Notes from a Comfortable Shoes Femme
By Mary Davies

September 2005

Cultural Appropriation:

            I went to hear a Nigerian musician, Femi Kuti, and his band last week in Northampton.  The crowd looked quite different from what I’m used to seeing in Boston.  It appeared that most people were between 30 and 50, many dressed in baggy clothes, flowing skirts and scarves, lots of guys with beards and long hair, and several white guys with dreadlocks.  During the concert I couldn’t help noticing 2 or 3 youngish white guys with long hair and beards (one with a poncho) each dancing alone in front of where I was standing.  They were clearly not being paid for this dancing—one was distinctly doing the kind of dance that gave rise to the stereotype that white people can’t dance.

            For several days afterwards I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that they were dancing alone, and what it means for white guys to dance alone to Black African music in a crowded concert hall.  I don’t know these particular people, but permit me to make some assumptions about them and to say that I’ve seen guys like them before.  The first time was when I went to college.  I was fascinated by them.  Somehow they represented a kind of freedom I was looking for—the freedom to be whoever you wanted to be, regardless of what anyone thought.  Guys I grew up with would never have made such a spectacle of themselves.  They traveled in packs, and most of them rarely danced, let alone by themselves in front of a crowd.  But to me these guys at my college represented the legacy of the Counter Culture from the 60’s that I thought was about Doing Your Own Thing.  They didn’t seem to care at all about other people’s opinions.  This was all new to me, and looked like a kind of freedom I craved.  At that time I didn’t necessarily recognize that kind of freedom as a privilege.  I didn’t understand that the price you pay for being “different” has something to do with how much your family can and will support you financially. 

            This most recent sighting of bearded white guys dancing alone to Black African music hit me much differently than it would have done 20 years ago.  This time I began thinking of it in terms of relationships.  I watched them each dance alone for most of the concert.  I can hear people asking, what’s the big deal?  They paid for their tickets, why can’t they dance alone if they want to?  What’s wrong with that?  I guess for me, not knowing these guys personally, their dancing alone was symbolic of all the ways in which my people (white, middle/upper-middle class, U.S. born) have been taught to take pieces of other people’s cultures for our own enjoyment, whether or not we have any connection to actual people who come from that culture. 

            It’s complicated.  In North America we are living on stolen land.  The legacy of that is all pervasive.  Some of us are the descendants of conquerors, some descendants of people brought here by force, some descendants of people who were here first, and some descendants of people who came because the risk seemed better than any option at home.  Some are descendants of a mix of these groups, and some are still coming.  And in this mix, the dominant culture tries to erase history, so it’s work to find out where things come from. The mythology of the melting pot, or even the salad bowl, doesn’t recognize historical (or current) power inequities.  There’s been a lot of mixing of cultures, by force, by theft, by buying, selling and trading.  Look how many people in North America eat lasagna who don’t have Italian heritage; how many people practice yoga or martial arts who don’t come from the cultures where those practices originated.  It feels like there are grey areas; is it appropriation if you pay for it, or only if you make money doing it?  What about if you learn the history and traditions, participate in community, form relationships with people who are from the culture that your interest comes from?  Instead of just taking something because it seems exotic, with no regard for the cultural survival of the people whose tradition it is from?

            It’s tough to write about this without using sweeping generalizations, so I’ve been thinking about how I personally may have learned to appropriate the cultures of people my people have had power over in one way or another.  Certainly no one sat down and spelled it out to me:  “Go and appropriate some culture now”.  I got the message in a million indirect ways, like:  When I was in Brownies we sat cross-legged on the gym floor around an imaginary campfire and pretended to be Indians trading wampum.  We weren’t told which Indians wampum came from, and we learned about Indians as mythical people from an unspecified past, not as people who could be among us, or whose land our houses were built on.  For Halloween, white kids in my neighborhood dressed up as Eskimos or Gypsies, and I never heard anyone dispute the notion that those were perfectly acceptable costumes like any others.  In my city the ukulele was taught in the public schools, and I’m sure we were never told where the instrument came from, or what kind of music was traditionally played on it.  (We learned to play “Swing on a Star” and “Never on a Sunday.”)  All of this went along with fairly rigid assumptions about gender roles and sexual orientation. As an adult I’ve been part of communities of people who identify in some way as “different”, either because of sexuality or gender identity or political beliefs or some combination of those, with other stuff thrown in.  I thrive on connections with people and groups that are built on shared understanding of the complexities of oppression, and the possibilities for resistance, as I like to say, knowing that the world needs to be made wider all the time.  But I still see all kinds of cultural appropriation going on in what people sometimes refer to as “alternative” communities. 

I see it everywhere:  the latest issue of Curve Magazine has a picture of Gwen Stefani on the cover in front of 4 Japanese “punky, funky groupie harajuku girls”, to quote the inside cover.  Curve suggests that she is paying homage to them, but I think using people of color for decoration isn’t much of a tribute.  A few pages later there’s a picture of a white girl with dreadlocks (Ember Swift) urging us to be vegetarians.  It’s not just Curve, which one of my friends referred to as the People Magazine of lesbian culture, and it’s not just in popular culture.  It’s in lots of places in our GLBTQ communities, our political groups, our social groups. 

It’s also not just about white people stealing culture from people of color.  I see it across class lines too.  People wearing work shirts or jackets with name tags whose families never had jobs where they had to wear uniforms.  Performers wearing “white trash” costumes to get a laugh.  Culture is about more than ethnicity.  Sometimes when those of us who come from higher class status try to resist the parts of our cultures that are oppressive, we choose “alternatives” that may be rejections of our own people’s values, but the choices we make may perpetuate the kind of oppression we’re trying to resist in ways we may not see. I want to be part of groups and communities in which people who come from positions of relative power and privilege can be honest about that, and resist the oppressive parts of our own cultures in ways that nurture relationships across cultural differences, and across power differences.  I want to be part of learning where traditions come from, so that when my “alternative” communities celebrate our love, mourn those we’ve lost, decorate our bodies, there’s recognition and respect and cultural understanding about the traditions that get used.

            I came from pretty limited models for cross-cultural and cross-power relationships:  hatred and disdain, ignorance about cultural theft at all, or overblown liberal condescension about how Interesting Other Cultures are.  None of these models supports long-term real sustainable relationships in which my people deal with the legacy of our racism and class prejudice and cultural incompetence we’ve been left, and people share stuff from each other’s cultures because we trust each other and it enriches everyone’s communities.

            But I will leave you with some hope.  There are lots of people working to stop cultural appropriation, and here are a few I’ve been made aware of recently:  The Freedom Trainers website, http://www.freedomtrainers.org/materials.html , has a great piece on why white folks should stop wearing dreadlocks or Mohawk hairstyles.  Tara Hardy has a wonderful essay in Without a Net (Seal Press, 2003, Michelle Tea, ed.) which addresses some cross-class cultural appropriation.  And Bitch magazine (the spring issue, no. 28) wrote a critique of that very same image of Gwen Stefani too.  Like many things, this is a work in progress.