Me and White Supremacy - Days 13/14: Cultural Appropriation + Week 2 Reflection

Resource: Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad

**Days 9-12 were reflections on anti-Blackness. Layla Saad suggested not sharing those reflections as they may be triggering to Black folks, so I have kept them to myself, but would be willing to share/engage in dialogue with anyone who is interested**

Cultural Appropriation

According to Ijeoma Oluo, cultural appropriation is broadly defined as the “adoption or exploitation of another culture by a more dominant culture.” This can include appropriation of another culture’s objects, motifs, symbols, rituals, artifacts, and other cultural elements. As the world has become smaller and we are able to interact with many different cultures, the line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation has blurred, made even less clear when some people from a group can think that something is culturally appropriative while other people from the same group considers it cultural appreciation or exchange. However, what is often described as cultural appreciation is a form of tokenizing and exoticizing that discards and dehumanizes the actual people of that culture. Often it includes cultural elements stripped of their original context/meaning/significance. Cultural appropriation rewrites history with whiteness at the center.

A lot of it has to do with power dynamics and history between groups. The world is not binary, and there is a lot of grey area in what cultural appropriation consists of. However Saad gave this list of questions to consider when you partake in an activity/behavior that could be considered cultural appropriation:

What is the history that exists between my culture and that culture?

What are some of the subconscious negative stereotypes and racist beliefs I have toward

people of that culture?

What are ways that I can financially compensate people from the culture I am purchasing

cultural elements from?

In what ways am I supporting, projecting, and uplifting people from that culture in my

community?

Do I understand the historic significance and sacredness of this cultural element to that

culture?

Does something like this cultural element exist in my own culture?

Why is it so important for me to partake in this cultural element at the risk of offending people

from that culture?

Are there ways for me to partake in this cultural element without financially benefiting from it

in ways that people from that culture would not? If I am financially benefiting, are there ways

in which I can redirect some of that benefit toward the people of that culture?

Knowing what I now know about me and white supremacy, how good does it feel to

partake in this cultural element the way I have been doing so far? Does something need to

change, and if so, what?

Cultural appropriation shows up in fashion (often without credit or attribution to original culture; use of blackface symbology), hair (traditionally African heritage hairstyles worn on non-Black people), beauty, spirituality (appropriation of sacred BIPOC spiritual ceremonies, rituals, iconography, practices, and objects), wellness, music (appropriation of Black music styles often filtered through white lens), cultural holidays and events (like halloween costumes; use of black face), an linguistic styles (appropriation of AAVE by non-black people - and the idea that using it is “cool” by white folks, but “ghetto” by Black folks).

Reflection: How have you or do you appropriate from nonwhite cultures? What actions have you taken when seeing other white people culturally appropriating?

To be quite honest, cultural appropriation as a concept has been (and still is) a concept that is pretty fuzzy for me, largely due to my lack of knowledge of what it encompasses. However, I can think of 3 very definite cases where I have appropriated culture. The first is when I was dressed as a Native American for Halloween one year (and honestly it might have been more than that because there were several instances where I wore the same costume for multiple years). To be fair, I was under the age of 10 and probably was inspired by watching Disney’s Pocahontas, but it is still something that I did not recognize as being wrong until looking back on it much later in my life (like a few years ago). It’s not something that strikes a strong emotion in me, because I was a kid and didn’t know the significance of that. At that point in my life, I had never met an Indigenous person, and I’m not sure I remember what I thought of them.

The next two are ones that I am grappling more with, having acted upon them in my adult life. The second one that comes to mind is celebrating Cinco de Mayo. I don’t even really know the history of the Mexican holiday, and yet until recently, I would still “celebrate” it by going to inauthentic Mexican restaurants. And being an introvert, this meant just eating dinner, but looking back, I feel kind of uncomfortable having partook (is that the right way to say that?) in these superficial “celebrations.” I haven’t done anything for the day in the past several years, but next year I’m thinking about reading up more on the day and maybe buying food from a Mexican-owned restaurant. I’m not sure what my place is in calling out this type of cultural appropriation (that seems much bigger than individual actions - like restaurants hyping up Cinco de Mayo and having deals), but I think it is worth questioning people about the reason they partake in this form of cultural appropriation, calling out that it is appropriation, and maybe educating people (depending on how well I know them). Knowing me though, I’ll probably get my closest friends to honor the day in a respectful way and as a way to learn about other cultures and then write about it in a blog post.

The last big case is one that I have just started to grapple with, and that’s yoga. I have been doing yoga on and off for years, and have recently been practicing every day. I know that yoga originated in India as a spiritual practice and that the yoga that I practice is very whitewashed. I love it because it really does make my body feel good, and by intentionally pairing moving to breathing, it clears my mind as well. It has been a great way to start or end my day while strengthening my muscles and my discipline. Does acknowledging that the yoga I do is appropriated and a superficial practice of what if came from make it better? I watch free videos on youtube, but is it right to learn from people who are benefiting (financially) from a practice that was appropriated from a rich culture? I don’t have the answer to that. It’s hard to see how my individual practice harms marginalized groups, and I’m not sure if/how it offends people from that culture.

There’s a lot I don’t know about cultural appropriation, and I think that is the biggest barrier for me right now to not appropriating culture. I mostly don’t have a good grasp of what is appropriation vs appreciation and how that manifests in my life. This sounds like a good topic for another blog post (to look at specific cases of cultural appropriation).

Day 14 - End of Week Reflection: What have you begun to unearth yourself when it comes to white supremacy? If you came to this book thinking you were “one of the good white people” or an ally to BIPOC, how do you feel about that now? What have you learned about how white supremacy works through you?

I think this book is one that I’ll be able to come back to over time and be able to answer these questions differently. I know how I am answering them now is much different than how I would have answered them when I first became an educator, and I hope that in the same amount of time in the future, I might be able to say the same about the amount I’ve grown.

A lot of the concepts and ideas presented in this book are ones that I am at least familiar with, so I haven’t had the sort of shock you might have when learning about them for the first time. But I think the biggest thing I am learning about is how much I do not know about how white supremacy manifests itself in our culture and in my own personal life. When reflecting on cultural appropriation, I could only think of three major ways that I have appropriated culture, but I feel pretty confident that I’ve done it (in maybe smaller ways) without recognizing it. Ignorance on race, white supremacy, and the ideas presented in this book have allowed me to uphold white supremacy in my life. Before reading this book, I think I would have said that the dangers of white supremacy come from the people/groups who are not shy about their belief in white superiority. However, I’m recognizing that the damage caused by white supremacy does not come primarily from the extreme fringe groups, but by the people who uphold the system who do not even recognize it. I am definitely part of the latter, and I am recognizing for the first time my role in it. I think lack of knowledge and awareness of the systems of white supremacy are the most important way it survives.

There are so many things that I do not know, but even by being able to give specific actions/behaviors a name has made me more aware of how I do/do not practice them. By learning language for “tone policing,” “white superiority,” and “white silence” I have been able to recognize that those are things I do or don’t question and also that they are behaviors that I need to be paying attention to in myself and others and question/stop them. I feel like I could easily fall into white exceptionalism, although I think I’ve learned about it in a formative time in anti-racist work that I can recognize it as a pattern I do not want to fall into. I think my concept of being an ally has shifted from showing up and listening with good intent to truly educating myself and applying what I am learning to ALL areas of my life (not just when I’m working with students).

I have a lot to learn still, but I think this book and my reflections on these topics are giving me a road map of where to start.