Antonia Opiah, op-ed, May 24, 2017<\/p>\n
In this op-ed, Antonia Opiah explores the shortcomings of the current cultural appropriation conversation.<\/em><\/p>\n “I’m not a gatekeeper of black hair”<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want white women asking me whether or not they can wear their hair in box braids<\/a> or Bantu knots<\/a>. I may make my living off of writing about black hairstyles<\/a>, and celebrating the rich history of black hair<\/a>, but I\u2019m not that kind of authority. I\u2019m not a gatekeeper of black hair \u2014 black hair doesn\u2019t have any gatekeepers. But these days one would think it does, and that\u2019s one of the things that makes me cringe a little about the cultural appropriation conversation that\u2019s been going on (outside of academic circles) for a few years now. For those who may not know, the Cambridge Dictionary<\/a> defines cultural appropriation (I\u2019ll refer to it here as CA for brevity) as \u201cthe act of taking or using things from a culture that is not your own, especially without showing that you understand or respect this culture.\u201d However in a widely shared article<\/a> on the site Everyday Feminism<\/em>, staff writer Maisha Z. Johnson points out an important aspect of CA, defining it further as \u201cthe power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group.\u201d \u201cPower dynamic\u201d is the key phrase here and a part often missed in debates about CA.<\/p>\n At the heart of conversations about CA \u2014 in its very definition \u2014 is an imbalance of power. I\u2019d go so far as to say that cultural appropriation<\/em> only exists because the world isn\u2019t fair. Opportunity isn\u2019t really as equal as we think it is and people are unfairly characterized, which has consequences. Cultural appropriation would be the cultural exchange<\/em> everybody wants and loves IF it were occurring on an even playing field, but it\u2019s not. And that\u2019s the crucial aspect of CA that gets overlooked, and the reason the CA dialogue leaves something to be desired. Academics have written about the power dynamic underlying appropriation<\/a>, and many journalists and bloggers have, too. But because communication is no longer what it used to be \u2014 because nowadays a national conversation really means that everyone is participating and syndicating their views and opinions about a topic \u2014 only the most compelling sound bites\u00a0bubble\u00a0up and\u00a0get\u00a0amplified. And what that means for the CA dialogue is that it ends up getting whittled down to \u201cblack people are saying white people can\u2019t wear cornrows\u201d or \u201cwhite people can\u2019t wear hoop earrings\u201d or white people just have to \u2014 as Katy Perry so eloquently put it<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 \u201cstick to baseball and hot dogs.\u201d But that\u2019s not the end goal of calling out appropriation. The goal is to make things more fair both on a cultural and economic level.<\/p>\n Making things fair on a cultural level means correcting incorrect narratives of groups of people or preventing them from being mischaracterized in the first place. In an email to me on this topic, poet, critic, and all-around Renaissance man Kwame Dawes wrote, \u201cWhen [musician] Burning Spear<\/a> sings, \u2018Christopher Columbus is a damn blasted liar!\u2019 he is making a critical point about the lies that led to people of African descent believing that they had no history, that they contributed nothing to the world<\/a>.\u201d Meanwhile, Africa\u2019s rich precolonial history continues to be downplayed (see Walter Rodney\u2019s book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa<\/em><\/a>). Dawes further shared (emphasis added):<\/p>\n \u201dI always tell people that without the work of serious activist historians, what we now accept as truth, that jazz was created by black people, would not be understood as such. For decades, a narrative existed that jazz was invented in New York by a bunch of white musicians<\/a>. The white musicians are not an invention, but they had gone to New Orleans earlier and heard jazz and came back and claimed they had invented it.\u00a0 That is exploitative cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation affects the soul of people, a sense of their inherent value, and it also affects their pockets, their capacity to rise above their circumstances through the fair rewarding of their creativity.\u201c<\/p>\n The emotional impact of CA is deeply underscored by the larger socioeconomic power imbalance that exists. Let\u2019s take Marc Jacobs\u2019s use of locs<\/a> in his spring 2017 runway show, for example. White models wearing locs isn\u2019t wrong in and of itself. But when it happens against the backdrop of the modeling industry lacking diversity<\/a>, or makeup artists and hairstylists in the industry not being equipped to do a black model\u2019s hair or apply her makeup<\/a>, and when the appropriation occurs with no credit, respect, or empathy, that\u2019s where things begin to feel like you\u2019re being kicked while you\u2019re down. Writer Lionel Shriver caused controversy by making light of cultural appropriation during a speech last September at the Brisbane Writers Festival. She had posed a great question: What are fiction writers \u201dallowed\u201c to write, given they will never truly know another person\u2019s experience? But instead of really exploring the answer to that question, she ended up writing off those concerned about cultural appropriation as overly sensitive. (It also didn\u2019t help that she was wearing a sombrero when she gave the speech). In a piece in The Guardian<\/em>, writer Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who was in the audience during Shriver\u2019s speech, pointed out the underlying inequality<\/a> present in the publishing industry that makes telling other people\u2019s stories complicated:<\/p>\n \u201dIt\u2019s not always OK if a white guy writes the story of a Nigerian woman because the actual Nigerian woman can\u2019t get published or reviewed to begin with. It\u2019s not always OK if a straight white woman writes the story of a queer Indigenous man, because when was the last time you heard a queer Indigenous man tell his own story? How is it that said straight white woman will profit from an experience that is not hers, and those with the actual experience never be provided the opportunity?\u201c<\/p>\n In this case, as in the case of Marc Jacobs, the tension isn\u2019t stemming from the surface act of borrowing from another culture; it\u2019s coming from the inequality surrounding it<\/a>. It\u2019s coming from the fact that a Nigerian writer might not be given a chance or have the resources to amplify her own voice because she\u2019s at a disadvantage as a result of the effects of colonialism and the West\u2019s continued exploitation of Nigerian resources<\/a>.<\/p>\n So, as I stated earlier, I don\u2019t want white women asking me if they can wear box braids. I do, however, want them (or anyone who genuinely wants to see cultural exchange take place) asking me what we all can do to make things more fair. Because there is a caste system that exists in the U.S. and in the world and we need to acknowledge it and dismantle it. We can do that by looking at the industries we work in and asking ourselves if they really reflect the face of the population, and if not, why not? Are there structural reasons at play or are there assumptions keeping certain demographics from being considered? For example, publishing companies are more likely to hire from certain universities<\/a>. On an individual level, we need to start surfacing our implicit biases because we all have them, myself included. We need to acknowledge the snap judgments we make about people; ask ourselves, \u201dwhy do I think this?\u201c; and challenge any assumptions that exist in the answer to that question.<\/p>\n Doing all of that is not an easy feat and the results of it probably won\u2019t be seen in our lifetime because the reality is when I\u2019m asked \u201dCan white women wear box braids?\u201c the answer is \u201dYes, of course. People can do whatever they want.\u201c But until things are made equal, they\u2019ll be doing it in a context where the people being \u201cappreciated\u201d will always express the pain of living in a world that\u2019s not fair.<\/p>\n