Cultural Appropriation

What is it and why is it causing such a stir?

Mar 17, 2023

Wikipedia notes these caveats before even defining the term, yet this definition is arguably as good as it gets. At least it’s a crowdsourced definition that could have multiple biases rather than one:

Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be especially controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures….When cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture, and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context—sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture. (para. 1)

A good friend invited me to a screening she organized for “a film exploring the politics of African dance.” Afternoon on a weekday you might think three people would show up, so I went mostly to support my friend. There were 15 or more in attendance. Here’s the 26-minute film.

One of the dance teachers featured briefly is a White woman, Lynn Weaver, who teaches African dance. In the film she enthusiastically showed photos of her trip to Africa to learn the dance form more. She was gracious, appreciative, and stated she had permission from her instructor to teach in this tradition. This permission is important for continuing a lineage of instruction, to keep it true to form. As a side note, this dance teacher had been a director for the organization hosting the film screening and presentation. It is a Canadian government-funded office that works to help immigrants with physical, cultural, and emotional challenges of transitioning to a new location. Her group has brought the dance to African-heritage adopted children to introduce the art to them. If anyone can be seen as a worthy recipient of permission to teach the dance, it would be someone like her.

The dancer, film maker, and presenter Simone said of Lynn, “She said everything right…so welcoming and generous....Why doesn't it feel right?” Simone describes that she went to a trusted teacher, Devi, to try to understand her feelings. They discussed racism being a visceral experience because of “colonizing…taking bodies…stripping bodies of culture…and dance is culture.” A woman in the audience—an elderly Canadian who I would have expected to be on the overly polite side—said, “I feel offended. It’s as if you’re saying that the cultural heritage of the world is not freely available for everyone to enjoy.” Simone heard all the comments of the live audience, and validated the perspective of each speaker, without arguing, as if to say, “we all have our perspectives, and it’s helpful for us all to hear them all.”

Simone made an appeal for the group to support the arts by encouraging the government to fund dance studios. I said, “I have friends on two local farms. All of them are dancers of tango, one of kizomba (largely of African origin). They love dance, but that's a hard ask for them to support taxes to fund a city dance studio. They struggle just to keep their farms going, to feed people.” We semi-rural folk find places to dance. We dance in a living room, a large room above the barn, or another rural friend clears out her ceramics studio. For special occasions there’s a surprisingly elegant room for affordable rent at a community center.

As I see it, here are the main points central to the question of “why doesn’t it feel right?”:

Permission and respect for the traditions are necessary but not sufficient.
It’s angering when people with access to privilege can enjoy and teach African dance, while people of African heritage don’t have a studio space to do the same.
It’s angering when White people are making money off your culture’s heritage or art forms, and you don’t see that you have a way to make money off it.

About the third point: The financial compensation wasn’t mentioned by Simone, and it may or may not have been implied. This point came from a similar discussion by Erica Woodland who states, “White people steal our practices and then sell them back to us…cooptition” (Movement Memos, 2023, 40:50). You got the grit, but they get the glory. Your people created it and preserved it, an expression of your joy, your creativity, your overcoming of oppression, and someone else makes money off it. Simone mentioned something related: Whites can perform the dance, but then they can go back to privileged lives. That sounds understandably angering. Others take part in the expressed emotion and meanings derived from struggle, but they haven’t shared the struggle. Are they sharing back with you?

About the second point: One line in the film was, “There’s a lot of Black people I know who don’t have access to African culture at all.” I don’t find that convincing. If they value it highly, they will find access. My friend of Jamaican blood who grew up in Toronto, she moved to LA for that access. We all make trade offs. If Simone or if I wanted that studio space more than we wanted anything else in the world, we could probably find a way to get it. At least in the cities of the Pacific Northwest, I doubt you can find many who are intent on denying Blacks that studio space, who wouldn’t accept the same rent from anyone. Further, she might be more likely to find a grant or subsidy supporting an ethnic minority and woman-initiated venture. That’s not to say everything’s fair. It isn’t. At the same time, as educated North Americans, Simone and I both have a whole lot more of mostly unearned privilege than most of the world’s people have. The originators of those dances shown perform barefoot on the earth.

About the first point: Simone wore cowboy boots. I guess we can all mix it up, as long as it’s with respect.

Does this play out in each of the quadrants? Does each quadrant feel resentful that someone else has more access to the benefit it created, or that someone else takes without permission, respect, and fair compensation?

What Each Quadrant Believes About Appropriation of Their Goods

That’s all, unless you’re using assistive technology.

You might be interested to listen to this podcast “Coleman Hughes on Colorblindness” on The Good Fight, about the book The End of Race Politics. He discusses why race is a poor proxy for setting public policy to assist the economically and culturally disadvantaged. He hosts a podcast of his own: Conversations with Coleman.

For Verbal Repeat of Quadrants Text

This section repeats the writing in the quadrants, for any who have difficulty reading in that format, and because as an image it won’t be verbally read by assistive technology. What’s the benefit of the quadrant format anyway? It’s a heuristic that can stick in the visual memory.

Blue Quadrant

Order-keepers. The right and the counterculture left unite in their frustration about taxes and rules. Yet it’s convenient to drive around knowing that traffic laws will be followed with a regularity that allows us not to be perpetually at risk. The potholes will eventually get filled in. Fire trucks, police, and ambulances will come when needed. Sorry you efficient job creators, but we can’t leave emergency services to the free market. Sometimes we need some slack; you can’t have every firefighter in action all the time. Plus, sometimes it’s less efficient to have competing services. The postal service does an efficient reliable job at a bargain basement price. Yet we love to bitch and moan about government.

Red Quadrant

Job creators. There’s some truth to it. This doesn’t mean we have to accept the failed theory of trickle down, but there are people good at organizing and leading teams. They thrive in a competitive environment, are not immobilized by risks, and are excited by a challenge that would overwhelm many others. Some work insane hours, take little or no leisure time, and they expect to get compensated better than others for that. They coordinate with powerful entities, know how to negotiate, and “take care of business.” We like the consumer comforts they provide, but we’re often fed up with free market capitalism that brings the goods to us. We want to have our cake and “eat the rich” too.

Yellow Quadrant

Physical riskers. This quadrant includes “move fast and break things” innovators who bring us the next grab bag of apps that delight and vex us. It also has soldiers, electricians up in precarious perches fixing power lines, truckers moving long lonely hours to transport food, mining and drilling in cold and heat with dangerous heavy machinery. Without their work, the rest of us would not remain at constant comfortable temperatures, with the safe cheap easy travel we take for granted. Most of us would become vegetarians, unwilling to butcher animals ourselves. Yet the citified often speak with derision about this type of “uncultured” working class.

Green Quadrant

Land protectors. On the topic of people making money off your culture’s heritage, Native Americans / First Nations should have the primary claim to grievance currently. White culture is still chopping down forest, over-fishing, making money off what they preserved purely, and they don’t have a way—in keeping with the traditions of sacred land and nomadic past—to be sustained by the land. Rumor has it they are patiently awaiting the day when their prophecies come to pass, when the Whites exhaust the earth’s resources and the exploitative culture collapses. Then they will help pick up the pieces and re-establish harmony, bring us all into the circle.

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