Affirming cultural enthusiasm and negating cultural plagiarism

At the VMAs this past week, we found out that Kanye is running for president in 2020. But that wasn’t all that happened. Taylor Swift released her new music video for “Wildest Dreams,” a simplistic depiction that has been described as “romanticizing white colonialism;” Wilson Rebel made an inappropriate joke about police brutality; and Miley Cyrus added by choosing to use the sometimes derogatory “mammy” and wear her hair in dreadlocks. These acts are oft criticized for taking a cultural element and divorcing it from its cultures, countries and peoples.

Even still, millions of viewers pay attention to these awards for popular music, videos and personalities. Pop culture is intricately tied to society and influences what we think and talk about. For many, seeing Caitlyn Jenner as a transgender woman in recent months was powerful and their first step to understanding or at least engaging transgender people. This is in spite of a number of organizations like the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Trans Advocacy Network carrying on transgender activism for years. Pop culture simply reaches people, but sometimes in the wrong ways with distortion, misappropriation or oversimplification mutating an issue. For example, hip hop--in addition to being a music genre that many people enjoy--is intricately linked to political movements, ideas and black resistance, a link that is often forgotten except by those who are looking.

But these underlying themes are not just occasional national news items. They exist in different spaces at Duke as well. In our campus community, we are superb at intellectualizing and studying ideas, but when it comes to issues where the “right” answer is elusive or centers on inspecting personal experiences, students are often confused. Devils After Dark recently hosted a Laser Tag with DUPD event, and while the event is popular and comes with good intentions, it seems like a poor choice in light of recent years’ police brutality. While at the Duke Dance Showcase last weekend, many dance groups fused cultural dances. The Dance Program Student Board performed routine set to a speech by Maya Angelou, and others like DefMo and Dhoom intentionally design dances that are inspired by difference styles and cultures. Cultural exchanges and intentional uses like these are not the issue, especially when engagement can be a background activity, but it does bring up questions about the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation.

Frankly, there are few hard and fast rules for what exactly constitutes cultural appropriation, especially because the nuances of a situation are key to assessing every act of cultural engagement. Important questions to ask include: which group has more power in the situation, has one group suffered historical oppression, does the cultural element exchanged have particular significance that is being preserved and of course if any harmful stereotypes are being unduly perpetuated.

Though determining what exactly is cultural appropriation is complex, we can be sure such appropriation is harmful because, if not done carefully, it presents dance, culture and entire groups of people in simple ways. Not only does it misrepresent but can be akin to parasitic colonialism--taking something that belongs to someone else while in a position of power and trying to embody it in ways that do not hearken back to its original significance. The appropriating actors then find themselves with less than genuine credit for something not wholly theirs. The heart of the issue of cultural appropriation is purely the use of ideas without due credit, appreciation and understanding--essentially plagiarism, which in any other context is unforgivable.

But even more damaging is the subsequent trivialization of culture. “Hunger Games” actress Amandla Stenberg asks, “What would America be like if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?” A recent article by The Washington Post details how marginalization happens not just through dance and clothing, but even food. The Atlantic goes further and commends how the film “Straight Outta Compton” reminds the audience that the N.W.A. music group became famous for not holding back about what it was like to be “young, black and terrorized by the police.” Many artists today shy away from such directness because of the ease of commercially-friendly topics: money, sex and glamorous partying.

These trends and conversations like many others have to be seen with an understanding that many people at Duke and in America often consume cultural elements of all varieties and mixtures without seeking the extra fulfilment of exploring context and cultural backgrounds. This is not about politics or a hard-line rejection of fusing cultures; it is about respect and a push towards more complete cultural experiences.