Created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during it’s flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.

The reason that so many communities of color have found holding on to our cultural heritage so difficult is because of colonization and forced assimilation, not because we didn’t share it with white people.

The reason you think that in order for survival we need to share our culture with you is based on the idea that once you have pushed us to extinction, you’ll still have our culture to study. But allow me to propose the radical idea that if the people die, so should our culture. We are the soul of everything sacred within our communities. If you kill us, then saving bastardized versions of our cultures means nothing.

Additionally, white people seem to be confused about what cultural sharing actually looks like. Cultural sharing is when you are invited into a cultural space to share in our joy and then leave you those traditions when you leave that space.

An example of Cultural sharing is Beyoncé’s baechella performance. You were invited to share in the awe and majesty of historically black tradtions like stepping and strolling and dancing. You can buy a T-shirt to commemorate the occasion, but you are not invited to start trying to stroll and step yourself. These are deeply significant aspects of black collegiate life born of resiliency to systematic persecution and racism. You trying to approximate them would be disrespectful.

The same goes for Native American or Asian traditional celebrations. Go, eat, dance, laugh, buy something, then go home and put that something on your shelf or wall and leave the culture alone.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

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