Published in 2019 by Enslow Publishing, LLC.
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Copyright © 2019 by Enslow Publishing, LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Davis, Jonita, author.
Title: Questioning cultural appropriation / Jonita Davis.
Description: New York : Enslow Publishing, [2019] | Series: Racial literacy |
Audience: Grade 7-12. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020364| ISBN 9781978504684 (Library bound) | ISBN 9781978505636 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Imitation. | Adaptability (Psychology) | Cultural property.
Classification: LCC BF357 .D38 2018 | DDC 155.2/4-dc23 LC record available at https://Lccn.Loc.gov/2018020364
Printed in the United States of America
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1 Identifying Cultural Appropriation
2 Appropriating Culture in Food
3 Cultural Appropriation in Fashion Clothing and Accessories
4 Appropriating Religious/ Spiritual Practices
5 A Duty to Question Appropriation
6 Challenging Cultural Appropriation
In May 2017, two white women-Liz Connelly and Kali Wilgus-opened a burrito cart, Kook’s Burritos, in Portland, Oregon.1 The cart was shut down days later after claims of cultural appropriation. Connelly and Wilgus specialized in tortillas made using the traditional recipe and process of the women of a small village of Puerto Nuevo, Mexico. Connelly told reporters the villagers taught them how to make the tortillas and that they gave the information freely. Despite the protests of their cart, the women didn’t think their act was cultural appropriation. It was.
The color run has become a very popular fund-raiser. During the event, runners race while wearing white or light-colored clothing. People line up and throw colorful powders at the racers. The color run was stolen from another culture: Hindus in India celebrate a centuries-old religious holiday called Holi, a celebration of the coming spring.2 People dance while throwing colorful powders in the air. There are also special foods, drinks, prayers, and more dancing.Holi was stripped down to just color powder and appropriated by American nonprofits and schools.
A woman from a rural Mexican town prepares corn tortillas made by hand at the market.
Color run fund-raising events are watered down versions of the vibrant Holi festival celebrated in India. This picture shows the intensity of not only the color powders but also the participation by all involved.
One well-known case of cultural appropriation happened in 2016, when Kim Kardashian rocked “boxer braids” as her new hairstyle.3 She took credit for the braids in many pictures and posts before people started calling her out on cultural appropriation. Turns out, her “new” hairstyle has been worn by several cultures and for centuries. For example, people descended from African tribes have used braiding for sending messages, showing their wealth, and more. Kardashian’s case is more obvious, but just as harmful as the color run and the burrito cart.
All three cases are cultural appropriation, despite the different ways it happened. The act of cultural appropriation requires the taking of something that is unique to a group of people. A more dominant culture often does this. Some call it outright stealing. In cases like the Portland burrito cart, the information was not stolen but shared. The problem is that Connelly and Wilgus took the shared cultural information and used it for their own profit. The recipes and lessons were never theirs to make money from.
Taking from another group of people is only one part of cultural appropriation. This doesn’t happen with just events, hair, and recipes. As you see with the Holi/color run appropriation, cultural elements can be rituals as well. These can be artifacts, technology, and even processes that are unique to a certain group of people. Cultural appropriation is taking a cultural element from a people and using it out of context or without context at all.4 It’s also something we all have a responsibility to prevent.
This is a cornrow braid style that is typical among black girls, teens, and women. However, the styles are deemed “fashionable” when white celebrities appropriate the cornrow style as a new trend.
American history is full of cases where cultural appropriation was left unchecked and caused harm. It doesn’t matter if the cultural item was taken for personal gain, profit, or fame. The outcome is ultimately the same-to harm the minority culture, the one whose things are stolen. The parts of an appropriated culture can get picked off, pulled apart, absorbed, and assimilated until the original culture becomes unrecognizable. Sometimes all that is left is a ghost of the culture in a shell created by the people who took it. In many cases, it looks nothing like the original at all.
The one thing that people get hung up on is the “taking” part of cuLturaL appropriation by the dominant culture. That “taking” often ends up damaging the original culture in some way. Taking something from another culture can happen a few different ways. Before you begin going out and questioning cultural appropriation, you must understand all these various pieces.
Bruno Mars has come under fire because of his hit songs that often borrow Black hip-hop, jazz, and blues sounds. Writer Seren Sensei led the charge, claiming that Mars’s “racial ambiguity” allowed him to steal from Black culture and profit from it.1 She went on to say that because he wasn’t Black, Mars should not be able to use the music of Black culture as he constructed his songs.
Mars is not racially ambiguous: he is Filipino, Jewish, and Puerto Rican.
Sensei is so concerned about Mars taking from Black culture, she failed to see that the other elements of cultural appropriation are not satisfied. Although Mars is not Black, he also does not come from the white majority, which dominates under American or Western cultural terms. In fact, Mars comes from two cultures that have been heavily assaulted by dominant white American culture. Yes, he is using Black music traditions and combining them with his own to make new sounds. However, because he is not a part of the dominating culture, technically he is not appropriating. More important is the fact that most white people see Mars as darker skinned and “probably” Black anyway. Thus, in a way he is thrown into the same category as Blackness because of his mixed heritage. This is not damaging to Black culture at all.
Bruno Mars is an artist whose live shows and recorded music sample from African, Caribbean, hip-hop, and R&B, which has caused many Black critics to accuse him of appropriating. For a few reasons, he is not.
One of the reasons we must question cultural appropriation is because that dominant culture will take from others, change it, and use it in a way that can damage the original culture and replace it with a whitewashed version. Mars does make changes to the sound, but he brings more fans to it and shows cultural appreciation with songs that hail back to older versions of the sound from the 1980s and 1990s. Sure, he profits from it, but he does not damage hip-hop only to replace the original with a whitewashed copy.
The spring of 2017 saw several stories involving Black girls who were being punished for wearing natural hair or braids to school. In Boston, 15-year-old twins Deanna and Mya Cook were suspended for refusing to remove their box braid hairstyle.2 Meanwhile, the Kardashian sisters grace the pages of fashion magazines and capture headlines in “boxer braids.” Rachel Dolezal is a white woman who wears faux “natural” hair to pretend she is Black.3 Both Kardashian and Dolezal soak up public attention, wearing styles that Black girls and women are chastised and punished for.
This is another very complex side of cultural appropriation. Black girls are expected to assimilate their hair-to damage their hair with chemicals and heat to straighten their natural curls. The result is a whitewashed look that, if forced to prevail, will end up wiping out braid and natural styles-except for Kardashian’s braids and Dolezal’s “curls.” Punishment for these hairstyles is also a common problem with cultural appropriation as well: white teens copying the Kardashian look are trendy and fashionable, but on black girls like the Cook twins, it’s a punishable offense. This double standard is another way that cultural appropriation damages. Punishing the origin culture forces them to stop or reduce their use of the culture, and theirs is soon replaced by appropriated version.
The Cook sisters, Mya (lefty and Deanna (righty, were disciplined for sporting a style that the Kardashians are praised for.
Another issue to consider when questioning cultural appropriation is the damage that can be done to the culture because of the “taking.” Set aside Bruno Mars for a second and let’s go back to the burrito cart story. The Mexican women who gave the two white women information about their cultural practices was a small group with no money. Not many knew about their tortilla recipe outside of that area in Mexico. The two Portland women had the potential to make the tortilla recipe known throughout the western seaboard if their burrito cart was a hit. They had access to capital (or money) and customers to make this happen. They could have eventually overlapped the Mexican women’s area, making “Kook’s Burritos” so well known that people even in Mexico wouldn’t realize the original recipe came from there.
Some of you may say this is a stretch and a lot of elements must come together to make this happen. Well, let’s examine the restaurant chain KFC and its “new” Nashville Hot Chicken.4 Nashville Hot Chicken was taken from an original recipe that has been sold for decades by Black cooks-the Prince family of Nashville in their family restaurant.
This kind of damage posed by cultural appropriation can be called erasure, since it illustrates the power that cultural appropriation has to overtake another culture’s hold on its own proprietary elements. This erases the original culture’s link to the element. In the KFC Nashville Hot Chicken case, the Prince family and Black community in Nashville are no longer connected to the dish. Despite the use of the location in the name of the dish, there is no way for KFC customers to >know where the chicken recipe truly comes from. KFC also changed the recipe so that its Nashville Hot Chicken does not taste like the original. All anyone will know is the KFC version. This is erasure.
The national appetite for Nashville Hot Chicken is fueled by an American fast food chain’s cultural appropriation of a Nashville family’s signature dish sold at their locally run diners.
As the dominant culture takes things, it often does not preserve the origins. Look at the Holi/color run example. Little mention is ever made of Holi on color run fund-raiser sites. The only way you would learn about Holi is if you have a connection to, or knew something of, India and its culture. To millions of people in the United States, color runs were created within the last decade and have no religious connection. See how dominant American culture, because it has so huge an influence, can erase a culture and its practices?
Now imagine what happens when a people are forced or feel the need to assimilate into American culture, or leave their culture behind to take on American habits and traditions. Cultural assimilation is when a dominant culture tries to absorb a minority culture.5 It often means giving up language, foods, clothing, religion, accessories, and more to survive as well as fit in America-at least on the surface. Slowly, cultural traditions and practices from elsewhere are folded into ours or are erased as the people become more “American.” Sure, you could go online and find the origins of the element, like Nashville Hot Chicken, but doing so does not change the minds of the millions buying that chicken from KFC instead of the Prince family. When the Prince family’s restaurant shuts down from loss of business to KFC, their original chicken will be gone as well, erased and replaced by the KFC version.
