#perpetually outraged

By: Savannah Edwards

Published: Oct 5, 2022

Let’s get this out of the way: Culture doesn’t come from skin color. Culture is a way of life, it comes from your environment. Just because two people have the same skin color doesn’t mean they come from the same place. A black person in a low income neighborhood of a major city has very little in common with a black person who was born and raised in an upper-middle class suburb. My neighbor and I are both black but we have different cultures. I was born and raised in the Carolinas and he was born and raised here in New Orleans. We’re not the same people. We don’t share the same customs or traditions, and we speak two different versions of Southern American English. According to the New York Times, eating black-eyed-peas on New Years is a black American ritual, but I’ve never heard of that. I can’t remember the last time I ate black-eyed-peas on purpose.

Culture is not stagnant. Culture moves and changes and grows over time. Meanings and rituals change as people and time changes. Cultures blend with other cultures to create new ones. Italian-American culture is exactly what the name suggests, a blend of Italian and American cultures with its own foods and customs and Italian dialect. French Louisiana was owned by both the French and Spanish, but much of the Spanish influence is gone and what’s survived is very much French, along with influences from Italian, Irish, and Haitian immigrants and African slaves.

Culture never stays put, it’s as mobile as people, so I’m not sure why young people today seem to think they can “gate keep” that which is easily accessible to everyone. We live in a multicultural society that has a heavy influence on the world and social media acts as a delivery system. It’s no wonder parts of China and Korea have been heavily influenced by what black Americans are doing in the states: music, fashion, hair, etc. This includes language. The never ending argument on TikTok is the use of AAVE (African American Vernacular English) by white creators. AAVE, or Ebonics as we called it growing up, isn’t a language. There are no rules and there isn’t a proper or right way to speak it. It’s a dialect closely related to the southern dialect that is mostly used by southern black Americans in urban settings and black Canadians. I don’t use AAVE. Why? Because language comes from hearing, and no one in my immediate family who would have had an influence on my language development uses AAVE, so my vernacular is Carolina southern.

This Dr. Phil segment on cultural appropriation highlights the braids debate, another hot button social media issue. Is it cultural appropriation for white women to wear braids? Is it offensive to black people for white people to wear braids? Let me be very clear: Black American women didn’t invent box braids.

Box braids is one of many African Hair-braiding styles, keyword being: African. In certain places in Africa, hair weaving has cultural significance, but in the United States it does not. It’s just a hairstyle; it’s just fashion. It being a protective hairstyle doesn’t make it culturally significant for black Americans because braids in general, regardless of your skin color, is a protective hairstyle. African Hair Braiding didn’t become mainstream in the United States until the 90s, and it has been shared with women all over the world by African women. Russia has its own market for African Hair Braiding (search: afrokosiki orАфрокосы). Box braids went out of style in the early 2000s and you would get made fun of for getting anything thicker than micros. Now box braids are back in style and young black women are under the impression this hairstyle belongs to us. Would this be considered cultural appropriation.

Should white people get their hair braided? That’s between you and your hairdresser. If you go to Africa and want your hair braided, they won’t deny you service because you’re white. They will take your money just like anyone else except they’ll charge you less and give you better results. Simply getting your hair done isn’t cultural appropriation.

These claims of appropriation come from people who don’t understand how culture works or haven’t experienced or allowed themselves to experience a culture different than their own. There are three concepts people get confused: appropriation, appreciation, and acculturation.

Appropriation:

Simply put, cultural appropriation “takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way.” Drunk frat boys wearing sombreros on Cinco de Mayo or Black Americans wearing dashikis and claiming it as their own culture could be considered cultural appropriation, but a young woman wearing a Chinese dress she found at a thrift store to prom is not. Wearing a hairstyle because you like the way it looks on your is not appropriation.

Appreciation:

This is self-explanatory. Appreciating or participating in another culture isn’t a bad thing. If you go to markets in other countries some people might offer to dress you in their traditional clothes or style your hair. Buying art and other cultural items and displaying in their home because you find them beautiful is appreciation. I have two dreamcatchers. One was a gift from my aunt who bought it when she was on a business trip several years ago and the second is one I bought at Marie Leveau’s on Bourbon Street. This store sells all kinds of things related to catholicism, voodoo, Santeria, and Native American culture. Appreciating the beauty and history of another culture is normal. Emotionally connecting with a culture different than your own is normal.

Acculturation:

Acculturation is when you acquire or adopt a second, usually more dominant culture, due to a shift or change in your environment. When you get married, whether you and your spouse are of the same race or not, you will experience acculturation because you’re having to adapt to a new culture. Ask any immigrant what it’s like to adapt to American culture while holding onto pieces of their “birth” culture. Moving to New Orleans from Charlotte, I’ve had to adopt a new culture. Everyone will experience this at least once: an eighteen-year-old going to college, moving to a new city, getting married, converting to a new religion, starting a new job, etc.

If your personal culture doesn’t shift, change, or do a complete 180 at some point in your life then you’re not growing.

Black women have, and some still do, face discrimination due to their natural hair, but should this be a reason to stop others from wearing these hairstyles? No. What does Susie Q getting her hair braided by her best friend or Little Lauren in the Bahamas getting her hair cornrowed by a local have to do with Miss Pam trying to get a job? How do these things relate to one another? It would seem to me the best way to move forward is to bring these hairstyles into the mainstream and make them normal, but some people want a reason to remain a victim. As black women, we’re told from the time we’re very little that our hair is our crown so it makes sense that some people want to keep a victim mentality on their shoulders. Unless you’re doing something wrong, let people be offended. Their emotions, triggers, and feelings are not your responsibility. Don’t let someone else’s ignorance stop you from experiencing the world and all it has to offer.

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“Racism must be continually identified, analyzed and challenged; no one is ever done. The question is not ‘did racism take place'? but rather ‘how did racism manifest in that situation?'”

-- Robin DiAngelo

“Those who are determined to be offended will discover a provocation somewhere. We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.”

-- Christopher Hitchens

Stop pandering to the sensibilities of outrage junkies. You’re just giving them their fix, and you can never make them happy.

Do your thing - write your story, create your art, make your movie - and ignore the fanatics.

By: Franklin Einspruch

Published: Oct 4, 2022

As an artist and art writer, I formally joined the conversation around “cultural appropriation” in 2015, arguing on the side of culture. The Federalist kindly published a few articles in which I pushed back against this then-burgeoning complaint. I surprised myself by appearing on the site, which tends to hold far more conservative views than my own, but I found that no one else in the art world media would publish comparable critique.

Having written on the topic for several years now, I find that the arguments haven’t changed much. For one, we’re no closer to a sensible definition of “cultural appropriation.” According to Porter Braswell, the writer of a July 2022 Fast Company article and founder of Diversity Explained, cultural appropriation “occurs when members of a dominant culture—for example, white Americans or white Australians—take elements from the culture of an ethnicity or racial group they have typically oppressed—e.g. Indigenous peoples—and use them for themselves.” That sounds straightforward enough, but in practice, accusations of “cultural appropriation” take place even between parties for whom dominance and subordination cannot be determined. For instance, to my knowledge it was never satisfactorily resolved whether drag queens of any race are allowed to appropriate the mannerisms of black women. See this excoriation of RuPaul’s Drag Race in Xtra*, accusing the show’s black, gay host of perpetuating blackface and anti-blackness for countenancing that vaunted crime. Even leaving unchallenged the dubious assumption that skin color is the most salient aspect of human existence, the example raises the question of why it’s permissible for a man to simulate a woman but not a white person to simulate a black one.

“Cultural appropriation” is hard to define because it isn’t real. A given culture joins the people who engage seriously in that culture. One can talk about rap being a black thing, or the hora being a Jewish thing, or kaiju movies being a Japanese thing, and so on—but the relationships are that of association, not ownership. Culture doesn’t belong to you; you belong to a culture. What does not belong to you cannot be, as Braswell puts it, “taken.”

Culture can, however, be copied, emulated, and adapted—with varying levels of success and sensitivity. If someone adapts the culture with which you affiliate, and the results are cynical, hollow, frivolous, or “cringe,” it is reasonable to feel distaste. But the result hasn’t failed because they “appropriated” or copied a form of cultural expression; everything is copied. It failed because its creator could not adequately cohere technique, feeling, and content. The correct descriptor, in this instance, is “bad art.”

Porter Braswell, however, grasps for notions of ownership even as the history he describes rips them away. The history of early American blackface, for example, might be thought of as the primordial case of “cultural appropriation,” but even this is not so simple. After describing how white actors would paint their faces and amuse white audiences with dehumanizing caricatures of black people, Braswell mentions:

Interestingly, after the Civil War, some Black Americans repurposed the minstrel show format and created traveling musical troupes of their own, offering some former slaves (and their descendants) a shot at economic freedom, celebrity, and the chance to travel the country.

These traveling shows also began attracting Black audiences, which meant they naturally included themes and art forms that were more geared toward our communities. Amongst these was a new form of soulful music that was born in the Mississippi Delta and had deep roots in Black spirituals: the Blues.

From a certain standpoint, this would mean that we owe the blues and its ensuing musical forms to minstrel shows put on by white actors. Obviously it’s not that simple, but neither is Braswell’s repeated contention that every creative advance is, to use the phrase he cites from Amiri Baraka, “black innovation.” This argument relies on a conception that the ambient culture of “white” America is incidental to the black artistic innovation that periodically leavens it. Hence Braswell’s approving quotation of bell hooks, describing hip-hop as “spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.”

In reality, this is like trying to distinguish two tributaries after they’ve merged into one river. There would be no Blues without the guitar or the influence of Negro spirituals. The guitar came to its current form in sixteenth-century Spain; the Negro spirituals were Christian, and therefore Levantine by way of Europe.  Though American slave masters imposed Christianity on their thralls, black Christian faith subsequently became the basis for powerful expressions of spirituality and perseverance.

Was the Jimi Hendrix Experience a black act or a white one? How about Cypress Hill (B-Real is Latino)? How about Jurassic 5 (Cut Chemist is white)? How about Guns ‘n’ Roses (Slash is half black)? Reifying “cultural appropriation” requires you to go around quantifying aggregate phenotypic and ancestral material in a manner that typifies obsolete race science.

Braswell concludes by offering four guidelines for staying out of trouble with respect to “cultural appropriation.” All of them have been at least partially discredited—meaning that the arguments and situations are more nuanced and complex than Braswell’s formulations would allow. His first guideline, for example, “Never use other countries or cultures that are not your own as jokes or costumes (e.g., wearing a sombrero at your Cinco de Mayo party),” was tested in real time by one brave soul who did exactly that. Donning a sombrero, poncho, and a cartoonishly fake mustache, he roamed around the campus of UCLA asking students whether they found his outfit offensive. Many of them did. He then went to Olvera Street in Los Angeles and asked the same question to Mexican people there. They did not. Such antics are indeed likely to offend some people, even some Mexican Americans. What this case highlights, however, is how often well-meaning white people are the most outspoken on the supposed harms of “cultural appropriation,” despite the people they are trying to defend having no issue with it at all.

Braswell’s second guideline is, “Don’t misrepresent traditional or sacred elements of a culture that have profound meaning for its members (e.g. wearing a Native American warrior headdress to a music festival).” In fact, most of the complaints against cultural appropriation pertain to material that is only “traditional” in the sense of habit, sometimes not even long standing habit. Take, for instance, braids. Does anyone think that the world is being made a better place for black people by the regular attacks on K-pop stars for their hairstyles? Are South Koreans a “dominant culture” with respect to American blacks? How “traditional” are hoop earrings? How “sacred” is carrying a baby in a wrap?

The third guideline, “If you are engaging with another culture, make sure you are engaged with its members and see how you can use your platform to benefit their interests,” as well as the fourth, “Don’t allow cultural appropriation to fuel profits without acknowledging the contributions and historical origins of a cultural product—and where possible, work to share those profits with the communities you’re engaging with” have similar issues. In 2014, the metal band Mastodon shot a video for their song “The Motherload.” It begins with the kind of dungeon and devil-worship imagery that has been cliché in metal videos since the 1980s, and is later overtaken by the royalty of the Atlanta twerking scene. This was, for the record, hilarious—an intentional, good-natured prank on metal. Mastodon was ripped so hard for “cultural appropriation” that the star dancer of the video, an utter goddess named Jade, publicly defended it. “Ask us if it was racist or sexist,” she said. “We were the ones right there experiencing it. I’ll tell you from my view: no.” Though it shouldn’t have been, that defense was necessary because community engagement and payment to those involved were not enough to stop the charges of wrongdoing from those who believe “cultural appropriation” is a legitimate grievance. It seems that Braswell’s third and fourth guidelines are conditional, at best.

Manage your feelings better.