our differences as well as our similarities.
