On Cultural Appropriation, and Participating in Different Cultures
Just because certain cultures and subcultures, particularly those created by PoC communities, exist doesn’t mean that it’s for mass consumption. You can certainly enjoy and observe and be inspired by said cultures, but it’s not a requirement that you *have to* participate because you enjoy it. Not everything is for everyone, and we really have to start understanding that.
Most of those cultures and subcultures were created by PoC communities in order to preserve their identity, give others in their community a sense of belonging, and as a way to process themselves in a world that’s taken away almost everything from them (thanks, white supremacy, racism, slavery, and anti-blackness!). Examples include anime, the ballroom scene, and rap.
Take Linkin Park. They’re a band who are clearly influenced by rap (which mostly comes from Mike Shinoda). One thing they’ve never done is adopt performative blackness in order to create a space for themselves in rap, to prove that they belong in rap culture, take away space from black artists, or to show that they appreciate rap. Shinoda even went on to create Fort Minor, and still managed to not do any of the aforementioned things. “The Rising Tied” manages to never once come off as performative or derivative blackness for the sake of wanting to participate rap culture. You could always tell that Shinoda has a deep respect and reverence for rap, and the rap community. (“Cigarettes” is arguably the one song that could be seen as problematic because it criticizes the violence and misogyny and performativity in rap culture that comes from people who are trying to sell listener a version of themselves that is exaggerated because they think that’s what rap is about, and how that’s problematic and harmful even if listeners don’t care because of how that kind of rap makes them feel cool, sort of the same way cigarettes are sold by cigarette companies as something that makes you cool and that it isn’t harmful at all. And since Shinoda is a non-black Asian person, it’s easy to read it as an anti-black take on rap.)
And then you have all these white artists who adopt blackness to show they can be cool and have a dark side in order to shed their “innocent” (read: very white) persona. And it last for an album cycle (maybe two if we’re unlucky), and then they shed said blackness and re-adopt a “mature” version of their former “innocence” and then distance themselves from that former persona (see: “Back To Basics”-era Christina Aguilera, and post-Bangerz-era Miley Cyrus).
And there’s also the recent rise in popularity in the ballroom scene. It’s a scene created by queer and trans black and Latinx people who were ostracized by the larger (read: mostly white) queer community in NYC to give themselves (queer and trans black and Latinx people) a place to belong and appreciate themselves. The existence of queer non-black and Latinx people in the ballroom scene isn’t inherently wrong (since they, too, experience similar ostracization from queer and trans white people) unless said people are participating without also checking their anti-blackness and anti-Latinx racism. And it’s similar to the existence of queer and trans white people in these spaces, though still very different because the rise in popularity can mean white people will begin to take up space in a subculture created as a way to escape the White Gayze™.
Like, I often think about my former desire to learn Japanese so I can consume anime and JRPGs without using subtitles without also taking into consideration that anime was created after the US bombed Japan (as a call back, listen to “Kenji” by Fort Minor, which is about Mike Shinoda’s family who were interned here in the US after the bombing of Pearl Harbor) in order to help people reconstruct their identity after that atrocity. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to learn another language, especially as a way to learn about another culture. The problem is wanting to participate in and consume said culture for one’s own selfish (and often dehumanizing) reasons.
Tl;dr: You can participate in and appreciate different cultures made by marginalized groups, but their existences is not an inherent invitation to participate in said cultures, especially cultures that exist to help people escape and process the horror inflicted on them due to white supremacy and slavery and racism and colonialism.
Originally published at https://medium.com on January 27, 2019.
