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Cultural Appropriation and How It Can Cause Harm

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Cultural Appropriation: Why Humans Define Nature Differently

The negative connotation surrounding cultural appropriation, john stuart mill and his ideas about cultural appropriation, the cultural plunge: an exploration of benefits and challenges.

Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption, borrowing, or imitation of elements, practices, symbols, or artifacts from a marginalized culture by individuals or groups belonging to a dominant culture, often without proper understanding, respect, or acknowledgment of the cultural context or significance. It involves the selective appropriation of certain aspects of a culture, typically for personal gain, fashion trends, or entertainment, while disregarding the historical, social, or religious meaning behind those elements.

Cultural appropriation, as a concept, traces its origins to the early 20th century, primarily in the field of anthropology and cultural studies. It emerged as a way to address the power dynamics and inequalities that exist between different cultures. The history of cultural appropriation can be seen within the context of colonialism and imperialism, where dominant cultures often appropriated elements from marginalized or colonized cultures for their own benefit. This included the appropriation of cultural symbols, artifacts, clothing, music, and other cultural practices. The discourse around cultural appropriation gained significant attention and evolved throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. It has become a subject of debate and critique, raising questions about cultural sensitivity, respect, and the commodification of cultural elements. Proponents argue that cultural exchange is beneficial and can foster understanding, while critics assert that appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes, exploit cultures, and erase the significance of cultural practices.

In the US, cultural appropriation is often observed in the realm of fashion, music, art, and even Halloween costumes, where elements from different cultures are sometimes used without proper understanding or respect. This can range from the adoption of cultural hairstyles, attire, or religious symbols to the appropriation of cultural rituals and practices. The public opinion on cultural appropriation in the US is diverse. Some individuals view it as a form of appreciation and cultural exchange, while others perceive it as a form of disrespect, erasure, and even exploitation of marginalized communities. Activists and social media platforms play a crucial role in raising awareness about cultural appropriation, promoting dialogue, and encouraging individuals to be mindful of the cultural origins and significance of what they adopt or represent. As society becomes more aware of the complexities surrounding cultural appropriation, there is a growing emphasis on fostering cultural understanding, respecting cultural boundaries, and engaging in responsible cultural exchange. The conversation on cultural appropriation in the US continues to evolve, highlighting the importance of education, empathy, and sensitivity to different cultures and their histories.

Fashion and Style: This includes the adoption of cultural attire, accessories, or hairstyles without understanding their cultural significance. Examples include wearing Native American headdresses or African tribal prints without knowledge or respect for their cultural context. Language and Slang: Appropriating language or slang terms from different cultures without understanding their origins can be seen as a form of cultural appropriation. This often happens when words or phrases are taken out of their original cultural context and used without proper understanding or respect. Music and Dance: Borrowing elements of music and dance from different cultures without giving credit or respecting the cultural roots is another form of cultural appropriation. This can involve taking traditional music styles, instruments, or dance moves and using them without acknowledging their cultural significance. Art and Symbols: Appropriation of cultural symbols, religious icons, or traditional artwork without understanding their cultural meanings can be seen as disrespectful. It involves using these symbols for aesthetic purposes or commercial gain without recognizing their cultural heritage. Rituals and Traditions: Adopting or modifying cultural rituals and traditions without proper understanding or respect for their significance is another aspect of cultural appropriation. This can involve appropriating religious practices, ceremonies, or spiritual symbols without understanding their sacredness.

Iggy Azalea: The Australian rapper faced criticism for appropriating African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in her music and performances. Her adoption of African American culture and style drew accusations of cultural appropriation. Katy Perry: The pop singer has been accused of cultural appropriation for incorporating elements of various cultures, such as Japanese, Indian, and African, in her music videos and stage performances. Kylie Jenner: The reality TV star and entrepreneur faced backlash for appropriating Black culture through her hairstyles, such as wearing cornrows, which some viewed as a misappropriation of a traditionally African hairstyle. Marc Jacobs: The fashion designer faced criticism for featuring white models wearing dreadlocks on the runway, which was seen as cultural appropriation of a hairstyle deeply rooted in African and African American culture. Miley Cyrus: The singer and actress faced controversy for appropriating elements of Black culture, including twerking and adopting a hip-hop-inspired persona during her Bangerz era.

Power Dynamics: This theory emphasizes the power imbalances between dominant and marginalized cultures. It argues that cultural appropriation occurs when elements of a marginalized culture are adopted and commodified by the dominant culture without proper understanding or respect, perpetuating inequalities and erasing the cultural context. Appreciation vs. Appropriation: This theory distinguishes between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. It suggests that appreciation involves respectfully learning about and engaging with different cultures, while appropriation involves taking elements out of context, often for personal gain, without understanding or respecting their cultural significance. Commodification: This theory focuses on the commercial aspect of cultural appropriation. It highlights how cultural elements, such as fashion, music, or art, are often commodified and stripped of their original cultural meaning, resulting in the exploitation of marginalized cultures for profit. Cultural Exchange: This theory acknowledges that cultural borrowing and exchange have existed throughout history. It suggests that cultural exchange becomes problematic when it lacks mutual respect, consent, and acknowledgment of power dynamics, leading to the erasure or exploitation of the culture being borrowed from.

Borrowing Elements: Cultural appropriation involves the adoption or borrowing of cultural elements, including symbols, traditions, clothing, music, language, or rituals, from another culture. Power Imbalance: Cultural appropriation often occurs within a power dynamic where a dominant culture adopts elements from a marginalized culture. The dominant culture may hold more social, economic, or political power, resulting in the exploitation or erasure of the culture being appropriated. Lack of Understanding: Cultural appropriation often reflects a lack of understanding, knowledge, or respect for the cultural significance, history, and context of the borrowed elements. It can lead to misrepresentation, distortion, or trivialization of the original culture. Commercialization and Commodification: Cultural appropriation frequently involves the commodification and commercial exploitation of cultural elements, turning them into trendy fashion, consumer products, or entertainment without proper acknowledgment or compensation to the source culture. Harmful Stereotypes: Cultural appropriation can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, reinforce prejudices, or contribute to the marginalization and discrimination of the culture being appropriated. Absence of Consent and Recognition: Cultural appropriation occurs when elements are taken without the consent or involvement of the originating culture, often without giving credit or recognizing the contributions of the culture being appropriated.

Marginalization and Exploitation: Cultural appropriation can contribute to the marginalization and exploitation of marginalized communities. When elements of their culture are taken out of context or commodified without proper understanding or respect, it can perpetuate power imbalances and reinforce inequalities. Cultural Misrepresentation: Cultural appropriation can lead to misrepresentation and distortion of cultures. It can perpetuate stereotypes, misconceptions, and simplifications, reducing rich and diverse cultural practices to shallow and inaccurate portrayals. Erosion of Cultural Identity: When cultural elements are taken and divorced from their original context and meaning, it can erode the cultural identity and significance attached to them. This can lead to the loss of cultural heritage and the devaluation of traditions, rituals, and symbols. Appropriation vs. Appreciation: The influence of cultural appropriation highlights the need for a shift from appropriation to appreciation. It encourages a more respectful approach to cultural exchange that involves learning, understanding, and honoring the source culture's perspectives, histories, and contributions. Social Awareness and Activism: Cultural appropriation has fueled social awareness and activism. It has sparked discussions and movements that aim to challenge and address the harmful effects of appropriation, promote cultural sensitivity, and advocate for the rights of marginalized communities.

The topic of cultural appropriation is important to write an essay about due to its far-reaching implications and significance in today's diverse and interconnected world. Cultural appropriation raises critical questions about power dynamics, identity, representation, and social justice. By exploring this topic, one can delve into the complexities of cultural exchange, appreciation, and exploitation. Writing an essay on cultural appropriation allows for an examination of the historical context, current manifestations, and the impact it has on marginalized communities. It provides an opportunity to critically analyze the ethical, social, and cultural implications of borrowing elements from different cultures. The essay can delve into the importance of recognizing and respecting the origins, meanings, and value systems associated with cultural practices and artifacts. Moreover, addressing cultural appropriation fosters a deeper understanding of privilege, cultural sensitivity, and the need for cross-cultural dialogue. It encourages individuals to reflect on their own role in perpetuating or challenging appropriation, and prompts discussions on the responsibility of individuals and institutions in promoting cultural understanding and equity.

1. Alcoff, L. M. (2019). The problem of speaking for others. In The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies (pp. 210-222). Routledge. 2. Anderson, K. (2009). Cultural appropriation and the arts. Wiley-Blackwell. 3. Choo, H. Y., & Ferree, M. M. (2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: A critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institutions in the study of inequalities. Sociological Theory, 28(2), 129-149. 4. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York University Press. 5. Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press. 6. Lentin, A. (2008). Racism and anti-racism in Europe. Pluto Press. 7. Matthes, E. H. (2017). Cultural appropriation and the arts. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. 8. McLeod, J. (2017). The ethics of cultural appropriation. Wiley-Blackwell. 9. Richardson, J. E. (2019). (Mis)appropriation, hybridity, and resistance: Revisiting the cultural politics of rap music. In Popular culture and the civic imagination: Music, dissent, and social change (pp. 67-89). Routledge. 10. Young, R. (2008). Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture, and race. Routledge.

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What Is Cultural Appropriation?

Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

Akeem Marsh, MD, is a board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has dedicated his career to working with medically underserved communities.

Verywell / Alison Czinkota

Identification

Cultural appropriation refers to the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression and doesn't respect their original meaning or give credit to their source. It also includes the unauthorized use of parts of their culture (their dress, dance, etc.) without permission.

In this way, cultural appropriation is a layered and nuanced phenomenon that many people may have trouble understanding and may not realize when they are doing it themselves.

It can be natural to merge and blend cultures as people from different backgrounds come together and interact. In fact, many wonderful inventions and creations have been born from the merging of such cultures (such as country music).

However, the line is drawn when a dominant cultural group makes use of elements of a non-dominant group in a way that the non-dominant group views as exploitative.

Cultural appropriation can be most easily recognized by asking this question of the non-dominant group: Does the use of this element of your culture in this way bother you?

Elements of Cultural Appropriation

Taking a step backward, how do we define cultural appropriation? It helps to consider what is meant by each of the terms in the phrase, as well as some related terms that are important to understand.

Culture refers to anything associated with a group of people based on their ethnicity, religion, geography, or social environment. This might include beliefs, traditions, language, objects, ideas, behaviors, customs, values, or institutions. It's not uncommon for culture to be thought of as belonging to particular ethnic groups.

Appropriation

Appropriation refers to taking something that doesn't belong to you or your culture. In the case of cultural appropriation, it is an exchange that happens when a dominant group takes or "borrows" something from a minority group that has historically been exploited or oppressed.

In this sense, appropriation involves a lack of understanding of or appreciation for the historical context that influences what is being taken. Taking a sacred object from a historically marginalized culture and producing it as part of a Halloween costume is one example.

Cultural Denigration

Cultural denigration is when someone adopts an element of a culture with the sole purpose of humiliating or putting down people of that culture. The most obvious example of this is blackface, which originated as a way to denigrate and dehumanize Black people by perpetuating negative stereotypes.

Cultural Appreciation & Respect

Cultural appreciation, on the other hand, is the respectful borrowing of elements from another culture with an interest in sharing ideas and diversifying oneself . Examples would include learning martial arts from an instructor with an understanding of the practice from a cultural perspective or eating Indian food at an authentic Indian restaurant.

When done correctly, cultural appreciation can result in deeper understanding and respect across cultures as well as creative hybrids that blend cultures together.

Dehumanizes oppressed groups

Takes without permission

Perpetuates stereotypes

Ignores the meaning and stories behind the cultural elements

Celebrates cultures in a respectful way

Asks permission, provides credit, and offers compensation

Elevates the voices and experiences of members of a cultural group

Focuses on learning the stories and meanings behind cultural elements

Types of Cultural Appropropriation

There are four main types of cultural appropriation:

Exchange : This form is defined as a reciprocal exchange between two cultures that are approximately equal in terms of power and dominance.
Dominance : This type involves a dominant culture taking elements of a subordinate culture that has had a dominant culture forced upon it.
Exploitation : This type is defined as taking cultural elements of a subordinate culture without compensation, permission, or reciprocity.
Transculturation : This form involves taking and combining elements of multiple cultures, making it difficult to identify and credit the original source.

Context of Cultural Appropriation

Learning about the context of cultural appropriation is important for understanding why it is a problem. While some might not think twice about adopting a style from another culture, for example, the group with which the style originated may have historical experiences that make the person's actions insensitive to the group's past and current experience.

For example, consider a White American wearing their hair in cornrows. While Black Americans have historically experienced discrimination because of protective hairstyles like cornrows, White Americans, as part of the dominant group in the U.S., can often "get away" with appropriating that same hairstyle and making it "trendy," all the while not understanding or acknowledging the experiences that contributed to its significance in Black culture in the first place.

Examples of Cultural Appropriation

When considering examples of cultural appropriation, it's helpful to look at the types of items that can be a target. They include:

Clothing and fashion
Decorations
Intellectual property
Religious symbols
Wellness practices

In the United States, the groups that are most commonly targeted in terms of cultural appropriation include Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic and Latinx Americans , and Native Americans.

The following are some real-world examples of cultural appropriation to consider.

Rock 'N' Roll

In the 1950s, White musicians "invented" rock and roll; however, the musical style was appropriated from Black musicians who never received credit. In fact, music executives at the time chose to promote White performers over Black performers, reinforcing the idea that cultural appropriation involves a negative impact on a non-dominant group.

Sweat Lodge

In 2011, motivational entrepreneur James Arthur Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide after the death of three participants in his pseudo sweat lodge . This is an extreme example of the cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of Native American traditions.

Do you remember the "voguing" craze made popular by Madonna back in the 1990s? Voguing as a dance actually had its roots in the gay clubs of New York City and was pioneered by Black members of the LGBTQ+ community. Madonna defends her right to artistic expression, but the question remains—how many people still mistakenly think she invented voguing?

Team Mascots

There is a history of major sports teams in the United States and Canada being involved in the cultural appropriation of Indigenous cultures through their names and mascots. Past and present examples include the Chicago Blackhawks, Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, and Edmonton Eskimos. (The Redskins and Eskimos have since undergone name changes.)

"Redskin" is a derogatory term for Indigenous people, and the term "eskimo" has been rejected by the Inuit community.

How to Know If Something Is Cultural Appropriation

If you are unsure how to decide if something is cultural appropriation, here are some questions to ask yourself:

What is your goal with what you are doing?
Are you following a trend or exploring the history of a culture?
Are you deliberately trying to insult someone's culture or are you being respectful?
Are you purchasing something (e.g., artwork) that is a reproduction of a culture or an original?
How would people from the culture you are borrowing from feel about what you are doing?
Are there any stereotypes involved in what you are doing?
Are you using a sacred item (e.g., headdress) in a flippant or fun way?
Are you borrowing something from an ancient culture and pretending that it is new?
Are you crediting the source or inspiration of what you are doing?
If a person of the original culture were to do what you are doing, would they be viewed as "cool" or could they possibly face discrimination?
Are you wearing a costume (e.g., Geisha girl, tribal wear) that represents a culture?
Are you ignoring the cultural significance of something in favor of following a trend?

Explore these questions and always aim to show sensitivity when adopting elements from another culture. If you do realize that something you have done is wrong, accept it as a mistake and then work to change it and apologize for it .

If you aren't sure if something is considered cultural appropriation, you need to look no further than the reaction of the group from whom the cultural element was taken.

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation

You can avoid cultural appropriation by taking a few steps, such as these:

Ask yourself the list of questions above to begin to explore the underlying motivation for what you are doing.
Give credit or recognize the origin of items that you borrow or promote from other cultures rather than claiming them as your original ideas.
Take the time to learn about and truly appreciate a culture before you borrow or adopt elements of it. Learn from those who are members of the culture, visit venues they run (such as restaurants) and attend authentic events (such as going to a real luau).
Support small businesses run by members of the culture rather than buying mass-produced items from big box stores that are made to represent a culture.

A Word From Verywell

Cultural appropriation is the social equivalent of plagiarism with an added dose of denigration. It's something to be avoided at all costs, and something to educate yourself about.

In addition to watching your own actions, it's important to be mindful of the actions of corporations and be choosy about how you spend your dollars as that is another way of supporting members of the non-dominant culture. Do what you can when you can as you learn to do better.

National Conference for Community and Justice. What is cultural appropriation? .

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cultural competence in health and human services .

History. How the history of blackface is rooted in racism .

Rogers RA. From cultural exchange to transculturation: a review and reconceptualization of cultural appropriation . Commun Theory . 2006;16(4):474-503. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00277.x

Penal MA. Blonde braids and cornrows: Cultural appropriation of black hairstyles . ResearchGate . 2020. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30870.98885

Cherid M. "Ain't got enough money to pay me respect": Blackfishing, cultural appropriation, and the commodification of blackness . Cult Stud Critical Methodol . 2021;21(5):359-364. doi:10.1177/15327086211029357

Kleisath C. The costume of Shagri-La: Thoughts on white privilege, cultural appropriation, and anti-Asian racism . J Lesbian Stud . 2014;18:142-157. doi:10.1080/10894160.2014.849164

Fan Y. The identity of Pilsen—Spanish language presence, cultural appropriation, and gentrification . University of Chicago English Language Institute.

Reed T. Fair use as cultural appropriation. California Law Review.

Boxill-Clark C. In search of harmony in culture: An analysis of American rock music and the African American experience . Dominican University of California.

Harris D, Effron L. James Ray found guilty of negligent homicide in Arizona sweat lodge case . ABC News .

History. How 19th-century drag balls evolved into house balls, birthplace of voguing .

Sharrow E, Tarsi M, Nteta T. What's in a name? Symbolic racism, public opinion, and the controversy over the NFL's Washington Football team name . Race Social Prob . 2020;13:110-121. doi:10.1007/s12552-020-09305-0

Kaplan L. Inuit or eskimo: Which name to use? . Alaska Native Language Center.

National Institutes of Health. Cultural respect .

Thagard P. Cultural appropriation, appreciation, and denigration .

Williamson T. Yes, cultural appropriation can happen within the Indigenous community and yes, we should be debating it .

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

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Commentary: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible

K. Tempest Bradford

Elvis Presley, in the studio in 1956 — Presley's success was undoubtedly driven by the material he appropriated from black musicians. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Elvis Presley, in the studio in 1956 — Presley's success was undoubtedly driven by the material he appropriated from black musicians.

Last week, the New York Times published an op-ed titled "In Defense of Cultural Appropriation" in which writer Kenan Malik attempted to extol the virtues of artistic appropriation and chastise those who would stand in the way of necessary "cultural engagement." (No link, because you have Google and I'd rather not give that piece more traffic than it deserves.) What would have happened, he argues, had Elvis Presley not been able to swipe the sounds of black musicians?

Malik is not the first person to defend cultural appropriation. He joins a long list that, most recently, has included prominent members of the Canadian literary community and author Lionel Shriver.

But the truth is that cultural appropriation is indefensible. Those who defend it either don't understand what it is, misrepresent it to muddy the conversation, or ignore its complexity — discarding any nuances and making it easy to dismiss both appropriation and those who object to it.

At the start of the most recent debate , Canadian author Hal Niedzviecki called on the readers of Write magazine to "Write what you don't know ... Relentlessly explore the lives of people who aren't like you. ... Win the Appropriation Prize." Amid the outcry over this editorial, there were those who wondered why this statement would be objectionable. Shouldn't authors "write the Other?" Shouldn't there be more representative fiction?

Yes, of course. The issue here is that Niedzviecki conflated cultural appropriation and the practice of writing characters with very different identities from yourself — and they're not the same thing. Writing inclusive fiction might involve appropriation if it's done badly, but that's not a given.

Cultural appropriation can feel hard to get a handle on, because boiling it down to a two-sentence dictionary definition does no one any favors. Writer Maisha Z. Johnson offers an excellent starting point by describing it not only as the act of an individual, but an individual working within a " 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 ."

That's why appropriation and exchange are two different things, Johnson says — there's no power imbalance involved in an exchange. And when artists appropriate, they can profit from what they take, while the oppressed group gets nothing.

'Columbusing': The Art Of Discovering Something That Is Not New

Don't Call It 'The New Ramen': Why Pho Is Central To Vietnamese Identity

Dear white artists making music videos in india: step away from the 'holi' powder, author lionel shriver on cultural appropriation and the 'sensitivity police'.

I teach classes and seminars alongside author and editor Nisi Shawl on Writing the Other , and the foundation of our work is that authors should create characters from many different races, cultures, class backgrounds, physical abilities, and genders, even if — especially if — these don't match their own. We are not alone in this. You won't find many people advising authors to only create characters similar to themselves. You will find many who say: Don't write characters from minority or marginalized identities if you are not going to put in the hard work to do it well and avoid cultural appropriation and other harmful outcomes. These are different messages. But writers often see or hear the latter and imagine that it means the former. And editorials like Niedzviecki's don't help the matter.

Complicating things even further, those who tend to see appropriation as exchange are often the ones who profit from it.

Even Malik's example involving rock and roll isn't as simple as Elvis "stealing" from black artists. Before he even came along, systematic oppression and segregation in America meant black musicians didn't have access to the same opportunities for mainstream exposure, income, or success as white ones. Elvis and other rock and roll musicians were undoubtedly influenced by black innovators, but over time the genre came to be regarded as a cultural product created, perfected by, and only accessible to whites .

This is the "messy interaction" Malik breezes over in dismissing the idea of appropriation as theft: A repeating pattern that's recognizable across many different cultural spheres, from fashion and the arts to literature and food.

And this pattern is why cultures and people who've suffered the most from appropriation sometimes insist on their traditions being treated like intellectual property — it can seem like the only way to protect themselves and to force members of dominant or oppressive cultures to consider the impact of their actions.

This has lead to accusations of gatekeeping by Malik and others: Who has the right to decide what is appropriation and what isn't ? What does true cultural exchange look like? There's no one easy answer to either question.

But there are some helpful guidelines: The Australian Council for the Arts developed a set of protocols for working with Indigenous artists that lays out how to approach Aboriginal culture as a respectful guest, who to contact for guidance and permission, and how to proceed with your art if that permission is not granted. Some of these protocols are specific to Australia, but the key to all of them is finding ways for creativity to flourish while also reducing harm.

All of this lies at the root of why cultural appropriation is indefensible. It is, without question, harmful. It is not inherent to writing representational and inclusive fiction, it is not a process of equal and mutually beneficial exchange, and it is not a way for one culture to honor another. Cultural appropriation does damage, and it should be something writers and other artists work hard to avoid, not compete with each other to achieve.

For those who are willing to do that hard work, there are resources out there. When I lecture about this, I ask writers to consider whether they are acting as Invaders, Tourists, or Guests, according to the excellent framework Nisi Shawl lays out in her essay on appropriation . And then I point them towards all the articles and blog posts I've collected over time on the subject of cultural appropriation , to give them as full a background in understanding, identifying, and avoiding it as I possibly can.

Because I believe that, instead of giving people excuses for why appropriation can't be avoided (it can), or allowing them to think it's no big deal (it is), it's more important to help them become better artists whose creations contribute to cultural understanding and growth that benefits us all.

K. Tempest Bradford is a speculative fiction author, media critic, teacher, and podcaster. She teaches and lectures about writing inclusive fiction online and in person via WritingTheOther.com .

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Cultural appropriation: What it is and why it matters

2021, Sociology Compass

Cultural appropriation is a highly contested subject within the media and society more broadly, often provoking moral outrage. It is receiving increasing interest within the academy and the last 20 years have seen the publication of a number of important studies. Cultural appropriation takes many forms, covers a range of types of action, and has many consequences. It is not a uniform practice and needs to be assessed on a case by case basis but there are common themes and issues. What follows is a discussion of the key concepts and literature in the field.

Related Papers

British Journal of Aesthetics

James Young

Some writers have objected to cultural appropriation in the arts on the grounds that it violates cultures' property rights. Recently a paper by Erich Matthes and another by C. Thi Nguyen and Matthew Strohl have argued that cultural appropriation does not violate property rights but that it is nevertheless often objectionable. Matthes argues that cultural appropriation contributes to the oppression of disadvantaged cultures. Nguyen and Strohl argue that it violated the intimacy of cultures. This paper argues that neither Matthes nor Nguyen and Strohl succeed in showing that cultural appropriation is often objectionable.

Ethnicities

Peter Balint

Social media is full of accusations and counter-accusations of a wrong called ‘cultural appropriation’. Our goal in this article is to sift through these deliberations and identify what cultural appropriation is, what it is not, and what, if anything might be wrong with it. We begin by explaining why public discourse about cultural appropriation should matter to political theorists of multiculturalism, especially in the anti-immigrant mood that has engulfed many immigrant-receiving countries. We then place cultural appropriation under the umbrella of cultural engagement, before identifying two forms of problematic cultural engagement – cultural offence and cultural misrepresentation – that are often conflated with cultural appropriation. In the next section, we define cultural appropriation as the appropriation of something of cultural value, usually a symbol or a practice, to others. We go on to explain that two additional conditions must be present to define an act of cultural appropriation: the presence of significant contestation around the act of appropriation, and the presence of knowledge (or negligent culpability) in the act of appropriation. Although this account of cultural appropriation is normative, cultural appropriation is often wrong only in a trivial sense. One of the ways it can become more serious is through the presence of what we term ‘amplifiers’. The contextual conditions that can render acts of cultural appropriation more egregious include: the existence of a power imbalance between the cultural appropriator and those from whom the practice or symbol is appropriated; the absence of consent; and the presence of profit that accrues to the appropriator. Ultimately, we find that there are very few instances of seriously wrongful cultural appropriation, and that many of the actions decried as cultural appropriation may be wrongful, but not because they appropriate.

Amirah Lockhart

Entertainment has always been an outlet from reality, no matter the culture. Whether in the form of music or television, entertainment has something for everyone. Different factors influence the content of the entertainment being consumed, but culture is one of the most important and decisive elements. The appropriation of entertainers in their work is not always immediately obvious to all consumers of entertainment, but members of the affected culture are quick to notice and usually shut out. I argue that the cultural appropriation of Black culture in most cases facilitates results that are harmful and damaging to the Black community. My research methods will use firsthand recollection of recent examples of cultural appropriation in the entertainment industry by members of the African American community who range from intellectuals to creators to consumers and juxtapose their accounts with historical examples of appropriation as recorded in primary and secondary sources

Social Theory and Practice

Erich H Matthes

Is there something morally wrong with cultural appropriation in the arts? In this paper, I argue that the little philosophical work on this topic has been overly dismissive of moral objections to cultural appropriation. Nevertheless, I argue that philosophers have developed powerful conceptual tools that can aid in our understanding of objections that have been levied by other scholars and artists. I demonstrate this by bringing the literature on cultural appropriation into dialogue with recent philosophical work on harmful speech and epistemic injustice. I then consider a further philosophical problem for objections to cultural appropriation: namely, that they can seem to embroil us in harmful forms of cultural essentialism. I argue that focusing on the systematic nature of appropriative harms may allow us to sidestep the problem of essentialism, but not without cost.

Cultural Appropriation: Yours, mine, theirs, or a new intercultural?

deepsikha chatterjee

This article considers how by shifting culturally anchored design materials from one context to simplistic placement in decontextualized settings, cultural appropriation takes place in costume design. Building on that, it discusses how production teams need to be cognizant of such issues in the design process given that availability of such materials has historically been possible because acquisition has often aligned with political and commercial ambitions. Reviewing scholarship on appropriation that includes performance, costume, fashion and cultural studies, it questions how designing costumes through intercultural interaction might be navigated in a globalized context, where artists are excluded through travel bans, but cultural materials are permitted free movement. The article then discusses how to create productive intercultural projects with teams willing to invest in ethical engagement. By including case studies in which such processes were less successful as well as one that indeed created new intercultural exchanges, this article is one of the first texts to address this complex issue. It intends to engender future forward thinking conversations with practitioners and researchers on the thorny but urgent issue of cultural appropriation through costume.

Martin Zeilinger

This thesis works towards a theory of creative appropriation as critical praxis. Defining ‘appropriation’ as the re-use of already-authored cultural matter, I investigate how the ubiquity of aesthetically and commercially motivated appropriative practices has impacted concepts of creativity, originality, authorship and ownership. Throughout this thesis, appropriation is understood as bridging the artistic, political, economic, and scientific realms. As such, it strongly affects cultural and socio-political landscapes, and has become an ideal vehicle for effectively criticizing and, perhaps, radically changing dominant aesthetic, legal and ethical discourses regarding the (re)production, ownership and circulation of knowledge, artifacts, skills, resources, and cultural matter in general. Critical appropriation is thus posited as a political strategy that can draw together the different causes motivating appropriative processes across the globe, and organize them for the benefit of a ...

MA Photography, Central Saint Martins

Federico Pompei

The idea of writing a research paper about the cultural appropriation issue comes from the inner acknowledgement of being, somehow, randomly lucky to be born within what we describe as the privileged and dominant Western society. Since I moved to London, I encountered many different cultural identities and I had the chance to embrace some of them. I was fascinated by the ease with which I was able to appropriate some aspects that I honestly found interesting. Then I realised that the reason I was feeling free was that my European culture always allowed me to consider my individuality as strongly powerful. I started considering my approach to different cultures as inappropriate, especially for the ease with which I was allowed to have access, for instance behind a laptop, to the peculiar aspects that characterise a particular culture. A simple example - that will later emerge in this research paper - is my devotion to define hip-hop music as generational. Despite this music genre comes from a cultural heritage that clearly does not belong to mine, I have free access to it and I genuinely feel myself close to its contents that, though, do not resemble my everyday life. However, I do not want to take into analysis a specific debate about the socio-political condition of the cultural appropriation debate. On the contrary, I want to underline the paradoxical and hypocritical aspects of the established Western discourse towards cultural appropriation – and of the Western society in itself. In such a context, the strong relationship between power and knowledge, as a consequence of Colonial policy, defines the cultural question. For this reason, in order to talk about paradoxes, I will consider this research’s approach as a paradox in itself, by using Western philosophical ideas and applying them to my statement. I will start from a general overview of the contemporary condition we inhabit, considering the possibility of describing it as a cultural stasis. I will then pit the importance of some concepts of Immanuel Kant’s definition of “Enlightenment”, considered as an important starting point of the socio-cultural revolution in European societies. Then, I will introduce Michel Foucault’s philosophy of “Critique”, that represents the main concept of this research, and I will compare it to the general debate towards cultural appropriation. The entire research paper is aimed at finding a way to improve the debate, by taking into analysis the possible relationship between culture and philosophy. This approach will also exemplify the controversial dynamics behind different cultures’ exchanges, considered as a mirror of the 21st century Western society.

Richard Rogers

Politics, Groups, and Identities

Dianne Lalonde

Cultural appropriation is often called a buzzword and dismissed as a concept for serious engagement. Political theory, in particular, has been largely silent about cultural appropriation. Such silence is strange considering that cultural appropriation is clearly linked to key concepts in political theory such as culture, recognition, and redistribution. In this paper, I utilize political theory to advance a harm-based account of cultural appropriation. I argue that there are three potential harms with cultural appropriation: (1) nonrecognition, (2) misrecognition, and (3) exploitation. Discerning whether these harms are present or absent offers a means of placing specific instances of cultural appropriation on a spectrum of harmfulness. I conclude by considering how cultural appropriation, and associated appropriative harms, may be avoided.

Cultural appropriation - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

This controversial topic has sparked a lot of debate in recent years. It refers to the act of taking elements from one culture and using them in another culture without proper understanding or acknowledgment. To write a strong argumentative essay on cultural appropriation, it is essential to understand its vast background. This topic is important because it can lead to the erasure of the original tradition and can perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

Our team of experts has prepared a collection of free essay examples about cultural appropriation to help students get a better understanding of this topic. These examples cover various aspects, including the impact of empires and colonies, the historical context, and essay topics that students can use for their research paper. They also provide guidance on how to write an appropriate thesis statement for cultural appropriation, an outline, and how to structure the introduction and conclusion of the essay.

Checking essay samples before writing your own paper may be crucial because it helps to get a more profound understanding of how to approach the topic. By using these samples as a reference, students can strengthen their writing skills and develop a comprehension of the difference between appreciation and misappropriation of cultures.

Cultural Appropriation: from Misrepresentation to Respectful Engagement

Cultural Appropriation, by some it’s seen as an adoption culture being stolen away from a dominant group. Mostly, people view cultural appropriation as simply the adoption of some particular cultural aspects of another culture. Cultural appropriation is starting to become more evident in everyday life as in commodity designs, games, movies, celebrations, and fashion. However, regardless of the fact that some of the cultural foundations are adopted positively or without bad intentions, they negatively affect the subjects especially if borrowed […]

How does Culture Affect Society

There are multiple cultural aspects that influence not only the way we view others, but also how we interact with other people. Culture is a strong part of a person’s life because it determines their views and values. The way individuals grow up within their culture can easily follow throughout their adult life. As I am African American, my culture is very unique in its own way as are other cultures. My culture focuses on more sentimental things such as […]

The Concept of Diversity Among Various Groups

The concept of diversity among various groups emerges from culture, nationality, gender, ideologies, and even political stands. Realizing the deep connection of the issues that trend at international institutions involves examining the way people interact and how they treat the occurrence of scenarios within the environment. Issues of unrest on college campuses have emerged from time to time on the basis of differing religious opinions, cultural diversity, race, gender stereotypes, and other factors that contribute to conflicting issues. The reality […]

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Harmony Amid Cultural Appropriation: Balancing Shared Influences

In a choreography tangled human co-operation, the tilled appropriation hardens center stadium, beckoning we, for navigate thin balance between inspiration and insensitivity. This appearance, akin despite disturbed dance, ouvre he with layers discussion, creative potential, and search for understanding. Because we undertake this research, it becomes cave, that co-operation between an estimation and appropriation - nuanced implementation, asks examination intention, influence, and jamais-évolue nature the wary tilled exchange. In his kernel, the tilled appropriation includes advancement or integration elements despite […]

Harmony Amidst Cultural Crossroads: Appreciation, Respect, and the Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation

In a mosaic our global society, exchange and cast-iron cultures became everything and prevailing. However, it amalgamation - not always celebration melodious variety; it often co-ordinates beginning producing, celebrates so as the appropriation tilled sea lawyer. This appearance, that includes advancement elements despite one culture other, exploded warmed discussions, with supporters, discuss for an exchange and criticize, distinguish potentiel harm and disrespect, that it can call tilled. In his kernel, appropriation tilled is dynamic power co-operation, context, and conceptions […]

The Cultural Tug-of-War: Team Mascots and Sporting Traditions in the Realm of Sports

In the vibrant arena of sports, where passion and competition collide, a nuanced conversation has emerged around the theme of cultural appropriation. This discourse delves into the intricate interplay between team mascots and sporting traditions, shedding light on the often-overlooked dynamics that shape the identity of teams and their relationship with diverse cultures. Team mascots, those spirited symbols of unity and enthusiasm, sometimes find themselves entangled in the web of cultural appropriation. The use of Native American imagery, for instance, […]

Playing with Culture: a Critical Look at Team Mascots and Sporting Traditions

Sports have always been a melting pot of cultures, showcasing the vibrant tapestry of human diversity. However, in the spirited realm of team mascots and sporting traditions, a nuanced conversation emerges around the issue of cultural appropriation. It's a phenomenon that raises eyebrows, questioning the fine line between celebration and insensitivity. Team mascots, those quirky characters that rally fans and add a touch of whimsy to the sports arena, often draw inspiration from various cultures. Yet, the question lingers: when […]

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Winter 2024

All Shook Up: The Politics of Cultural Appropriation

In the era of global capitalism, imagining the lives of others is a crucial form of solidarity.

I first heard the phrase “Stay in your lane” a few years ago, in a writing workshop I was teaching. We were talking about a story that a student in the group, an Asian-American man, had written about an African-American family.

There was a lot to criticize about the story, including an abundance of clichés about the lives of Black Americans. I had expected the class to offer suggestions for improvement. What I hadn’t expected was that some students would tell the writer that he shouldn’t have written the story at all. As one of them put it, if a member of a relatively privileged group writes a story about a member of a marginalized group, this is an act of cultural appropriation and therefore does harm.

Arguments about cultural appropriation make the news every month or two. Two women from Portland, after enjoying the food during a trip to Mexico, open a burrito cart when they return home but, assailed by online activists, close their business within months. A yoga class at a university in Canada is shut down by student protests. The author of a young-adult novel, criticized for writing about characters from backgrounds different from his own, apologizes and withdraws his book from circulation. Such a wide variety of acts and practices is condemned as cultural appropriation that it can be hard to tell what cultural appropriation is .

Much of the literature on cultural appropriation is spectacularly unhelpful on this score. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, a professor of Africana studies at Williams College, says that the term “refers to taking someone else’s culture—intellectual property, artifacts, style, art form, etc.—without permission.” Similarly, Susan Scafidi, a professor of law at Fordham and the author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law , defines it as “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

These definitions seem enlightening, until you think about them. For one thing, the idea of “taking” something from another culture is so broad as to be incoherent: there’s nothing in these definitions that would prevent us from condemning someone for learning another language. For another, they rely on an idea—“permission”—that doesn’t, in this context, have any meaning.

Permission to use another group’s cultural expressions isn’t something that it’s possible to receive, because ethnicities, gender identities, and other such groups don’t have representatives authorized to grant it. When novelists, for example, write outside their own experience, publishing houses now routinely enlist “sensitivity readers” to make sure they say nothing that will offend—but once the books are published, novelists are on their own. There’s nothing they can do to rebut the accusation that the products of their imagination were “unauthorized,” nothing they can do to ward off the charge that they’ve caused harm by straying outside their lanes.

Something like the admonition to stay in one’s lane lay behind the protests that arose when Dana Schutz’s portrait of Emmett Till in his casket was displayed in an exhibit at the Whitney Museum in 2017—probably the most acrimonious chapter of the cultural appropriation discussion in recent memory. The artist Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the Whitney “with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed.” Black continued: “Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture. . . .”

Schutz’s response identified the problem with the idea of staying in one’s lane. “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America,” she said,

but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother. . . . Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection. I don’t believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have) but neither are we all completely unknowable.

She was saying that the lane that she shared with Mamie Till-Mobley by virtue of being a mother was just as salient as the lane of race.

A similar point was made by the political scientist Adolph Reed, in an article that highlighted the many ways in which the history of Black Americans and white Americans have been intertwined. Reed remarked that “one might argue that Schutz, as an American, has a stronger claim than [the British-born] Black to interpret the Till story. After all, the segregationist Southern order and the struggle against that order, which gave Till’s fate its broader social and political significance, were historically specific moments of a distinctively American experience.”

When Till-Mobley defied the authorities by displaying her son’s mutilated body in an open coffin, it was not with the aim of making his image available only for Black people. Till-Mobley said that “They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.” The author Christopher Benson, who co-authored Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America with Till-Mobley, wrote that “She welcomed the megaphone effect of a wider audience reached by multiple storytellers, irrespective of race: Bob Dylan’s song ‘Ballad of Emmett Till’; Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem ‘The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till’; James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie ; Bebe Moore Campbell’s novel Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine ; and Rod Serling’s numerous interpretations in his TV shows, including The Twilight Zone .”

In writing about cultural appropriation in art, then, the point isn’t that artists should be permitted to imagine the experiences of others as long as they can establish that they share a lane. There are no two people on the planet who don’t share a few lanes. The point is that artists imagine the experiences of others by virtue of a common humanity.

A common humanity: the phrase seems quaint, anachronistic, even as I type it. But I think the restoration of the dignity and prestige of the idea is one of the tasks of the contemporary left.

In the world of fiction—the area of artistic endeavor that I know best—imagining other lives is part of the job.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote, “We judge the great novelists by the quality of their awareness of others.” If Tolstoy is considered by many to be the greatest novelist who ever lived, this isn’t because of the beauty of his sentences or the shapeliness of his plots. It’s because he could bring to life so many wildly different characters, from the young girl preparing eagerly for her first ball to the old man dying in his bed, from the aristocrat on a foxhunt to the serf watching the aristocrat ride by. Tolstoy’s intense responsiveness to life jolts us into an awareness of how much more deeply we could be living; his intense responsiveness, in particular, to other people, jolts us into an awareness of how much more keenly we could be entering into the experiences of the people around us.

One of Tolstoy’s contemporaries, George Eliot, wrote explicitly about the effort to imagine the minds of others as a sort of moral necessity. In Middlemarch , Eliot introduces us to a vibrant young woman, Dorothea Brooke, who is about to marry a desiccated scholar named Casaubon. Dorothea naively believes that Casaubon is a man of great intellect and great humanity; everyone else who knows them sees what she can’t see: that she’s about to marry a cold, humorless, ungenerous man.

Around seventy-five pages into the novel, Eliot does a remarkable thing. She stops the action and says, in effect, we’ve heard what everyone else thinks of Casaubon, but what does Casaubon think about himself?

Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him. . . . Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world. . . .

This little passage is one of the most beautiful statements of the novelist’s creed that I know. Everyone is the center of a world. The novelist’s work is to honor this truth, and one of the ways in which a novelist does so is to imagine what it is to live in other people’s skin.

A common objection to sentiments like this holds that the freedom to imagine other lives has long been held almost exclusively by white writers, who have abused the freedom by creating inaccurate and demeaning images of others, and that it’s therefore especially important for white writers to stay in their lane. In this account, silence is recommended as a form of collective penance.

The novelist Kamila Shamsie has answered this argument thoughtfully. She writes that there is

something deeply damaging in the idea that writers couldn’t take on stories about the Other. As a South Asian who has encountered more than her fair share of awful stereotypes about South Asians in the British empire novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’m certainly not about to disagree with the charge that writers who are implicated in certain power structures have been guilty of writing fiction which supports, justifies and props up those power structures. I understand the concerns of people who feel that for too long stories have been told about them rather than by them. But it should be clear that the response to this is for writers to write differently, to write better. . . . The moment you say, a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories. Worse, you’re saying, as an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, unknowable. She’s other. Leave her and her nation to its Otherness.

Although it’s not uncommon to hear people say that writing from the point of view of someone outside one’s “identity group” is never permissible, critics and reviewers seem to have reached a softer consensus about the subject. They tend to say that fiction writers should of course claim the freedom to imagine the interior lives of others, but they must do so “responsibly.”

On one level, this is obviously reasonable. If someone wrote a story about a devout Muslim with a scene in which the main character came home from work and made himself a pork chop, it would be reasonable to tell the writer that he needed to find out a little more about Islamic customs and beliefs, and it would be reasonable to tell him to approach the subject more responsibly.

But if we think about it, this notion of responsibility has disquieting implications.

Isaac Babel, the great Russian-Jewish short story writer, published most of his work before the Stalin regime came to power. After Stalin began to imprison and execute writers and intellectuals, Babel tried to stay alive by staying silent. But even while he tried to display his allegiance to the regime, he couldn’t suppress his independence of mind. At a writers’ conference in Moscow in 1934, Babel said that “the party and government have given us everything and have taken from us only one right—that of writing badly. Comrades, let’s be honest, this was a very important right and not a little is being taken from us.”

Babel was saying that Stalin had taken away everything. Without the freedom to write badly, the writer has no freedom at all.

Just as writers need the freedom to write badly, they need the freedom to write irresponsibly. The best fiction is deeply moral—George Eliot’s creed of empathy is the highest ethical idea I can conceive of—and yet fiction couldn’t be written at all if it lost its connection to the world of irresponsible play.

After the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for publishing The Satanic Verses , some writers and intellectuals expressed their solidarity with Rushdie, while others murmured that he should have written more responsibly. Without admitting it to themselves, they were standing with his persecutors, implying that he brought the fatwa down upon himself through his provocative literary behavior. The right to offend, the right to satirize, even the right to get things wrong—all of these are precious, and anyone who believes oneself a friend of art and literature needs to defend them without qualification.

I should make it clear that I’m not saying that people who grouse about cultural appropriation are as bad as Stalin or the Ayatollah. I’m saying they don’t respect the anarchic energies of art.

When Diaghilev commissioned Jean Cocteau to write the libretto for one of his ballets, his only words of instruction were, “Astonish me!” What young artists today are being told is something more along the lines of “Watch your step!”

Just as the critics of cultural appropriation have a puritanical view of art, they have a puritanical view of culture as well. Let’s look again at Susan Scafidi’s definition: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

We imagine the arbiter of cultural appropriation as a kindergarten teacher, sternly telling the children not to use one another’s toys without asking. But this isn’t the way culture develops. There is no product of culture that isn’t the result of mixing—that isn’t the result of taking things without permission—from the meals we make to the music we enjoy to the language that I’m using to write this essay.

Much of the mixing has been on horribly unequal terms. But not all of it. In our current way of looking at it, cultural appropriation is always pictured as a vampire-like dominant culture draining the blood of a minority culture too weak to defend itself. A more confident social justice movement might see some of these borrowings as evidence of the strength of popular creativity. Ralph Ellison, in a review of a book about music and race in America, was getting at this idea when he wrote of the origins of the blues as “enslaved and politically weak men successfully imposing their values upon a powerful society through song. . . .”

In many of his essays, written as far back as sixty years ago, Ellison turns out to be one of the surest guides to the controversies around cultural appropriation that we have. Here he is in his essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”:

It is here, on the level of culture . . . that elements of the many available tastes, traditions, ways of life, and values that make up the total culture have been ceaselessly appropriated and made their own—consciously, unselfconsciously, or imperialistically—by groups and individuals to whose own backgrounds and traditions they are historically alien. Indeed, it was through this process of cultural appropriation (and misappropriation) that Englishmen, Europeans, Africans, and Asians became Americans. The Pilgrims began by appropriating the agricultural, military and meteorological lore of the Indians, including much of their terminology. The Africans, thrown together from numerous ravaged tribes, took up the English language and the biblical legends of the ancient Hebrews and were “Americanizing” themselves long before the American Revolution. . . . Everyone played the appropriation game. . . . Americans seem to have sensed intuitively that the possibility of enriching the individual self by such pragmatic and opportunistic appropriations has constituted one of the most precious of their many freedoms. . . . [I]n this country things are always all shook up, so that people are constantly moving around and rubbing off on one another culturally.

Ellison’s friend and comrade-in-arms Albert Murray had a similar perspective. “American culture,” he wrote, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. . . . Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

After you spend time reading Ellison and Murray, critics of cultural appropriation begin to seem like members of a weird purity cult, issuing edicts and prohibitions against the kinds of mixing that are an inevitable part of life.

For an eloquent and lively example of a viewpoint largely opposed to the one I’m expressing here, I’d recommend Lauren Michele Jackson’s White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . . . And Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation . Jackson writes with wit and gusto about these issues, at times sounding like an observer in the tradition of Ellison and Murray. “Appropriation is everywhere, and is also inevitable. . . . The idea that any artistic or cultural practice is closed off to outsiders at any point in time is ridiculous, especially in the age of the internet.”

But although much of her book celebrates this kind of mingling, when she considers examples of white artists who are influenced by Black culture, she tends to find the consequences malign. “When the powerful appropriate from the oppressed,” she writes, “society’s imbalances are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged. In America, white people hoard power like Hungry Hungry Hippos. In the history of problematic appropriation in America, we could start with the land and crops commandeered from Native peoples along with the mass expropriation of the labor of the enslaved. The tradition lives on. The things black people make with their hands and minds, for pay and for the hell of it, are exploited by companies and individuals who offer next to nothing in return.”

But if the practice of cultural mingling, as Jackson so vividly demonstrates, is as natural and inevitable as breathing, it can’t be the practice itself that’s the cause of the inequalities she rightly condemns. The causes must lie elsewhere.

Listen to the historian Barbara J. Fields:

Everybody inhabits many [cultures], all simultaneous, all overlapping. It was true for Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and it is true for us today, sharing a history beyond our individual experience and therefore sharing the culture that history has produced. Differences of political standing and economic power ensure that some people can monetize a shared cultural inheritance more than others, just as some enjoy greater wealth and higher incomes, live in better housing, receive better educations, and live longer and healthier lives. But that is because of political and economic exploitation, not cultural appropriation. . . . [P]olitical action, not cultural policing, is needed to tackle it.

It makes little sense to condemn an artist or entertainer for taking something from another population on unequal terms while failing to note that all of us—anyone who might read Lauren Michele Jackson’s book, anyone who might read this essay—are doing the same thing during every moment of our lives. In a globalized capitalist economy, every object we buy or use or wear or touch is likely to have been made by workers without significant labor rights in faraway places.

The way forward isn’t to pursue a dream of staying within our lanes. (Stop wearing clothes! Stop using phones! Stop eating food you didn’t grow yourself!) The only way forward is for those of us who are not among the one percent to make common cause in order to put an end to these inequities.

The more one reads about cultural appropriation, the more difficult it is to resist the conclusion that the preoccupation with staying in your lane is a sort of counterfeit politics.

Critics of cultural appropriation believe themselves to be involved in a significant political activity, yet the objects of their criticism are usually people who are relatively powerless—the yoga teacher, the women with the burrito cart, the visual artist, the novelist who dares to venture out of her lane. It would be hard to make the case that the critique of cultural appropriation constitutes an assault on unjust hierarchies in our society, since those who hold real power are rarely the objects of this critique.

Charges of cultural appropriation are also often made against successful artists and celebrities, from Elvis Presley to Kim Kardashian to Jeanine Cummins, the author of American Dirt —but it would be fanciful to say that entertainers represent the source of power and unjust hierarchy in our society either.

In 2013, the internet spent a few minutes mulling over the question of whether the band Arcade Fire was guilty of cultural appropriation when it put out the album Reflektor , which was heavily influenced by the music of Haiti. It wasn’t a major controversy, as internet controversies go, but it was significant enough to make its way to the pages of the Atlantic . (Finally, most of the people who discussed this were willing to give the band a pass, since its frontman, Win Butler, had been immersed in the music of Haiti for years, and his wife and bandmate, Régine Chassagne, is of Haitian descent.)

Not too long before this, ordinary Haitians had endured a different form of appropriation, a form that went unremarked upon by those who were pondering the question of how much disapproval to express toward Arcade Fire.

In 2009, Haiti’s parliament raised the national minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. Foreign manufacturers, along with the U.S. State Department, immediately pushed back, prevailing on Haiti to lower textile workers’ minimum wage to 31 cents an hour. This came to about $2.50 per day, in a country whose estimated daily cost of living for a family of three was about $12.50.

Powerful corporations from the most powerful country on earth exerted pressure that intensified the destitution of people in Haiti. Among the corporations were Levi Strauss and Hanes, whose CEO was at that time receiving a compensation package of about $10 million a year. Yet you could have searched Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the internet for a long time before finding any Americans who cared or even knew about any of this, even after WikiLeaks and the Nation brought it to light in 2011.

In 2017, the two Portland women who’d opened a burrito cart closed their business after being assailed by online activists for appropriating the cuisine of Mexico. The following year, when the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company fired dozens of workers who were trying to launch an independent trade union at its factory in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, few in the world of online outrage took any notice.

Of course, the pressure exerted on working people in Haiti and Mexico is the same pressure that corporate power exerts all over the world, including within this country, where capital’s long war against labor rights and social welfare provisions seems to grow more intense every year. This is true appropriation—the stealing of people’s life chances, the repression of their opportunity for leisure and health and safety, the bulldozing of any possibility of equitable local development. The malefactors here aren’t women running a burrito cart or musicians soaking up influences or white models wearing dreadlocks or writers trying to dream their way into other people’s lives, but corporate actors making decisions that degrade us all.

Sometimes I wish we were equipped with an extra sense, a sense that would allow us to perceive how connected we are to one another. When I put on my shirt, I would feel the labor of the garment worker in Nicaragua who pieced it together; when I use my phone, I would be aware of the child laborer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who mined the cobalt for its battery; when I peel an orange, I would feel the presence of the worker in Florida who picked it.

Lacking such a sense, we need to cultivate the sympathetic imagination. We need to try to imagine the lives of others.

So I’m not finally arguing that when artists try to imagine the lives of others, we should lighten up and see their efforts as basically harmless. I’m arguing that imagining the lives of others is an essential part of the effort to bring into being a more human world.

We can embrace a sort of cultural solipsism that holds that different groups have nothing in common, or we can understand that our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of people we’ll never know. We can deny what we owe to one another, or we can seek to retrieve the vision of a shared humanity. We can choose to believe that it’s virtuous to try to stay in our lanes, or we can choose to learn about the idea of solidarity. It’s an old idea, but for those of us concerned with freedom and equality, it’s still the best idea we have.

Brian Morton ’s novels include Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon .

Socialist thought provides us with an imaginative and moral horizon.

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What Is Cultural Appropriation Exactly, and How Do I Avoid It?

Here's how to avoid a cultural faux pas.

What is the definition of cultural appropriation?

Cultural appropriation, also called cultural mis appropriation, occurs when a person from one culture adopts the fashion, iconography, trends or styles from a culture that's not their own . Some of the most harmful examples of cultural appropriation occur when when the culture being appropriated is one of a historically oppressed group.

What is cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation?

The line between what differentiates cultural appropriation from cultural appreciation can be razor-thin, not to mention highly controversial. Some say appropriation doesn't exist because no culture is completely original and uninfluenced by any other. Others believe creatives like designers and musical artists get a pass because their art is open to discussion and interpretation. The key to practicing appreciation rather than appropriation is to understand the culture you're borrowing from, including acknowledging its history of oppression and marginalization. It helps to support creators from that culture too, when possible.

How do I avoid cultural appropriation?

One you've researched a culture, does that mean you have permission to use it freely? Not exactly. Good intentions don't automatically absolve us from the harm that cultural appropriation does to marginalized communities. Before you "borrow" from a culture, do a gut check:

Is what I'm doing furthering a stereotype?
Am I using something sacred to another culture — a Native American headdress, a religious symbol — in a flippant or "fun" way outside its intended use?
Am I engaging with a piece of ancient culture as if it's new? Am I neglecting to credit the source of my inspiration?

If you can safely answer "no" to all of those questions, you will probably be able to avoid cultural appropriation. Still, think of it this way: If you feel the need to ask whether you're culturally appropriating, it may be safer to avoid the outfit or practice that leads you to ask the question in the first place.

What are some examples of cultural appropriation?

Some Halloween costumes deemed offensive , such as a "gypsy," Rastafarian or geisha, are considered cultural appropriation because those outfits play into stereotypes that have led to the mistreatment or misunderstanding of a group of people. But they're far from the only ones. Here are a few more examples of cultural appropriation:

The Washington Football Team

cultural appropriation nfl oct 03 washington football team at falcons

Sports teams have a long history of cultural appropriation, but some have started to do the right thing. The Washington Football Team changed its name in July 2020 . Other teams, like the Cleveland Indians and the Atlanta Braves are still holding on to their names, even though they can considered offensive to Native American people.

cultural appropriation lizzo during a saving our selves a bet covid19 effort

The popular recording artist raised eyebrows for her February 2020 Rolling Stone cover in which she was criticized for wearing a traditional headdress from Cambodian and Thai cultures. "If it was appreciation, the story would support the culture that is being depicted. But it's aimed only towards the Black community. I'm all for standing up for your culture, but don't use someone else's to talk about your own," one Instagram commenter responded.

Kylie Jenner

cultural appropriation 2020 vanity fair oscar party hosted by radhika jones

Not only has Kylie Jenner been accused of stealing designs from a New York City streetwear artist for her own brand, but has also allegedly built her $1 billion fortune on exploiting Black women . She's also gotten called out for her hair on a number of occasions.

Kim Kardashian West

Kim Kardashian has gotten lots of flak over the years for styling her hair in Fulani braids, or cornrows, a traditionally Black hairstyle. In 2018, Kardashian West responded to controversy over her referring to her blonde braids as "Bo Derek braids." "I know the origin of where they came from and I'm totally respectful of that," she told Bustle . "I'm not tone deaf...I do get it." She also came under fire again in 2019 for naming her shapewear line Kimono, before changing the name to Skims.

For Halloween 2013, Rihanna dressed up in classic chola style — thin arched eyebrows, flannel shirt buttoned at the top, gold hoop earrings, baggy khakis — associated with a modern subculture of Mexican American women. "Privileged people want to borrow the 'cool' of disenfranchised people of color, but don't have to face any of the discrimination that accompanies it," wrote Julianne Escobedo Shepherd . Rihanna, who repeated parts of the look on the September issue of Vogue UK , said she thought it was "ladylike but punk." Her outfit on a 2019 cover of Harper's Bazaar China in which she wears traditional Chinese clothing sparked similar criticism.

The Queen of Pop has been pushing buttons since the '80s, and her attire for the 2018 MTV Video Music Awards landed her back in the headlines . Madonna took the stage in an ensemble inspired by the North African Amazigh people. Some accused her of disrespecting the culture , while others said it was an honor . Madonna didn't respond to the criticism, but has repeatedly brushed off accusations of cultural appropriation. "I'm not appropriating anything," she has said. "I'm inspired and I'm referencing other cultures. That is my right as an artist."

Miley Cyrus

Over the years, Miley Cyrus morphed from Hannah Montana to a person who wears her hair in Bantu knots while twerking in front of Robin Thicke . Lately, it's a 2017 Billboard interview about her latest, more rootsy style, that had people talking about cultural appropriation. Asked about why she seemed to be distancing herself from Black culture, Cyrus said, "It was too much 'Lamborghini, got my Rolex...' I am so not that." Said one commenter on Twitter , "Miley Cyrus wore hip hop culture like a costume. Abandoned it. Stereotypes it now."

Gordon Ramsay

The Hell's Kitchen chef got into hot water of his own recently after the opening of his new Asian-inspired London restaurant Lucky Cat. Food critic Angela Hui was not impressed with Ramsay's choice of head chef for the eatery, a man whose research into the cuisine consisted of traveling "back and forth to Asia for many months." Hui also called out the menu's interchangeable use of Chinese and Japanese ingredients. "Chinese? Japanese? It's all Asian who cares," she wrote on Instagram. Ramsey called her remarks "derogatory and offensive."

Selena Gomez

Selena Gomez donned a bindi , a colored dot traditionally worn on the center of the forehead by Indian women of various religious and cultural communities, for several performances in 2013. The bindi can symbolize connection with the "third eye" or as a way to distinguish married women. "The bindi is an auspicious religious symbol that should not be thrown around loosely," Rajan Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism said. But Gomez isn't backing down. "I've learned a lot about the culture, and I think it's beautiful," she said . "I think it's fun to incorporate that into the performance."

Karlie Kloss

A Native American war bonnet is a feathered piece of headgear traditionally worn by respected leaders. While certainly not the only person to wear the headdress in an out-of-context setting (here's looking at you, festival attire) the reaction to one model Karlie Kloss at a Victoria's Secret runway show in 2012 was swift. "Any mockery, whether it's Halloween or Victoria's Secret, they are spitting on us," said Erny Zah, a spokesperson for the Navajo Nation. Kloss later tweeted an apology . "I am deeply sorry if what I wore during the VS show offended anyone," she wrote.

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Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation: Why it Matters

By Kelsey Holmes, Greenheart Club Program Assistant

Cultural exchange and appreciation are the core values of Greenheart Club. Learning to understand a culture that is different than your own is so important in becoming a global citizen and leader. Through our participants, we’ve heard so many wonderful stories of people of different backgrounds coming together to exchange ideas through service.

It is important to understand, however, that there is a difference between appreciation and appropriation . Appreciation is when someone seeks to understand and learn about another culture in an effort to broaden their perspective and connect with others cross-culturally. Appropriation on the other hand, is simply taking one aspect of a culture that is not your own and using it for your own personal interest. Appropriation could mean of purchasing a piece of jewelry or clothing that may have important cultural significance to that culture, but simply using it as a fashion statement. It could be taking a photo of a ritual ceremony simply for the sake of getting as many likes on Facebook as possible . Regardless, taking a part of another culture without understanding what it truly means can be harmful not only to those whose culture you are using but also to those with whom you share it.

So, how can you explore and take part in a culture without exploiting it for your own use? Here are a few great ways!

Think about: Would I be offended if someone wore an important religious symbol from my culture without understanding what it truly means?
Think about: I recently purchased a beautiful piece of handmade jewelry. Did I listen to the artist who created the piece to learn more about his or her background, what their work means to them, and how it fits into the culture of that place? If not, I may be appropriating instead of appreciating.
Think about: Did I just take a piece of someone’s culture to use for my own benefit, without knowing the significance behind it? Did I ask about the origins of the custom, item, or symbol? This is so important in understanding and appreciating a culture.
Think about: Am I equally interested in sharing a piece of my own language, food, customs, and traditions? Chances are, this person is just as excited to learn about my culture as I am about theirs. What an incredible part of cultural exchange and appreciation!

Still unsure? Use the infographic below to check yourself and make sure that you are respecting and appreciating other cultures in an appropriate way!

At Greenheart Club, our participants are actively engaged in mutual exchange and cultural appreciation. What are some ways that you show your appreciation of other cultures?

24 thoughts on " Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation: Why it Matters "

Trying to learn here. Interesting that, if I wear a piece of jewelry with cultural significance, my INTENTION is everything. If I got to know the artist, heard her story, etc. that is appreciation. But how does anyone else know my intention behind wearing the piece? They could assume I’m appropriating instead of appreciating.

Also, being of Irish ancestry, I’ve always taken offense at the celebration of St. Patrick. What a farce. An excuse for people to get drunk and act inappropriately. But have I ever stated this in this way? No. People would tell me I’m a party pooper.

Hi Tara- thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! We agree that there is a fine line between appreciation and appropriation and that we each interpret our cultural identities in different ways. I think that we have all experienced people crossing that line at times, but the important thing is to talk about it and keep learning. We encourage you to keep exploring these ideas along with us! Thanks for reading! – Greenheart

Tara, I am of Scot/Irish/Dutch and German decent. I completely agree with you about St. St. Patrick’s Day.

I was at a store that had shot glasses attached to green beads. Earrings with tiny beer mugs attached. There were buttons, “Irish for a Day.” That wasn’t Cultural Appropriation, that was Cultural Disrespect. No, you cannot be Irish for a day. It portrays the Irish people as a bunch of drunkards. I called the corporate offices to express this.

I would be equally offended if Sombreros, and more necklaces with Shot glass came out for Cinco De Mayo. A Caucasian wearing a Sombrero, not cool at all. Thankfully, the stores have enough sense not to do this practice.

Now, if we could get them on board for St. Patrick’s Day. Shamrocks, fine, earrings, the same. Please wear green as to not be pinched. I’m ok with this also. Promoting that Irish people are drunkards. I’m not happy with that at all.

Thank you for allowing this dialogue.

Good morning A colleague of mind and I was exchanging thoughts and she sent this to me in confirmation of my conclusion of years of experience as a “community leader” over the past 30 years. And as Executive Director of the Southampton African American Museum located in the heart of the village of Southampton aka “Da HAMPTONS” I personally have Always loved learning and embracing other culturals and also proudly sharing mine. We MUST tell OUR story.

Our mission is “to promote and an understanding and appreciation of AFRICAN American culture by creating programs that will preserve the past, encourage learning and enhance the life of the community. Southampton African American Museum will research and collect local history, produce media events, create expand community celebrations. The Southampton African American Museum will TREASURE the past, TEND to the present, and TRANSFORM the future.” I appreciate you and will like to keep in communications.

Hi Brenda, Your mission sounds admirable and we’re so glad you came across our organization! Thanks for sharing – we agree that it is SO important to learn, embrace, and promote cultural exchange and understanding!

I just stumbled upon your amazing site. This is my question? I am Scot/Irish/Dutch and German.

In the 1970’s it seems everyone wore everything as a fashion statement. A good example was Turquoise jewelry in silver. Our late Mother had several pieces our late Father purchased for her as gifts. They were purchased at department stores.

To my knowledge they do not have Native American symbols. I know the Turquoise is real, as is the silver. Were they crafted by Native Americans? This is unknown.

Would it be considered cultural appropriation to wear a bracelet or a necklace every once in awhile? These are bold pieces. Does Turquoise have a special meaning to Native Americans?

I would simple like to wear it in honor of our late Mother. She passed away when I was 23 years old. However, I know times have changed and I certainly do not wish to offend Native peoples.

Thank you for your answer.

Hi L. Orris, What a great and thoughtful question! As someone who is not a member of the Indigenous community – I cannot answer this! I think another important aspect of understanding cultural appreciation and the difference between appropriation is also exploring the resources you use, and working hard not to make generalizations about a community, or asking someone to speak on behalf of a whole community. I’d encourage you to do a bit more research into the meaning behind turquoise in jewelry for the Native American community and to look for resources that come from the community.

Good luck! And we’d love for you to comment back if you have found some more information on this!

From the culture of Christianity. What is it when Christ Jesus or Christian symbols are used in (IN SO CALLED ART OR ART) in a demeaning way? Does that count in your organization and the continued learned path for all of us. Or do you not consider that a culture even though you acknowledge religious symbols and leaders of other cultures? Please do not give the same single generic answer as all the previous ones given. Thank you.

Hi David, we understand this is certainly a difficult topic, so we’d just like to clarify that this blog is to serve as a platform in welcoming and acknowledging varying opinions and comments. We thank you for offering your input, as conversation is necessary here. As an organization acknowledging the differences between appreciation and appropriation, we have found that it’s commonly misunderstood, since it is not a topic often considered in daily conversation. Unfortunately, we have all experienced this line being crossed in inappropriate ways. It goes back to the question of where do we draw the line between “appropriate” forms of a given culture and more damaging patterns of cultural appropriation? We appreciate your perspective and example, and we encourage you to continue exploring these ideas to bring increased awareness and clarity to this topic. Thanks for reading! – Greenheart

Hi, I live in New Mexico and Pueblo, Navajo, and Hopi people here are artisans. A huge amount of their income comes from selling traditional jewelry, rugs, pottery, etc. If you were not meant to wear it (proudly) they would not be selling it. I also make jewelry and incorporate turquoise and other stones into it. At the end of the day, this is how people make a living. If people stop wearing it for fear of offending, they stop getting an important source of income. When I was a kid I visited the Indian Cultural Center in Albuquerque with my good friend and her Mescalero Apache mom. They encouraged me to purchase jewelry that I admired there. I’d say, don’t worry about it. Really.

I’m curious as to white people and non black people of color wearing dreads. Is it ok for them to really be wearing it even if they know the pain other people go through because they wear it. I as a black man wouldnt wear another cultures garb or hairstyle that has a history of discrimination. And also do white people have culture?

Hi Taylor, Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! We agree that there is a fine line between appreciation and appropriation and that it can be difficult to come up with a definitive answer to many of these questions, especially since we each interpret our cultural identities in different ways. Many of us have experienced people crossing that line at times, and perhaps the example you cite is one of those times. I encourage you to continue learning and exploring – what defines culture? What might make up culture for a group of people? And what might inform other’s decisions to make a cultural choice that could be seen as offensive? Good luck – we are all always learning!

Best, Greenheart

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I’m sorry, but you all make this so complicated. I’m Apache and Pueblo. If you buy a necklace from me. I expected when I sold it you would be wearing it. If I sell you something at “Indian Market” with thousands of Native people around it does not have ceremonial significance.. If a Native Person sells you something “holy or Ceremonial” it will not be $300. People, please have common sense. You don’t buy a piece of clothing, weaving, pottery, jewelry, etc. and replicate it and sell it. It is the same with all art. I just think many people love our art and think they can make money off it. THAT, my dear is Cultural Appropriation.

Thanks for weighing in and sharing your opinions! It’s true that some people find this subject a bit more complicated than others. It’s an important conversation- and we appreciate you adding your perspective so our community can continue to share and learn from one another! – Greenheart

Thank you so much Mitra. I am Caucasian and live in the Pacific Northwest. We have purchased some pieces from Northwest indigenous artists, and display them in our home. Each one does have some cultural significance or symbolism, and we take the time to learn what it means, but primarily, we enjoy our art for its beauty and what it represents of our local history. Lately, though, I’ve been reading a lot about cultural appropriation, and wonder if we’re guilty of some kind of exploitation. On the other hand, I prefer to support our local artists (who are relying on sales) . Any thoughts? (None of our art wasn’t made for sale)

If my friend, a POC raised in a house of black women, wanted to do my (quite white) hair, would that be okay? My friend sees it as cultural exchange (like her mom). How would people react? is this still appropriation if I have enough respect to just wear a hair style and not profit off of it?

Hi there, thanks for weighing in and sharing your thoughts with us! We do believe that there is a major benefit in asking questions and openly addressing these important topics, though there may not be a definitive answer here. To better interpret varying perspectives we should ask ourselves what defines culture? What might make up culture for a group of people? And what might inform other’s decisions to make a cultural choice that could be seen as offensive? We encourage you to continue exploring these ideas that build a community of conversation. Thanks for reading! – Greenheart

Very interesting article. I wonder though — if I wish to learn Yoga, is it only appropriate to attend classes that are taught exclusively by Asian men or women? How about meditation? Is it cultural appropriation if the instructors (in America or Europe) of Yoga, meditation, or Buddhism are white men or women because they are ‘selling’ and profiting from their classes? Also, I consider myself a secular Buddhist. I often wear a mala bracelet and always wear a silver pendant with the Om symbol. I know what they mean. I wear them with intent and respect. They are not merely a fashion accessory for me. But I’m a white woman. So, anyone seeing me with my mala and pendant might think “cultural appropriation”, but in reality, they reflect my (true and heartfelt) beliefs. I never came across a single book, video, or real-life Asian teacher of Buddhism or mediation that assessed my ability to be taught and advance in those subjects based on my cultural origin being Asian – or non-Asian. My very first basic introduction to Buddhism was from my friend’s Japanese mother, whom I met when I was a teenager. She never hesitated nor implied Buddhism wasn’t appropriate for me because I wasn’t Japanese, or Chinese, or Tibetan, etc. She taught me chants, how to set up an altar, use the bell & Dorje, etc. Granted that was many, MANY years ago, but are things so different now that this would be viewed in a different light today? I find it all very confusing (sometimes) because I often see the most strident calling-out of cultural appropriation done by people who aren’t even of the culture they claim someone is being offending. If that makes sense…

Thank you so much for your comment! You offer some great insight to the questions we must always ask ourselves. It’s important that we continue to openly discuss the topic of cultural appropriation with one another, especially in this world of transformation and in times of confusion or discomfort. We encourage you to continue learning and sharing your thoughts with us and others in your network. Thanks for reading! – Greenheart

Mattie, Yoga has been done in many different cultures and heritages for thousands of years. To gain spiritual insight through a daily practice such as yoga could never be cultural appropriation.

If I were to carve and create my own totem pole to act as a sort of family crest/storyteller, which according to my research, should be in line with a family or house pole(although I live alone, so it wouldn’t serve an entire family or clan), would that be appropriation? Most of my culture comes from the UK and northern Europe, (although I do embrace the Scottish and Irish aspects, that I know of) so branching out is very interesting to me

13 Cultural Appropriation Examples

cultural appropriation definition examples

Cultural appropriation is the co-optation of elements, customs, or practices of one culture by another culture without acknowledgment or consent. Usually, the appropriating culture is in a relation of domination to the appropriated culture.

Cultural appropriation is important to understand because it very casually hides under its garb sinister histories of ethnic, racial, or religious conflict and colonization.

Cultural appropriation is distinct from cultural exchange, in which two cultures participate in each other’s rituals and customs on an equal footing.

The earliest known use of the term cultural appropriation is credited to Arthur E. Christy (1899 – 1946), a professor of literature at the University of Illinois (Martin, 2018). Professor Christy was born in China to missionary parents and was thus sensitive to how elements of one culture can be abused by members of another, dominant culture when they are taken from their original setting without a complete understanding of the context they are embedded in.

Examples of Cultural Appropriation

1. native american war bonnet.

Native American war bonnets are among the most instantly recognizable artifacts of Native American culture , and for this reason, often the most appropriated items of Native American culture.

A war bonnet is a piece of headgear made using eagle feathers and beads and worn either during battle or on special ceremonial occasions by a select few members of the community. The wearer of the war bonnet is seen to have earned the right to adorn the headgear through exceptional acts of valor and courage.

However, until large-scale awareness about cultural appropriation spread, war bonnets were used as fashion accessories by non-natives. They were especially popular as headgear for music festivals. Several Indian tribes found this casual display of an item sacred to their culture offensive and demanded a ban on their use by non-natives (Rota, 2014).

Related Article: Is The Evil Eye Cultural Appropriation?

2. Native American Iconography in Sports

Similarly, the use of Native American iconography as a part of American sports culture has long been contested and criticized. A prominent example is the American Football team Washington Redskins.

The word “Redskin” is a pejorative term used for Native Americans in the US and Canda, rooted in the language of settler colonialism. (McWhorter, 2015) In the 19th century, several American states offered rewards to settlers for extermination Native Americans, and bringing in “Redskin scalps”.

The mascot and logo of the Washington Redskins featured the head of a Native American man adorned with eagle feathers. Collectively, the use of the word Redskin and the appropriation of Native American imagery on its logo were seen by Native Americans as instances of cultural appropriation.

In 2022, the team changed its name to Washington Commanders, bowing to long standing demands from protestors. Other teams that changed their names following similar protests were the Cleveland Indians, Edmonton Eskimos and Golden State Warriors.

Teams currently under pressure to change their names and their Native American iconography are Atlanta Braves, Chicago Blackhawks, and Kansas City Chiefs. The Atlanta Braves have in particular come under repeated criticism for their use of foam tomahawks as the team’s mascot. Native Americans have called the use of foam tomahawks demeaning to their culture, and demanded that it be banned. (Anderson, 2017)

3. The Svastika and the Hakenkreuz

Svastika is a Sanskrit word that literally translates to “that which brings health and prosperity”. The symbol has been used as a sacred symbol by Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists in the Indian subcontinent for millennia (Zimmer, 2017).

With the spread of Buddhism outwards from India to East and Central Asia, the symbol came to be used in the religious iconography of several other countries such as Japan and Mongolia.

Other variants of the symbol have been in use by indigenous cultures in Africa and the Americas for centuries too.

However, in the 1930s, the German government appropriated a version of the symbol as its party insignia, which today has come to be one of the most easily identifiable symbols of imperialism. The German word Hakenkreuz, meaning a crooked cross, was used along with the Sanskrit symbol for the new dictatorship.

To distinguish the Svastika from the Nazi symbol, several Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist organizations have called for a clear distinction between the Svastika, which is a religious symbol of peace and harmony, and the Hakenkreuz, which is a more accurate descriptor of the co-opted symbol.

4. The Arab Keffiyeh

The Keffiyeh is a headscarf worn by Arab men as part of their traditional attire. The Keffiyeh is either a white or a red-and-white checkered scarf kept in place by a cord known as the agal.

Traditionally worn to keep the head safe from the intense heat of the Arabian desert, the Keffiyeh has become a symbol of Arab identity. More recently, it has acquired the status of an emblem of solidarity with Palestinian nationalism. As a result, its use by non-Arabs wishing to show their support for the Palestinian cause has spiked.

To meet this increased demand, stores in America and elsewhere have begun stocking Keffiyah headscarves manufactured in China. This curious outcome of globalization, in which an item of Arab cultural heritage is manufactured on a large scale by Chinese factories to be worn by white Americans has been labeled by several Arab commentators as an instance of cultural appropriation. (Swedenburg, 2021)

5. The Sikh Turban

Keeping unshorn hair carefully tied in a turban is a central tenet of the Sikh faith that originated on the Indian subcontinent in the late 15th century. As a result, the turban is an item imbued with sacrality and spiritual significance in the Sikh religion.

While turbans are worn by almost all communities in the Indian subcontinent, the Sikh turban is distinctive in appearance and instantly identifiable to anyone familiar with Indian culture.

As a result, the wearing of a Sikh turban by a non-Sikh merely for the sake of appearance can be seen as a case of cultural appropriation by Sikhs. In 2018, the Italian fashion house Gucci was accused of cultural appropriation when several of its white models walked the ramp at the Milan Fashion Week wearing the Sikh turban. (Petter, 2018)

6. Dreadlocks

Dreadlocks is a hairstyle that has been used throughout history by many cultures. The style is believed to have been worn by the Minoans around 1600 BCE.

However, in recent history, the hairstyle is believed to have emerged from African culture. Maasai warriors in Kenya would have dreadlocks and the hairstyle became very popular among Rastafarians.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the popularity of dreadlocks among subcultures of white Europeans came up against criticism that they were appropriating African culture. Similarly, white people wearing cornrows (although, not french braids ), another African hairstyle, have been criticized .

The difficulty of cultural appropriation in the United States is that African-American culture heavily influences mainstream American culture . You can see it in music, for example, such as Jazz and the Blues.

7. Plastic Shaman

A Plastic Shaman is someone who attempts to dispense traditional, indigenous spiritual and healing techniques while having no biological and cultural link to that indigenous tradition.

Shaman is a term used for spiritual masters and traditional healers of indigenous cultures. Plastic Shamans appropriate the cultural traditions of indigenous cultures in order to market them to a new audience (Aldred, 2000).

In so doing, they remove these practices from the cultural context they are embedded in and present them as cures to the ailments of modern society. In this case, indigenous culture is appropriated purely for a commercial motive.

Tattoos are one of the most common means of cultural appropriation of subordinate cultures. Often celebrities get tattoos of sacred or divine figures from third-world cultures without acquiring any knowledge of the significance of the figure.

Another common tattoo practice is getting texts in supposedly exotic languages tattooed on the body without understanding the meaning or context of the text. This too can be seen as a form of cultural appropriation. For instance, David Beckham famously had his wife Victoria’s name tattooed on his forearm in the Devnagri script used to write the Hindi language.

Maori people from New Zealand also have their own tattoo style that harks all the way back to their warrior traditions. Non-Maori people who get these tattoos can also be accused of appropriation.

9. Whitewashing in Films

Whitewashing refers to the phenomenon of White actors playing non-white characters in cinema. The phenomenon was widespread in Hollywood till the 90s and continues occasionally to this day.

Prominent examples of Whitewashing are actor Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and Johnny Depp playing a Native American in the 1997 film The Brave.

Whitewashing contributes to ethnic stereotypes about minority communities. It also raises questions about inadequate or inappropriate representation of a particular community in cinema.

For instance, when Al Pacino, an Italian-American, played Tony Montana, a Cuban immigrant in Brian de Palma’s cult classic Scarface, (1983) it was seen as a stereotyping of not just Cuban Americans, but also Italian Americans, lumping both communities together to pander to a popular, white American stereotype of them as mafioso gang members. Pacino’s accent and mannerisms were not particularly well received by the Cuban American community either, who viewed Pacino’s performance as a caricature of Cuban Americans.

10. Plastic Paddy

Plastic Paddy is a term used for someone who tries to appropriate elements of Irish culture.

The term is also used for members of the Irish diaspora in America and England who make exaggerated displays of celebrating their Irishness, especially on culturally significant occasions such as St. Patrick’s Day. It is especially used to deride the sentimental commoditization of the paraphernalia associated with Irish identity such as the Green color.

It may also be used to refer to Americans of Irish descent who claim to be Irish despite the fact that they, and even their parents, have never even stepped foot in Ireland.

11. Blackface

Blackface was the practice of non-black performers applying make-up on their faces to mimc the appearance of an African-American person, most often as a caricature. The practice was widespread until the early 20th century when it began to be recognized as being insensitive and highly offensive.

The practice however continues sporadically, especially as a Halloween tradition in the United States.

The history of Blackface is rooted in racial stereotypes of Black people as sub-human. In theatrical performances, it was typically used as a device for inducing humor and sometimes revulsion in the audience. The character appearing with Blackface would either be intended as a subject of derisive laughter, or of villainous contempt, or both (Desmond-Harris, 2014).

12. Mandalas

A mandala is a Buddhist symbol used in meditation and other religious practices. They are not always considered cultural appropriation , although can be in some instances.

It is sometimes considered cultural appropriation to use a Mandala if it’s to be trendy and fashionable while you have no direct understanding of (or connection to) Buddhist culture.

For example, wearing it on a t-shirt to “look like a hippie” is far less respectful than using it because you’re a practitioner of Buddhism. Similarly, mandala tattoos worn by non-practitioners may get some sideways looks.

However, the use of mandalas is not the exclusive domain of one particular ethnic group. People from around the world use mandalas in meditation practice and in other ways that show contextual understanding of the mandala and its cultural and social value.

13. Dream Catchers

Using a dream catcher isn’t necessarily cultural appropriation. Many Native Americans sell authentic dream catchers for a living.

However, the use of a dream catcher for decoration or jewelry without acknowledgment of its purpose can be considered cultural appropriation.

To use a dream catcher respectfully, remember that it isn’t just a gimmick or decoration. It has history and purpose for a minority culture. As a result, it should be purchased and used for its own purpose – as defined by Native Americans – and not only as a gimmick.

What’s Not Cultural Appropriation?

While the concept of cultural appropriation is fuzzy (and changes over time!), currently, the following items are generally not considered cultural appropriation.

Hawaiian shirts – Hawaiian people tend to be very welcoming of non-Hawaiians wearing Hawaiian shirts. With some limited exceptions , these shirts can be work by anyone.

The Evil Eye – Worn as a tattoo or jewelry, the evil eye is said to scare off evil spirits. It’s not generally considered cultural appropriation , despite the fact it’s used in traditional spiritual rituals. This may be because it’s not connected to an organized religion.

Cultural appropriation is a controversial topic. Sometimes, we have clear examples of appropriation of symbols, language, and traditions in ways that are offensive and imperialistic. In other instances, such as that of Jazz and Blues music, there is debate over whether culture has been appropriated, or merely that cultures have blended and grown together in multicultural societies.

Aldred, L. (2000). Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality. American Indian Quarterly , 24(3), 329–352. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1185908

Anderson, D. ( 1991, October 13). Sports of The Times – The Braves’ Tomahawk Phenomenon. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/13/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-braves-tomahawk-phenomenon.html

Connor Martin, K. (2018, March 29). “New words notes March 2018” . Oxford English Dictionary . Retrieved 19 January 2022.

Desmond-Harris, J. (2014, October 29) Don’t get what’s wrong with blackface? Here’s why it’s so offensive Vox https://www.vox.com/2014/10/29/7089591/why-is-blackface-offensive-halloween-costume

Kitwana, B.(2006, May 30). Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the New Reality of Race in America . Basic Books.

McWhorter, J. (2015, October 12) Why ‘Redskins’ Is a Bad Word Time https://time.com/4070537/redskins-linguistics/

Petter, O. (2018, February 23) Gucci criticised for putting turbans on white models The Independent https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/gucci-white-models-turbans-avan-jogia-fashion-canada-actor-a8224716.html

Rota, Z. (2014) Why Native Headdresses No Longer Belong at Music Festivals Vice https://www.vice.com/en/article/jpnzz7/why-native-headdresses-no-longer-belong-at-music-festivals

Swedenburg, Ted (2021). The Kufiya. In Bayat, A. (ed.). Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century . (pp. 162–173) University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-96812-7 .

Zimmer, H. (2017) Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization . Princeton University Press.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 5 Top Tips for Succeeding at University
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 50 Durable Goods Examples
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Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 30 Globalization Pros and Cons

2 thoughts on “13 Cultural Appropriation Examples”

I would appreciate if you could add about cultural appropriation vs. appreciation.

Thanks for the tip Viva. I’ll add it to the editorial calendar for a separate article specifically on this topic.

For a simple comprison:

1. Cultural Appropriation: This is where you do not respect or honor the culture of which something originates from. 2. Cultural appreciation: This is where you understand the history and are willing to learn.

People of color explain the difference between cultural appropriation and appreciation

There's a big difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation.
If you show love and appreciation for parts of a culture, such as clothing, hairstyles, or accessories, but remain prejudiced against its people, that's appropriation.
On the other hand, if you learn, explore, and understand a different culture and then show that in a style that you've developed over time, that's appreciation.
Below, people of color tell Insider what you should remember when you want to appreciate another culture, and why it's damaging when you get it wrong.
Visit Insider's homepage for more stories .

If the headlines are anything to go by, Adele caused quite a stir with her latest Instagram photo . Over the last weekend of August, she posted a tribute to Notting Hill Carnival — which was was held online this year due to the coronavirus pandemic — wearing bantu knots and a Jamaican flag bikini top.

"Adele accused of cultural appropriation over Instagram picture," wrote the Guardian , while the Daily Express went for: "Piers Morgan rages at cultural appropriation mob over Adele controversy."

Happy what would be Notting Hill Carnival my beloved London 🇬🇧🇯🇲 A post shared by Adele (@adele) on Aug 30, 2020 at 3:17pm PDT Aug 30, 2020 at 3:17pm PDT

However, the words underneath Adele's photo tell a different story. Rather than an angry "mob," Caribbean people flooded the comments telling her to ignore the backlash because what she was really doing was appreciating Jamaican culture, not appropriating it.

"Tell the haters to step off!" one commenter wrote. "You are a product of Multicultural Britain, so it's not cultural appropriation."

Another fan said that "we Jamaicans love you" and there was "no cultural appropriation here."

"Thanks for honoring us and highlighting the powerful influence Jamaican culture has in the UK and around the world!" they said. "We have your back on this one all the way!!! 'Out Of Many One People' is our nation's motto and we live it! If you come with love and respect, Jamaica has love for you!"

Branding expert Carole Pyke, who works with companies to help build acceptance and normalize representation of people of color, said she didn't see Adele's photo through the eyes of cultural appropriation.

"At a time when the August tradition of carnival on the streets of Notting Hill was canceled, I saw it as a woman celebrating the carnival vibe with its freedom and vibrancy," she told Insider. "A reminder to us all that even though life, as we know it, has changed we can still choose how we navigate our way through it."

The appropriation vs. appreciation debate has been going on for years, but it is particularly prevalent right now amid the growing Black Lives Matter movement. People who have been oppressed are speaking out against racism and prejudice louder than ever, so it's particularly obvious when a predominantly white company, group, or individual enjoys or profits off other cultures without standing up for the lives of people of color.

Cultural appropriation or appreciation?

Saurav Dutt, the author of " The Butterfly Room, " which explores racism and interracial relationships within Indian society, told Insider that enjoying something and being fascinated by it doesn't mean you are appropriating it.

"Cultural appropriation arises when people, anyone, takes aspects of another culture specifically to mock or disrespect them," he said. "What seems to draw the ire of cultural appropriation activists are the less respectful instances where someone will use an item from another culture to ridicule or patronize the other group."

For cofounder of The Rum Kitchen Stevie Thomas, who was previously a "Shipwrecked" contestant, the cultural appropriation conversation hits home. He talked to Metro in 2019 about growing up around mostly white middle-class people in Notting Hill, and how he struggled to connect to his identity of having a heritage that's half Welsh, a quarter Jamaican, one-eighth Irish, and one-eighth Portuguese. Opening up The Rum Kitchen in London was his way of finally connecting to his roots.

#shipwrecked A post shared by Stevie Thomas (@steviexthomas) on Apr 17, 2018 at 11:30pm PDT Apr 17, 2018 at 11:30pm PDT

Thomas told Insider the difference between taking advantage and appreciating a culture ultimately comes down to where your heart sits.

"Adele appreciates and loves the culture. You can feel her heart has always been in the right place," he said. "Black culture has been used, abused, and rehashed for a white marketplace way before Adele's hair, Elvis's hip-shaking, and Eminem's lyrical flow."

The problem starts when greed gets in the way of giving back to certain communities and cultures, such as when restaurant investors who originally intended to appreciate and celebrate end up caring more about money.

Kim Kardashian's 'Bo Derek braids'

Natalie Rita, the managing director of PR company NRPR, works with many POC influencers on a daily basis. She told Insider appropriation happens if you show love and appreciation for parts of a culture, such as clothing, hairstyles, or accessories, but remain prejudiced against its people. For example, wearing African braids or a Hindu bindi while spending no time educating yourself about their origins or the culture surrounding them is "picking and choosing which part of a culture you want to participate in," she said.

"In a nutshell, people need to know whether they're respecting a culture or ripping them off," Rita said. "People need to ask themselves: 'Do I understand the significance of what I'm doing here?,' 'Am I honoring this culture or just imitating it?,' and most importantly, 'Will I offend anyone who belongs to this culture?'"

The Kardashians are often criticized for wearing their hair in Black styles without really acknowledging where they came from. Kim Kardashian, for example, called her cornrows "Bo Derek braids" — a reference to the actresses' hairstyle when she played Jenny Hanley the 1979 film "10."

Bayo Adelaja, a diversity and inclusion expert, is the leader of Do it Now Now , an organization "committed to bringing social empowerment to Black communities across the globe." She told Insider Kardashian's comments made it sound like Black people hadn't been wearing braids for decades before Derek's character came along.

"[It] reminded people that despite profiting off of Black culture for all of her career, she doesn't care about it at all," she said. "When Zendaya wore Locks on the red carpet, she was denigrated by a style guru on the E! channel, but when Kendall Jenner wears Locks on a runway, the style is chic and fashion-forward."

In the real world, this can translate to a Black woman wearing her hair naturally, only for it to be called "unprofessional," "ghetto," or "too ethnic," Adelaja said, then when a white person does it, it's lauded as cool and edgy.

Natalie J Monty and her sister run an Instagram haircare page for Black and multiracial women and girls called @got.coils . The sisters, who are from London, set up the page in 2019 as a way to celebrate natural hair and give advice about how to style it.

Monty told Insider she has seen a great deal of cultural appropriation of African hairstyles from European brands and individuals since then, claiming many styles and looks as their own. She's also seen European women think they are being innovative for wearing wigs to grow out their hair, or silk wraps to protect it at night.

"That's actually something that many Black and Asian women have been doing for, I'd say, definitely over 100 years," she said. "It's something that's been taught from past generations ... So it makes women of color feel uncomfortable at times."

So the UK lockdown is finally starting to lift from this weekend onwards. Honestly, since both our careers can be hectic, we’ve enjoyed the slower pace and reflection it has brought about. Has lockdown affected your hair routine and/or maintenance for the better or worse?! Real talk; let us know below! Sav’s hair has been flourishing and mine.. well.. it’s doing ‘aight I guess 😅 Natalie & Savannah 💋 A post shared by Coily Haircare|Skincare|Style (@got.coils) on Jun 30, 2020 at 10:43am PDT Jun 30, 2020 at 10:43am PDT

Context and upbringing matters

Adelaja said the context also matters in how things are worn. Rita Ora, for example, received backlash for "Black-fishing" with her looks when people found out she is white Albanian/Estonian with no Black heritage. However, she was brought up in an area of London which had a high population of Black people and rose to fame when artists such as Beyonce, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna were dominating pop music.

Ora had grown up with Black culture, so it made sense it would become part of her style. Cultural appropriation, on the other hand, is like wearing someone else's heritage as a costume, "as if you were trying to tap into some alter ego or reverse some otherworldly version of yourself," Adelaja said.

"They are doing it to stand out from the crowd in their own context of life," she said. "That is when a culture becomes a trend or a fad. That is hurtful to those who come across the actions of those individuals because it devalues their culture and turns it into something that is only valuable as an accessory."

It's also important to match your intentions to your actions. Influencer and musician Kahlen Barry recently spoke out about how his ex-friend Tana Mongeau treated him when they worked together, accusing her of gaslighting and racist microaggressions .

He told Insider Mongeau doesn't address accusations of racism in her past, but then profits off Black culture by making rap and hip hop music. He said this is a huge problem within the music and entertainment industries.

"You're disrespecting our people, but then you're making music that comes from our community," he said. "If you're treating people in our community badly, or you're being microaggressive and racist towards us, and then you're trying to use our culture for capital gain, that's appropriation."

It's always good to be mindful

It's a good idea to speak to someone you know from a cultural group before you display something originally from their background on your person. You don't have to erase other cultures from your wardrobe altogether, but maybe question how they got there in the first place.

Ruby Aryiku, the cofounder of the Black social marketing agency VAMP, told Insider there has been a huge shift this year towards understanding cultural appropriation, and everyone should be mindfulof listening to those who do find offence.

"An understanding of the historical context of certain aspects of black culture will swiftly help brands and others from making these mistakes," she said. "If you're genuinely interested in showing appreciation, then do the work to understand it. If you don't have the time to learn, it's likely that said 'appreciation' will probably not be appreciated."

Stories of racist jokes, microaggressions, and tokenism from YouTubers highlight a widespread problem within the influencer industry
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Theoretical development, self-authorization to consume cultural difference, data collection information, author notes.

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Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference

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Angela Gracia B Cruz, Yuri Seo, Daiane Scaraboto, Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference, Journal of Consumer Research , Volume 50, Issue 5, February 2024, Pages 962–984, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad022

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Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international K-pop consumers, this study illustrates that this tension spurs consumers to pursue self-authorization—the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world—through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference. Four consumer self-authorization strategies are identified: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Findings show notable conditions under which each self-authorization strategy is deployed, alongside consumers’ capacity to adjust and recombine different strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and idiographic conditions. Overall, this study advances understanding of how consumers navigate the resurgent politics of marketized cultural diversity in an era of woke capitalism.

“Based on my experience, sometimes I see something as cultural appreciation, sometimes I see something as cultural appropriation. It really depends on the exact situations that I have been in. […] As an Asian American, seeing K-pop fans in America, I see it as cultural appreciation; on the flip side, when I see Koreaboos who use Korean names just for the fun of it, I see it as cultural appropriation because my name has been made fun of before.” (Sam, Reddit thread, September 2020)

The consumption of cultural difference refers to the market-mediated creation of desirable contrasts to everyday life and mainstream notions of identity using another culture’s objects, symbols, styles, motifs, and subjects ( Peñaloza 2001 ; Schroeder 2015 ; Young and Brunk 2009 ). For the past decades, a prevailing ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism suited to the demands of transnational capitalism institutionalized a desire to appreciate cultural difference as a valorized consumer identity project ( Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) . This prevailing discourse of cultural appreciation constitutes the ethnic consumer subject, who is hailed to “embrace differences through consumption” ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 , 556). However, as Sam’s quote illustrates, a fairly recent change is emerging in popular understandings of this consumption domain. More and more, the consumer appreciation of cultural difference is being challenged by a countervailing set of ideas: the discourse of cultural appropriation that constitutes the responsibilized consumer subject.

Cultural appropriation refers to the use of elements of one culture by members of another culture, in ways that are perceived as unacknowledged or inappropriate ( Young and Brunk 2009 ; Ziff and Rao 1997 ). Although scholars have long problematized complex cultural inequities that surface when other, often marginalized, cultures are transformed into palatable sources of consumable difference ( hooks 2006 ; Peñaloza 2001 ; Root 1996 ; Skrbis and Woodward 2007 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ), these critiques have only recently filtered into more pervasive public discussions and emerged as a significant concern for consumers ( Finkelstein and Rios 2022 ; Mosley and Biernat 2021 ; web appendix A ). In a sociocultural zeitgeist politicized through the lens of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” ( Kanai and Gill 2020) , consumers are hailed as responsibilized consumer subjects ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 )—exhorted to take responsibility for how their actions intersect with issues of cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion ( Arsel, Crockett, and Scott 2022 ; Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021 ; Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ; Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021 ). Consequently, the “Western neoliberal idyll of market-based inclusion and diversity” ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 , 554) that calls the ethnic consumer subject to appreciate other cultures is being undercut by this countervailing discourse that calls the responsibilized consumer subject to engage with issues of cultural appropriation. Against this backdrop, an important question requires attention: how do consumers manage the tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation when they pursue the consumption of cultural difference?

To address this question, we conducted a 6-year qualitative study of international (non-Korean) fans of Korean pop (K-pop). Through our time in the field, we observed vibrant consumer discussions of a tension between the competing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation. The theoretical lens of reflexivity, which holds that individuals are tasked with the adaptive construction of their own identities in relation to a systemically uncertain social world ( Adams and Raisborough 2008 ; Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson, Henry, and Bardhi 2018) , provided a starting point for analyzing consumer discussions. This approach led us to identify consumer self-authorization, defined in our work as the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference when confronting an identity-relevant tension between the ethnic consumer subject and the responsibilized consumer subject. We describe four consumer self-authorization strategies: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy represents a distinct configuration of understandings of the self in relation to the social world aimed at conferring permission for oneself to continue consuming another culture’s elements.

Our theoretical account of consumer self-authorization illustrates how individuals carve diverse pathways through a tension that sits at the heart of consuming cultural difference. Inscribed in a nexus of countervailing discourses embedded in divergent ideologies of multiculturalism and hailing oppositional versions of consumer subjectivity, we find that consumers pursue diverse routes to craft permission to consume cultural difference while configuring who they are in relation to multiple others. Ultimately, however, consumer self-authorization is not aimed at radically dismantling systemic inequalities that continue to disadvantage people of color and people from the Global South. Instead, it constitutes an attempt to manage the tension between cultural appreciation and appropriation at the level of the individual consumer subject, carrying a broad range of consequences for how cultural difference is animated as a valued market resource.

The consumption of cultural difference is located at a nexus of two countervailing discourses. A cultural appreciation discourse frames the “making one’s own” of another culture’s elements ( Young and Brunk 2009 ) as an unproblematic process of cultural diffusion and blending. By contrast, a cultural appropriation discourse frames the “taking” of elements from another culture in problematic terms ( Ziff and Rao 1997 )—as a harmful act of distortion, decontextualization, and domination. Each discourse comprises three interwoven elements that sustain one another: a set of ideological assumptions about the power relationships between cultures, a moral interpretation about acts of consuming difference, and a vision of the ideal consumer subject ( table 1 ). Taken together, these countervailing discourses constitute a tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation that has filtered into popular media and public debates ( Mosley and Biernat 2021 ), offering individuals varied interpretive resources to understand acts of consuming cultural difference.

CONSUMING CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: TWO COUNTERVAILING DISCOURSES

Cultural Appreciation Discourse and the Ethnic Consumer Subject

The discourse of cultural appreciation , rooted in the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism, foregrounds moral interpretations of consuming cultural difference as a desirable and depoliticized consumer identity project. Prior research shows that this approach to consuming difference can manifest in multiple domains, including the consumption of foreign food ( Thompson and Tambyah 1999) , festivals ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ), wellness techniques ( Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017) , and popular music ( Peterson and Bennett 2004) . The pervasive appreciation of cultural difference in consumers’ everyday lives reflects an institutionalized consumer desire to construct authentic meanings and pursue distinctive identity projects ( Peñaloza 2001 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ). This desire for difference is further sustained by commodified transnational circulations of cultural objects, meanings, and practices, which result in ever-shifting recombinations of global, regional, local, and multicultural consumer cultural formations ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008 ; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006 ; Sharifonnasabi, Bardhi, and Luedicke 2020 ). Fueling these circulations are market actors who routinely mine reference systems originating in specific groups to construct commercial myths aimed at communicating desired lifestyles and identities ( Arsel and Thompson 2011 ; Beverland et al. 2021 ; Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) . Furthermore, through the practices of the state, media, commercial actors, and consumers, cultural otherness is collectively reframed from a site of inequality and conflict to a valorized and normalized source of consumable difference ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ). In essence, the market performs a pivotal role in constituting, amplifying, and normalizing the consumption of difference across cultures ( Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ).

Outside of consumer research, proponents of the cultural appreciation discourse similarly advance a normalizing view of the consumption of cultural difference by foregrounding the relationality, hybridity, and intertextuality of relationships between cultures. This perspective casts the sociohistorical circulation of objects, ideas, motifs, and styles between cultural groups as an a priori condition of all societies, viewing cultures as relational and ever-evolving phenomena. From this perspective, cultural elements offer open affordances for ongoing processes of creative and transformative reconfiguration ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008 ; Figueiredo, Larsen, and Bean 2021 ). Schneider (2003) further argues that borrowing across cultures is not only endemic but beneficial: appropriative acts can promote the recognition of another culture’s practices. Seen in this light, the use of elements from other cultures is a transformative and creative practice, expanding the horizons of those who appropriate, while extending the social life of an appropriated practice, artifact, or text by investing it with renewed significance ( Schneider 2003 ). In essence, when situated within a lens of reciprocal exchange and cultural hybridity, the use of elements from other cultures is viewed as a depoliticized, even desirable, practice that promotes cultural adaptation, diffusion, learning, and blending.

The outcome of the cultural appreciation discourse is that it sustains the consumption of difference by constituting individuals as ethnic consumer subjects ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ). Whether indigene or immigrant, the ethnic consumer subject is hailed to welcome cultural difference via the logic of the market and express their willingness to engage with other cultures through commodified artifacts, texts, practices, and experiences ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ). In distinguishing high cultural capital from low cultural capital ( Holt 1998) or the cosmopolitan from the local ( Figueiredo et al. 2021 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999) , the pursuit of difference enables the realization of a marketized version of individual subjectivity molded to the demands of intensifying multiculturalism and transnational capitalism. Against this backdrop, the ethnic consumer subject is exhorted to “negotiate his/her cultural background(s) and engage with different ethnicities predominantly through individual consumption choices made in a multicultural marketplace” ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 , 554).

Cultural Appropriation Discourse and the Responsibilized Consumer Subject

The prevailing perspective advanced in the cultural appreciation discourse is being challenged by a countervailing discourse of consuming difference as cultural appropriation . The cultural appropriation discourse is scaffolded by the ideology of critical multiculturalism. Composed of heteroglossic intellectual traditions encompassing postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and critical perspectives on globalization and cosmopolitan consumption ( Arsel et al. 2022 ; Crockett 2017 ; Luedicke 2015 ; Varman and Belk 2009) , this long-standing scholarly project is broadly aimed at foregrounding, problematizing, and dismantling the systemic inequalities that disproportionately marginalize and harm people of color and cultures of the Global South. Seen through the lens of inequitable power relationships that structure the terms of cultural exchange between groups, consuming cultural difference is morally interpreted as a problematic and politically charged practice.

The literature on cultural appropriation identifies two distinct forms of cultural exchange under conditions of asymmetrical power relations: assimilation and exploitation ( Rogers 2006 ). Assimilation is when members of a less powerful group (e.g., immigrants) use the elements of a more powerful group (e.g., indigenes). Insights about this form of cultural exchange are well established in theories of consumer acculturation. Immigrants, for example, encounter and make use of dominant cultural elements that are not “theirs,” but that nonetheless exert a powerful force in their daily lives ( Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard 2005 ; Luedicke 2015 ; Weinberger 2015 ). Such negotiations are delimited by asymmetrical power relationships between cultures and individuals’ positionalities with respect to these power structures ( Luedicke 2015 ). Luedicke (2015) analyzed how immigrants’ use of indigenes’ valorized brands and cultural resources is understood through the lens of historically unequal power configurations between immigrants and indigenes. Within this relational configuration, immigrants’ assimilation of dominant cultural elements is perceived as a threat by indigenes, paradoxically sustaining discriminatory views of immigrants. By contrast, exploitation denotes the opposite configuration: when a more powerful group or individual uses the cultural elements of a less powerful group ( Rogers 2006) . Media critiques of appropriative commodification of elements from marginalized cultures by more powerful institutions or individuals ( web appendix B ) are largely consonant with this latter view of appropriation-as-exploitation.

While acknowledging that not all uses of marginalized culture elements are exploitative, the cultural appropriation discourse foregrounds the harm that can be perpetuated through appropriative acts and outlines when these harms are more likely to occur. Specifically, appropriative acts are harmful when they involve inhabiting a cultural voice or performing a cultural practice in a way that erodes a marginalized culture’s distinctive identity, infringes cultural property rights without credit or compensation, misrepresents or profoundly offends another’s culture, or fetishizes another’s culture as a commodity or a costume ( Cherid 2021 ; Young and Brunk 2009 ; Ziff and Rao 1997 ). Seen in this light, the consumption of cultural difference is rendered in more sinister shades, as an act of misrecognition, infringement, and exploitation ( Cherid 2021 ; Lalonde 2021 ; Root 1996) .

The outcome of the cultural appropriation discourse is that, as it increasingly filters from academic literature into popular culture and public discussions ( Finkelstein and Rios 2022 ; Mosley and Biernat 2021) , individuals become constituted as responsibilized consumer subjects ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ) with respect to the issue of cultural appropriation. Prior literature shows that consumers are increasingly held accountable for the broader societal impact of their individual practices across a range of consumption domains ( Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021 ; Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ; Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021 ). Although consumers carry comparatively less power than institutional actors such as the state and multinational corporations to shape market practices, responsibilization positions the consumer on par with these institutional actors. This discursive positioning of the consumer as sovereign and morally agentic, as Giesler and Veresiu (2014) explain, is part of a larger process in which responsibility and risk are shifted away from the state and institutions and toward the individual. Consumer responsibilization toward the issue of cultural appropriation, which has filtered into public consciousness via mainstream and social media ( Kanai and Gill 2020 ), manifests a more “organic” responsibilization that differs from the institutionally driven process described in Giesler and Veresiu’s (2014) work. The orientation toward responsibilization now permeates consumer subjectivities across so many domains that many consumers readily frame social issues raised in the media through the lens of their own consumption. Consequently, in relation to the cultural appropriation discourse, individuals are oriented toward a “moralistic mandate” ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 , 842) that exhorts them to understand consuming difference in relation to its broader societal impacts and to take responsibility for the consequences of their consumption choices. This means that consumers feel compelled to care about cultural appropriation concerns, reflect on consuming difference in moralized terms, and link these moralized concerns to their own ethical responsibility.

Between the Ethnic and Responsibilized Consumer Subject: The Role of Reflexivity

Taken together, these countervailing discourses constitute a tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation that offers divergent interpretative resources to frame the consumption of difference. On the one hand, consumers are encouraged to appreciate the consumption of difference as a valorized act of cultural adaptation, and on the other hand, consumers are increasingly reminded that the consumption of difference risks distorting, decontextualizing, and dominating other cultures, leading them to feel the discomfort ( Eckhardt and Dobscha 2019) and challenges ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ) of responsibilization. Hence, we ask: how do consumers manage this tension?

The theoretical concept of reflexivity offers a useful starting point for this question. Reflexivity is broadly defined as the “awareness of the self within the social world” ( Akaka and Schau 2019 , 502) and encompasses “the act of an individual subject directing awareness towards itself, reflecting upon its own practices, preferences and even the process of reflection itself” ( Adams and Raisborough 2008 , 1168). Originating from the works of Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) , reflexivity is theorized to play a central role in the processes of self-identity construction in late-modern societies. Specifically, Giddens (1991) argues that, as the result of dynamic social changes that characterize post-traditional settings of modernity, making sense of the self relies less on traditional institutional categories, such as gender and social class. Instead, the focus has shifted toward self-reliance and obligation on the self to make wise choices. This, in turn, promotes a reflexive awareness that carries potentialities to shape one’s own identity and even broader social structures. Adams (2006) terms this tenet “the extended reflexivity thesis,” emphasizing the reflexive capabilities of individuals in the context of systemic social change.

The extended reflexivity thesis has been explicitly translated in consumer research by Thompson et al. (2018) as the ideal type of existential reflexivity. Here, consumers are conceived to strategically deploy market resources to accomplish volitional identity projects from the position of agentic autonomy. In the absence of strong institutional structures that guide identity formation ( Giddens 1991 ), or when faced with disruptions to taken-for-granted social structures ( Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson et al. 2018 ), individuals must draw on available sociocultural resources to create subject positions that allow them to manage salient identity tensions. Similarly, in many contexts of consuming cultural difference, there is currently no institutional consensus on how to appreciate cultural difference without appropriating or on who can grant permission to consume on behalf of a cultural group. Hence, when confronted with an identity-relevant tension between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject, individuals must reflexively engage with available sociocultural discourses and moral interpretations to craft manageable subject positions vis-à-vis others whose differences are consumed.

Research Context: International K-pop Consumers

To understand how individuals navigate the consumption of cultural difference at the nexus of the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject, we conducted a 6-year qualitative study of international (non-Korean) consumers of K-pop. K-pop is an immersive media universe, comprising a plethora of youth musical, aesthetic, fashion, dance, and performance styles embodied by groups of K-pop celebrities—referred to as idols ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021) . K-pop content embodies a Korean flavor: song lyrics are mostly in Korean; almost all idols are Korean and have Korean names; narrative themes reflect popular tropes from Korean media culture; and dance choreographies privilege synchronized collective precision over individualized expression ( Shin and Kim 2013 ). Music videos are an important component, advancing thematic concepts for each idol group’s new release that comprise an aesthetic, narrative, and performance motif. International consumers can follow their favorite idols not only through their music and music video releases but also through their ubiquitous appearances on talent and variety shows, Korean dramas, and global concert tours. Each idol group’s fandom has a distinct name (e.g., BTS Army, ATINY, Moomoo), with fan practices initiated and coordinated through official fan clubs based in Seoul. Fans orchestrate market reactions to their favorite idols’ content, for example, by organizing fan chants at K-pop concerts, generating views online through streaming marathons and reaction videos, or creating English subtitles for other international fans ( Cruz, Seo, and Binay 2021 ).

This dense universe of celebrity-driven music, fashion, and media offerings embodies the latest iteration of Hallyu or the (South) Korean Wave—a rise in the global popularity of South Korean popular cultural products ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021 ). The Korean Wave began in the late 1990s with regionally focused exports of Korean dramas to China and then to other East Asian and Southeast Asian nations, followed by a more recent global diffusion of K-pop to Western markets ( Cruz et al. 2021 ). The extensive international diffusion of K-pop is fueled by Korean cultural producers’ deliberate strategies to create a distinctly Asian, yet globally palatable, alternative to Western cultural imagery ( Oh 2014) . Three main Korean entertainment companies shape K-pop’s global image and centrally control the artist training process that cultivates K-pop idol groups ( Shin and Kim 2013 ). Moreover, the Korean government actively promotes K-pop as a nationalistic platform for maintaining Korea’s position at the forefront of regional globalization from Asia ( Shin and Kim 2013 ). As a result of these forces, K-pop has developed a loyal international following among consumers across multiple countries.

International K-pop consumers’ engagements with cultural difference in K-pop offered an appropriate empirical setting for our analysis. While we did not set out to theorize self-authorization to consume cultural difference, through our time in the field, we observed vibrant consumer reflections that evidenced a consumer-level tension between the competing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation. Consonant with the cultural appreciation discourse, K-pop can be interpreted as a cosmopolitan assemblage of diverse musical, aesthetic, and performance styles inspired by multiple cultures—indeed, K-pop’s culturally hybrid and syncretic form is designed to enhance its appeal to a transnational youth market ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021 ). Seen through the celebratory lens of global cosmopolitanism ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) , K-pop’s growing global popularity represents the latest moment in ongoing global circulations of youth culture, offering its mostly young fans a desirable departure from the everyday while connecting them to the modern and global circuits of cultural difference.

Concurrently, consonant with the cultural appropriation discourse, international K-pop fans questioned their own, and others’ right to consume Korean culture—and elements of other cultures—in the form of K-pop. We found that international K-pop fans engaged in extended conversations about cultural appropriation as it pertains to what cultural differences they consume in K-pop (i.e., the representations of cultural difference that they consumed in K-pop) and how they consume cultural difference (i.e., individual approaches to consuming cultural difference). International K-pop fans reflected on what it meant to enjoy the diversity of cultural styles in K-pop’s music, choreography, and fashion concepts (e.g., hip hop, R&B, dreadlocks) that originate from historically marginalized cultures ( Garza 2021) . International fans also considered how they, as non-Korean fans, could express their passion for K-pop in light of a long history of racialized discourses that fetishize Asian bodies and cultures ( Oh 2014) . Among international fans, the derogatory figure of the Koreaboo parodies the fetishistic consumption of K-pop and Korean culture ( web appendices D and E ). These consumer-level discussions cement a connection between the responsibilizing discourse of cultural appropriation and the many ways in which cultural difference becomes a desirable commodity in K-pop.

Data Collection

We conducted an extensive qualitative study, collecting data from multiple sources, including in-depth interviews, online forums and websites, social media platforms, and news media. Table 2 summarizes the dataset, detailing how each type of data contributed to our understanding of the phenomenon.

SUMMARY OF DATA SOURCES

In-Depth Interviews

Interviews were conducted between 2017 and 2022 with 38 non-Korean consumers of K-pop living in a large Australian city. Opening with a grand tour question (how and when did you first develop an interest in K-pop?), the interview covered a range of topics such as what appealed to participants about K-pop, their experiences of K-pop concerts in Australia, their relationship with other consumers, the various social activities that accompanied their K-pop consumption, and how K-pop had affected other aspects of their lives. As the research evolved to focus on emergent issues of cultural dislocation, later interviews probed more extensively into what the emic terms “Koreaboo” and “cultural appropriation” meant to participants and how these notions shaped their K-pop consumption.

The researchers recruited participants through personal contacts and referrals, an ad posted on an Australian-based K-pop Facebook page, a university student subject pool, and snowball sampling. Participants comprised 28 women and 10 men, ranging in age from 19 to 25 years. The rather homogeneous demographic nature of the sample reflects the most actively engaged and visible supporters of K-pop idol groups, who tend to be young and predominantly female, as much K-pop content is targeted to appeal to this lucrative segment. Nonetheless, we employed theoretical sampling throughout and pursued opportunities to identify variations in K-pop consumption through a constant comparative method. Participants had been involved in K-pop between 1 and 13 years and engaged in K-pop consumption in various ways, from predominantly consuming K-pop among close friends to actively participating in dance cover groups and organizing online and offline community events ( web appendix C ).

Netnographic Observations and Media Sources

To contextualize participant interviews and triangulate their narratives within spontaneous conversations that are not directed by the researchers, we conducted several waves of netnographic immersion ( Kozinets 2019) among English-speaking K-pop consumers. At the outset, we were broadly interested in understanding the globalization of K-pop. Each successive wave of netnographic investigation refined this focus further. During our immersions, we examined archival material from well-established online sources that had large numbers of active members who frequently posted consumer-to-consumer comments pertaining to K-pop. The first wave in 2016–2017 sensitized us to the K-pop phenomenon and the vast online universe of K-pop consumption, including the language, practices and rituals, and salient tensions within the international K-pop fandom. Informed by issues of cultural dislocation emerging in the online and interview data, the second wave of netnographic immersion in 2018–2019 focused on tensions between Korean “K-fans” and “international” fans. As we read threads and posts, we focused on those most relevant to understanding key issues for international consumers of K-pop. In these discussions, the term “cultural appropriation” or its acronym “CA” was often employed by consumers. This led us to refine our research focus and adjust our online data collection approach to better capture the tensions in consuming cultural difference. Consequently, in the third wave of netnographic immersion from March to July 2021, while we continued occasionally observing a wide range of online sources, we narrowed our data collection focus to sources that afforded opportunities for consumers to engage in conversations that could evidence reflexivity in this domain.

To keep the online and social media data to manageable levels, we collected data from two main online sources, Reddit and Quora, both websites where people often ask questions, engage in discussion, and offer advice to one another. These sites offered us with online data that were richer than those we found on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. On these selected sites, we searched relevant keywords including “international,” “koreaboo,” “cultural appropriation,” and “CA.” This search resulted in threads such as “What do you think of the culture [ sic ] appropriation in the K-pop world,” “I want an honest discussion about GLOBAL cultural appropriation,” and “Why is it bad to be a Koreaboo?” ( web appendix D ). We retained these threads and followed links shared on comments by consumers (e.g., to “Koreaboo cringe compilation” videos on YouTube).

In addition, we read news articles (e.g., web appendix B ) to help illuminate the popular discourse about cultural appropriation that spans multiple consumption contexts, including K-pop. We particularly focused on those news articles that were shared by consumers in discussion boards and other online sources.

Data Analysis

We engaged in an iterative part-to-whole process of constant comparison between data collection, analysis, and development of theoretical concepts ( Goulding and Saren 2010 ; Thompson 1997 ). We began by closely reading participant interviews and online conversations among international K-pop fans to gain an understanding of the relevant issues for these consumers. Initially, our theoretical focus was on the cultural dislocations experienced by international K-pop fans. Once our theoretical focus was refined and set on the tensions between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, we approached the interviews and the data from the last wave of netnographic immersion using thematic analysis ( Braun and Clarke 2022 ). We started with open coding to identify provisional themes, concepts, and categories. The entire dataset was manually coded by the authors. Each author initially coded a portion of the dataset for emergent codes. In further discussions among the authors, the identified codes and code illustrations were discussed and aggregated into initial themes (e.g., accusing market actors, mimicking authentic K-pop consumption, delegitimizing K-pop). These themes were refined as we iterated between existing literature and the dataset until we developed a framework that explains how consumers navigate the countervailing discourses in consuming cultural difference.

During the process of analysis, regular researcher meetings were employed to explore divergence in perspectives and enrich the theorization. Researcher reflexivity was enhanced by the researchers’ firsthand familiarity with diverse cultural perspectives and their various levels of engagement with K-pop (e.g., one of the authors is fluent in Korean and has consumed K-pop since 2006; the others do not speak Korean and were not familiar with K-pop until starting this research project). This process of immersion and iteration led us to our present theorization of consumer self-authorization.

Our analysis of international K-pop fans and their conversations about cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation led us to identify a set of four self-authorization strategies that consumers deploy to grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference when confronting an identity-relevant tension between the ethnic consumer subject and the responsibilized consumer subject: reforming, recontextualizing, restraining, and rationalizing. When consumers engage in reforming, they problematize the harms of cultural appropriation as it applies to their consumption of cultural difference and cast themselves in the subject position of an activist custodian. When consumers engage in restraining, they limit their appreciation of cultural difference to less controversial forms and enact the subject position of a cautious appreciator. When consumers pursue self-authorization through the recontextualizing strategy, they situate their appreciation of cultural difference within its informing sociohistorical backdrop and cast themselves in the subject position of a respectful outsider. Finally, when consumers engage in rationalizing, they refute the relevance of cultural appropriation to their appreciation of cultural difference and cast themselves in the subject position of a connected cosmopolitan. As summarized in table 3 , each of these self-authorization strategies is bolstered by a distinct recombination of countervailing discourses that supports each subject position and includes a set of tactics that are either directed at what cultural difference is consumed (e.g., should international K-pop fans support K-pop group Blackpink after they used sacred elements of Hindu culture in a music video?) or how cultural difference is consumed (e.g., should international K-pop fans use Korean words and slang terms?). There are also notable conditions under which these strategies are likely to be deployed by consumers. In the following sections, we unpack each strategy, illustrating them with quotes from our dataset ( web appendix E includes additional quotes for each category).

CONSUMER SELF-AUTHORIZATION STRATEGIES

Reforming: Consumer as Activist Custodian

“From a personal experience, I decided for myself that I can still enjoy K-pop contents AND speak up about things that they do wrong (CA, sexism, colorism, unfair treatment of artists etc.) For me, the ugly sides do not cancel out the good things that K-pop brings. I believe speaking up and making our voices heard will make an impact, especially nowadays K-pop has evolved into a global genre and international markets can be crucial for an artist’s success. I was born and raised in Southeast Asia where racism, colorism and CA were painfully prevalent. Education for racial and cultural awareness was nonexistent. From my years of consuming South Korean and Chinese content, I think the situation is similar in those areas. With globalizing, the level of awareness has been increasing, albeit very slowly. […] I think enjoying and appreciating someone’s art and speaking up about things they get wrong are not mutually exclusive. My ult bias member [favorite singer in favorite group] has also got heat for controversial things but has shown so much growth from constructive criticism. I still love and appreciate his art every day. But if he didn’t learn and kept on making the same mistakes, I would have stopped supporting him as well. I hope you continue to find the joy in K-pop. It is quite fun.” (KoiT, Reddit thread, December 2020)

KoiT’s excerpt captures the first self-authorization strategy of reforming. Here, consumers problematize the harms of cultural appropriation as it applies to their consumption of cultural difference, while positioning themselves as activist custodians who are animated by a concern for the consumed “other.” In this excerpt, KoiT names and gives examples of how cultural appropriation often manifests in K-pop. Mobilizing the critical vocabulary and motifs that form the ideological subtext of the cultural appropriation discourse (e.g., “racism,” “colorism”), KoiT connects these manifestations to longstanding structural inequities that disproportionately harm other cultures. In doing so, KoiT’s reflection helps other international fans make sense of what cultural appropriation might mean in the context of K-pop consumption, while advancing a moral interpretation of appropriative acts as distorting, decontextualizing, and dominating historically marginalized cultures. The harms of cultural appropriation when consuming K-pop are similarly raised and problematized by interview participants and in numerous online fan conversations ( web appendices D and E ). Together, these debates surface two main self-authorization tactics, directed at what forms of cultural difference should not be consumed by K-pop consumers and how cultural difference should not be consumed by K-pop consumers.

Reforming What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“K-pop is supposed to be fun and a break from the world. It should inspire you and make you feel happy. You should not have to deal with all the cr*p you see in the rest of the world in your fan spaces. So personally I feel it’s my job to look out for and speak up for fans who are confronted with painful imagery/problematic behavior from their idols. […] As for [CA] being an American concept that South Koreans have the right to ignore, I call b*llsh*t. Many corporations around the world have consultants to find out if their branding or logos are offensive in other cultures. SK [South Korea] is not some random backwater that can’t be expected to know what’s going on in the markets they’re selling to. And in some cases there is no plausible excuse. It doesn’t take an ethnoanthropologist or PhD in critical race theory to know the curry song is making fun of another culture. And enough idols have had controversies over Black hairstyles that you would think they’d have heard that’s a no-go zone unless you like scandals. And if you still don’t know what the hair thing is about there are plenty of online resources. […] Why not worry about your fellow fans and hold your idols accountable? We can have nice things if we just speak up and out after all.” (LouLou, Reddit comment, July 2020)

Importantly, even though cultural appropriation critiques are ostensibly about the culture of production, these critiques are framed as an identity-relevant concern for international K-pop consumers and directed at consumers who unquestioningly consume pop culture aesthetics that distort and decontextualize others’ cultural elements. By connecting concerns about what cultural difference is consumed to a concern for the other, LouLou enacts the subject position of an activist custodian, motivated to protect others from harm while consuming cultural difference. Positioning themselves as an activist custodian of the K-pop consumer experience, LouLou promotes the goal of protecting other K-pop fans from “offensive” and “painful” content. LouLou ends their reflection with a responsibilizing call to other consumers to engage in similar forms of questioning. Hence, consumers are framed as complicit in the routinization of cultural appropriation, where “hold[ing] your idols accountable” becomes part of a K-pop fan’s moral responsibility in promoting a culturally safe space for all consumers.

“I am a Desi and a Muslim, and the number of times our South Asian traditions and religions have been ridiculed is really disappointing […] Having your culture or religion being made fun of is really upsetting and angering. Now here are a few examples: 1- When G-IDLE used a mosque as an ‘aesthetic’ while dancing; now a mosque is somewhere we Muslims go for praying and it is also known as a pure place and the house of God. Dancing in front of it for ‘aesthetic’ purposes is really disgusting. 2- When a Hindu God was disrespected in a Blackpink MV [music video]; Lord Ganesha is an important God for Hindus, and they placed them on the ground beside her which is very disrespectful and stupid, I personally want YG [producing company] to apologize for this disgusting behavior. Even though I am Muslim I have a deep respect for this religion, and really support whoever is calling out on this behavior. These are just two but I can rant on and on about how they think that our Desi culture (Desi means people from Pakistan and India and Bangladesh) is not an aesthetic for you!” (Ana, Quora post, November 2020)

Reforming can manifest as part of collective consumer action. As alluded to in Ana’s quote, a 2020 music video by female K-pop idol group Blackpink depicted a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha on the floor. Deemed offensive to the Hindu religion and South Asian community, this use of a sacred Hindu symbol as a performance prop incited numerous calls by international K-pop fans—both South Asian and non–South Asian—to “unite against [production company] YG” and “support us in our fight to safeguard our religion and culture” under social media hashtags including #MyCultureIsNotYourAesthetic, #BlackPinkApologize, and #YGApologisetoHindus ( Jeong 2020 ). Fans further collectively petitioned the production company for a response. Four days after the video’s initial release, the offending image was quietly edited out.

Reforming How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“Anyone who fetishizes Korean culture, [it means] to take the Korean culture and reduce it to only those tiny little things that aren’t representative of it that you think are amazing, and you love and you want to embody. So not learning the language, but you want to throw in some words here and there, because it makes you look cool. Or trying to do your makeup to make yourself look Korean. That’s what I consider Koreaboo and I consider it to be a negative thing. […] If you were just like, ‘Korea’s, like, so perfect. Like, everything’s perfect. Koreans are perfect! I want to, like, marry a Korean guy, you know, they’re perfect! They’re much better than, like, white people.’ That sort of thing that’s going way overboard, because that’s just reducing a culture to only these positive things that you see in it. […] I definitely do get a bit irritated if someone’s just looking at a culture so one dimensionally. I think it’s very degrading, very infantilizing.” (Melissa, interview)

“They [Koreaboos] would get the idea that all Korean men are these like soft, sensitive guys. And there’s a lot of history of Asian men being seen as weaker than white men, or black men, or whatever. So they perpetuate that ideal without realizing that it can have harmful effects, when it’s based off of the idea of their ideal boyfriend. […] It’s like you’re basing your idea of this entire race of people off of what you think is desirable, rather than what they actually are.” (Claire, interview)

In sum, via reforming, the tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation is amplified as an identity-relevant issue that matters for international K-pop fans’ consumption of cultural difference. When reforming, consumers foreground the power asymmetries of consuming cultural difference, leading them to attempt to enroll others into this perspective and try to oppose cultural appropriation. It is not surprising, therefore, that this self-authorization strategy is deployed mostly by consumers who are sensitized to the harmful consequences of neocolonial market dynamics—a sensitivity that allows them to empathize with those whose differences are consumed. Such sensitivity often stems from these consumers’ prior socialization and education. For example, by drawing on her firsthand experience as an Indian member of the Desi ethnicity who has seen her sacred dance “mocked […] as ignorant hand movements,” Maya can more readily perceive how repeated appropriative representations diminish a consumed culture (“Imagine someone bowing the way Koreans do to each other and laughing at that—would that be funny? No, right?”). This sensitization toward harm is not only limited to persons of color. While Claire is not of Asian descent, her ability to empathize with those whose differences are appropriated reflects a growing awareness of neocolonialism among younger consumers in Western industrialized nations such as the USA and Australia. This growing awareness has been driven by a changing educational curriculum that attempts to engage with difficult histories of racism and colonization (Vee: “if you’re an American, and you grew up learning about that history, you’d be like, why is/how is this a thing where Koreans think it’s cool to imitate this.”). This growing awareness is also amplified by the popular and social media coverage of cultural appropriation episodes (Ruby: “back when I was in high school, I don’t think I ever read anything about cultural appropriation […] I didn’t know any examples, there were no proper cases.”) and the popularization of social movements aimed at resisting entrenched institutional racism (Nadia: “Black Lives Matter, for example […] this was a big thing.”). Under these enabling conditions, we find that consumers feel empowered to inhabit the activist custodian subject position and hold other market actors accountable on the issue of cultural appropriation.

It may seem perplexing that consumers who engage in reforming are, in effect, amplifying a troubling tension in their own consumption of cultural difference. But by pursuing this strategy, their implicit goal is to safeguard themselves and others against these harmful practices while consuming cultural difference. Consumers’ subject position when reforming thus resembles an archetypical “morality play myth in which a moral protagonist is called upon to defend the sacrosanct virtues and ideals from the transgressive actions of an immoral adversary” ( Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler 2010 ); in essence, reforming imbues their consumption of cultural difference with heroically redemptive qualities.

Importantly, however, international K-pop fans who engage in reforming are not responding to “outside-in” attacks, as in the case of the Hummer brand community responding to attacks from oppositional groups ( Luedicke et al. 2010) , gay consumers living with stigmatizing representations ( Eichert and Luedicke 2022 ; Kates 2002) , or indie consumers responding to devaluing hipster stereotypes ( Arsel and Thompson 2011) . Rather, reminiscent of the consumers who mobilize change from within a consumption field ( Scaraboto and Fischer 2013) , the reinvigoration of tensions in the consumption of cultural difference is being amplified by active participants who are deeply invested in this consumption context. The reforming strategy reflects less a morality conflict between insiders and outsiders than an emergent “inside out” responsibilization of consumers ( Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021 ; Giesler and Veresiu 2014) .

Reforming, however, falls short of the radical or sustained resistance aimed at redressing structural inequities between cultural groups. For example, we did not see international K-pop fans calling for long-term partnerships between the K-pop industry and marginalized artists or communities. Nonetheless, reforming incrementally repoliticizes others toward the interests, safety, and well-being of the consumed other. Reading through or participating in these types of discussions, consumers learn about what is considered cultural appropriation in K-pop, become sensitized to its harmful effects, and apprehend that cultural appropriation carries consequences for members of appropriated cultures and themselves as participants in the consumption of cultural difference. In dozens of responses to LouLou’s and Ana’s posts, for example, other consumers share their own impression of the episodes (e.g., “I don’t think BP [Blackpink] had anything to do with the Ganesha thing”) and engage in ambiguous, contested, and emotionally charged reflections. As such, reforming is generative of reflexivity in others, when it is visibly performed via consumers’ networked social interactions, as it is in the K-pop fandom. In short, reforming triggers further reflexive pathways to self-authorizing the consumption of cultural difference.

Restraining: Consumer as Cautious Appreciator

“I’m tired. Tired of racism, cultural appropriation, and plain disrespect as a black person. It’s almost like a cycle. I get into a group and love them with all my heart. Then I find out about all the bad things they’ve done and it leaves me heartbroken and devastated. I move on to another group and the cycle continues. Eventually, I learned to do ‘background checks’ on groups to see what they did and if it’s worth listening to their music/supporting the artist. Nowadays I feel like I don’t even have the energy to get into any more groups/soloists in K-pop and just focus on the ones I already listen to because I’m so tired of being let down. According to Very Well Mind, ‘the term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the feelings of discomfort that result when your beliefs run counter to your behaviors and/or new information that is presented to you.’ This accurately describes me (and most likely many of you) as a black K-pop fan. How can I be pro-black while supporting an anti-black industry? I feel guilty for even listening to K-pop, and honestly sometimes wish I never got into it in the first place.” (Livy, Reddit post)

Livy’s quote introduces the self-authorization strategy of restraining—when consumers circumvent the tension between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject by limiting their appreciation of cultural difference to less controversial expressions. Unlike reforming, which is directed at shifting the understandings and practices of other actors (e.g., K-pop industry and idols, “Koreaboo” consumers) and triggering adjustments at the level of the collective, restraining is about disciplining the self. Animated by the desire to shield the self from moralized judgments about cultural appropriation while consuming cultural difference, when restraining, consumers enact a self-disciplining approach to their consumption, thereby constituting themselves as cautious appreciators.

Restraining What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

When managing the tension as it pertains to what cultural difference is consumed, consumers attempt to carefully select which K-pop idols they follow and try to divert their allegiance away from K-pop idols contaminated by cultural appropriation controversy. For example, Livy morally interprets repeated cycles of cultural appropriation in the K-pop industry in relation to their lived experience “as a black person.” Internalizing the moral imperatives of the cultural appropriation discourse, Livy responsibilizes themselves to “move on” from K-pop idol groups that engage in cultural appropriation and even performs “background checks” before deciding to support a new K-pop artist. Yet, moving on is difficult: like many other fans, Livy invests significant time, money, and emotion to follow each K-pop idol group—an investment from which it is often taxing to detach. Livy is further taxed with the emotional burden of guilt, dissonance, and regret when they fail to completely restrain their consumption. Reflecting the disproportionate impact of responsibilization on the individual consumer ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ), Livy directs the moralistic mandates of the cultural appropriation discourse at themselves, ultimately bearing both the costs of disciplining their own consumption choices and the costs of failing to do so.

“I would stan a group or I’d go on Twitter and before someone stans a group they’d be like, ‘Is this group problematic?’ And then you click the thread and then it’d be like this group’s done blackface, this group’s done cornrows, this group said the N word. I think with woke culture now being such a prevalent thing in the media, before someone stans a group they’re like, ‘Okay, just to double check is this group okay to stan?’ Because a lot of people don’t want to seem like they’re promoting this behavior. […] If I’m on Twitter at the moment I’ll be looking through a friend’s account or someone else’s account and it’ll be like, ‘Don’t follow me if you’re a fan of this group, this group, this group or this group because I don’t want to be associated with even the fans of that group.’ So they think that just because you’re a fan of that group you support their behaviors. They just don’t want to be mutuals with someone who supports people that they don’t like. So let’s say if Super Junior for example did something really culturally not right, they assume that their fans then are supporting what they did after continuous, repeated behaviors, which is why they don’t want to be associated with those groups of fans. […] One of my favorite groups—or used to be one of my favorite groups—was Oh My Girl, they were not necessarily racist but they were doing a lot of cultural appropriation. They were wearing bindis and specifically making fun of Indian culture. When I first started stanning they did do some stuff in the past and I gave them the benefit of the doubt because I was like, they’re young, we all make mistakes and they haven’t made a mistake in two years, I’m assuming they’ve grown from that. They did it again and I’m like, ‘No, I can’t.’” (Nadia, interview)

Restraining How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“Obviously, you have a fine line between actually being a fan and it turning into… a fine line between being a fan and appropriating, being a bit too much. I guess there’s certain things that are just a bit strange after certain points. For example, I’m sure nobody’s going to have a problem with you dressing in, I don’t know, Korean style clothes or what not, but after you start looking a bit too… trying to emulate a Korean person’s facial features and trying to speak Korean out of nowhere… I think for international fans, as long as you’re not going overboard. […] There’s a fine line between trying to be somebody and appreciating somebody’s culture. You don’t have to do the whole eyes and the whole hair and the whole face, you can sort of dress the way they do which is not changing your whole personality to become somebody’s culture. It’s appreciating and wearing the clothes, the styles, but not really changing the whole face and everything to be Korean. […] It’s sort of like a music interest. It’s not like a personality interest. I like Korean K-pop, but it’s not something that I liked that much where it changed me. I think some people have—Korea just starts becoming their personality. If you’re a [Koreaboo], I guess, Korea and Korean’s things are mainly your personality. […] But for sure, you definitely get the risk of being considered a Koreaboo, definitely.” (Jerry, interview)

“If one was to accept they’re not Korean, but then they like the language, culture, that is not going to be a Koreaboo. But then if some were to suddenly try and speak their so little knowledge of Korean, and show it off to everyone, then that would be like a different story. After the term Koreaboo appeared, I think that the internet is trying to not be seen as Koreaboos nowadays. Because I remember back in the—few years ago, I would randomly see phrases of Korean, like the Romanization of Korean in their captions. But nowadays I don’t really see that at all. It’s either you’re not Korean, you don’t understand it. Or you’re not Korean, but you do understand it, so you’re trying to assist people with the translations. Not throwing random phrases in there.” (Anna, interview)

In sum, restraining is when consumers delimit their consumption of cultural difference to non-controversial forms. This individual-directed strategy enrolls consumers into the ongoing work of mapping and steering clear of submerged “danger zones” in the consumption of cultural difference. Restraining tends to be deployed when consumers perceive significant risk of social judgment, sanction, and conflict as a consequence of their consumption of cultural difference. This sense of heightened vulnerability can erupt as a function of the kinds of social spaces that consumers are navigating or the perceived visibility of their actions within those spaces. Spaces such as high school and online fanwars emerged as typical examples of unsafe spaces where consumers felt exposed to social judgment (Anna: “there’s this stereotype that non-Korean fans who like K-pop are Koreaboos […] when I was in high school, the people who didn’t like K-pop would go judging those who liked K-pop.”). Consumer vulnerability to social judgment is also heightened by participants’ perceived visibility within these spaces. For example, Nadia’s status as a K-pop content creator makes her actions visible among other K-pop content creators and international fans, and therefore, more prone to social scrutiny (“they think that just because you’re a fan of that group you support their behaviors”). Under such conditions where the stakes are simply deemed too high, restraining offers a viable strategy for protecting the self. By dampening and disciplining their own consumption, individuals achieve self-authorization by performing compliance with the cultural appropriation discourse.

In some ways, restraining resembles previously documented strategies that consumers adopt in response to social conflict. This strategy is captured, for example, with Star Trek fans ( Kozinets 2001 ) or members of the indie subculture ( Arsel and Thompson 2011 ) who create safe zones to manage conflict. Eichert and Luedicke (2022 , 10) relatedly found that some gay men enact an underground self-representation and “meticulously avoid objectifying their identity.” While these previously documented underground strategies emerged in response to stigmatizing discourses, it is intriguing that a similar strategy is being deployed by international K-pop fans to address a tension that is now arising between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject.

Recontextualizing: Consumer as Respectful Outsider

“Any culture can be appropriated, I think. I feel like it’s just about the respect. Like if you’re just interacting with this person’s culture disrespectfully, then that’s cultural appropriation, because that’s not yours, and you’re not being respectful about it. [But] I feel like people are so quick to jump to conclusions nowadays. Like, you have to look at the context.” (Melissa, interview)

The third self-authorization strategy, recontextualizing, is where consumers situate their appreciation of cultural difference within its informing sociohistorical context, while constituting the subject position of a respectful outsider. In contrast to the previous strategy of restraining, which often demands a deliberate dampening of investment, recontextualizing involves a deepening of investment. This is because this strategy relies on a deeper understanding of salient cultural dynamics, which helps consumers present a more nuanced perspective on what cultural difference is consumed and how they consume it.

Recontextualizing is contingent on consumers acquiring the relevant sociohistorical knowledge and skills needed to navigate complex cultural dynamics and relate to diverse cultural viewpoints. Involving a deft ability to bridge across the countervailing frames of the cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation discourses, recontextualizing is reminiscent of the traversing strategy employed by non-celebrators of Christmas who perform a “delicate dance” between conflicting desires to connect with others through a dominant cultural ritual and the desire to express an ideologically rooted identity ( Weinberger 2015 , 395). Consequently, recontextualizing commonly manifests among consumers who are prone to reflect on how one’s cultural background influences their views. In particular, we observed that reflections about one’s race, ethnicity, and cultural background are often made explicit in consumer discussions about cultural appropriation in K-pop: “I’m an Indian who lives in America. I have Indian parents who immigrated here from India”; “I’m a black person who comes from Africa. I am not American, but I’m from Europe (France to be precise). I also come from a Christian family”; “I am mixed, coming from both black and white backgrounds and I was raised in an environment with both black and white people.” Here, participants’ lived experiences of dislocation provide an important resource for recontextualizing what cultural difference is consumed. By connecting the countervailing discourses of cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation with their individual identity resources, consumers adopt a subject position of the respectful outsider, adept at making space for diverse cultural viewpoints and connecting “both sides.”

Recontextualizing What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“Keep in mind that CA [cultural appropriation] is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of a different culture or identity—the problems with CA therefore differ because of the context in which it happens not just the definition itself. […] Cultural appropriation functions differently in the West (US) than it does in K-pop but we react to them (us the Western fans) the same way. The reason why we often have such strong reactions to CA is that we assume that because we are in a violent environment (btw this is talking about the US) where things like CA is rooted in violent intent for our culture and wellbeing. […] It [CA] matters VERY MUCH in the political climate of the United States. The US is an ‘ethnic melting pot’ but the well-being of these ethnicities is tied to a government that harms these people because of racism. […] However, in K-pop while it’s morally wrong that’s really all it is. […] It’s not that it doesn’t MATTER because everyone is entitled to feel wronged when their culture is disrespected but it functions DIFFERENTLY. And if you wanted to know: my ethnicity is black and my nationality is Nigerian (Yoruba) and I live in the US.” (Elena, Reddit, June 2020) “I believe since K-pop is growing more global, not everyone is on the same wavelength with cultural appropriation. Definitely there are boundaries that these K-pop idols shouldn’t cross, since now there are more international fans than before. […] That said, cultural appropriation is something that is dependent on the individual. As someone who is half Black and half Asian, I can definitely see both sides.” (Megan, Quora, June 2020)

Recontextualizing How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“I think the first step is acknowledging that this is their culture. This is their way of life. If you try to take that on without any understanding of the ramifications of it. […] I think by listening to K-pop and trying to understand its culture is the way I try to go about it. I try to gain more understanding and knowledge in a way to prevent myself from appropriating. […] So learning about the Korean history, especially like the North and South Korea, the differences, what happened, the impact on what that had to South Korea. […] I try to put that into perspective, try to understand all of the cultural and social issues, and then attempt to not overstep the line. Because I don’t want to be viewed as someone who takes on someone else’s culture, because I still, I respect my own culture and where I come from, and I’m proud of that. Yeah it’s just that the media and the music and the messages that they have in Korean music, I also enjoy.” (Avani, interview)

Arsel and Thompson (2011) discussed how high cultural capital can become a resource for consumers to demythologize cultural meanings that devalue their extended identity investments in a consumption field. Consumers mobilize various resources, including distinctive displays ( Crockett 2017 ; Kates 2002) and moralistic interpretations ( Luedicke et al. 2010) , to resist threats to their consumption-related identities. Similarly, because of their extended identity investments in the field of K-pop, consumers like Elena, Megan, and Avani have developed a heightened knowledge of the broader politics of K-pop’s globalization and sociohistorical dynamics of Korean culture. This knowledge allows them to recontextualize what difference they consume and how they consume it. Overall, recontextualizing constitutes a new subject position based on respectful—that is, more sophisticated, knowledgeable, and self-aware—consumption of cultural difference.

Rationalizing: Consumer as Connected Cosmopolitan

“We live in a very global world, it’s a little ridiculous to act like any sort of influence from different cultures is appropriation.” (online forum post)

The forum post above animates the final self-authorization strategy of rationalizing—when consumers refute the relevance of cultural appropriation discourse to what cultural difference they consume and how they consume it, thereby exempting their consumption of cultural difference from responsibilization. In contrast to the previous strategy of recontextualizing, in which consumers position themselves as respectful outsiders, when rationalizing, consumers craft a shared “we” that connects them to the cultures whose differences they consume. By emphasizing the liquidity of the boundary between the consuming self and the consumed other, consumers defend the valorized subject position of the connected cosmopolitan.

Rationalizing What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

To refute the relevance of the cultural appropriation discourse as it applies to what cultural difference they consume, international K-pop fans rationalized their consumption by framing K-pop in de-exoticized terms. If the cultural appropriation discourse assumes a clear boundary between cultural outsiders and cultural insiders, and a clear sense of what belongs to a culture and what does not ( Rogers 2006) , when de-exoticizing K-pop, consumers challenge these assumptions by emphasizing the liquidity of the self–other boundary as it applies to K-pop. Squarely aligned with the tenets of the cultural appreciation discourse, this strategy emphasizes a view of cultures as intermingling, shared, and cosmopolitan. For example, Nasrine understands K-pop as a form of cultural difference that is deliberately packaged to be consumed across cultures (“Korea, with the way they’ve been exporting all of this, I feel like they want their culture to be blended with the Western world, or in general, with everyone.”). Here, Nasrine frames what cultural difference she consumes in K-pop as a symptom of valorized processes of cultural diffusion, blending, and adaptation—a routinized expression of global remix culture. From this vantage point, Nasrine is rendered a connected cosmopolitan, deftly participating in the global flows of youth culture ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) .

“You know how people complain when a non-black person wears braids in their hair, like dreadlocks, I feel it’s a bit nonsensical because I don’t feel like you're disrespecting a culture by participating in the cultural activity or cultural norms. […] I don't get why people say only members of that race should participate in their cultural norms. If everyone wants to live in a diverse community, they should mingle a bit. It lets you, at the very least, accept the other cultures as a member of the community, I feel. […] You wouldn’t say that listening to Taylor Swift is a cultural appropriation of American norms or listening to someone like Of Monsters and Men being appropriation of Icelandic norms. So I don’t feel like it is an issue because, to me, it’s more distinct. I don’t see the relationship between cultural appropriation and K-pop fans, to be honest. I don’t see a relationship. That’s just me.” (Jeff, interview)

In this excerpt, Jeff reframes the debate as one between promoting cultural exchange versus cultural insularity. Notice how Jeff draws an equivalence between the use of Western-originated music by non-Western consumers and the use of black cultural elements in K-pop. In viewing these ways of consuming cultural difference in the same light, Jeff’s reflection elides asymmetrical conditions of production and reception that underpin different flows of global cultural exchange. By drawing on the neoliberal multicultural tenets ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018) embedded in the cultural appreciation discourse, Jeff’s reflection articulates an affirmative cosmopolitan vision of global interconnection and intermingling wherein such cultural inequities are rendered irrelevant. From this depoliticizing ideological standpoint, Jeff self-authorizes the consumption of cultural difference by asserting the value of a cosmopolitan worldview.

Rationalizing How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“The reason it [K-pop] stuck with me I think is because it connected me to my Asian identity that I never really got to experience, because I moved [to Australia] when I was one so I lost a lot of my—I pushed a lot of my Asian culture away because I was trying to fit into Australian culture. […] It was really cool because you get to see Asian culture, and it’s so cool now seeing K-pop groups perform at Coachella, which is so insane because you wouldn’t see that normally. And BTS winning the Grammys, it’s so cool being able to see Asian creators and Asian musicians being at the forefront of Western music as well, and it exposes people. I think I really resonated or really appreciated having K-pop in that time because it showed that being Asian isn’t something to be ashamed of, look at the cool stuff that we have.” (Nadia, interview)

In sum, via rationalizing, consumers demonstrate creative ways to contest the boundaries of cultural difference, belonging, and ownership. Adopted by those like Nasrine, a connected cosmopolitan participant of global youth culture ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) , or Ruby and Nadia who claim a shared regional Asian consciousness ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) , rationalizing enables consumers to address the tension between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject by constructing themselves as insiders of a shared transnational collective. By connecting culturally diverse consumers to an inclusive identity ( Beverland et al. 2021 ; Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) , this movement toward a shared “we” can carry transformative effects in consumers’ lives. Indeed, the rationalizing strategy, reliant upon the utopic cosmopolitan vision embedded in the cultural appreciation discourse, is consonant with K-pop’s global mainstreaming and discourses which position K-pop as a culturally syncretic blend of modern musical expressions from around the world ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021) . As such, rationalizing represents the most ready-to-hand and taken-for-granted pathway for consumers who have primarily experienced cultural difference as an identity-enhancing resource from a privileged position of unfettered market access. By advancing celebratory interpretations of cultural exchange, rationalizing helps consumers defend this privileged position. While our analysis focuses on consumers who explicitly reflect on an identity-relevant tension between appreciation and appropriation, we acknowledge that there are many consumers who, like Jeff, are dismissive of the debate (“I don’t feel like it is an issue”) or do not engage with the debate at all and, as such, fall outside our sample. The urge to defend a privileged and longstanding source of distinction may similarly motivate such manifestations of the rationalizing strategy. Yet, echoing the neocolonial logic of cosmopolitan consumption ( Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) , the rationalizing strategy reinscribes a depoliticized and dehistoricized view of the complex relationship between cultural groups. Ultimately, rationalizing self-authorizes the consumption of cultural difference by deflecting discussions away from the ongoing harms of cultural appropriation to historically marginalized cultures.

Prior work has theorized the tensions endemic to the marketization of cultural difference ( Peñaloza 2001 ; Root 1996 ; Skrbis and Woodward 2007 ) and, more recently, outlined cautionary implications for the use of cultural elements by commercial actors ( Kennedy and Makkar 2020 ; Thomas et al. 2020 ; Zanette et al. 2021 ). By contrast, our work focuses on how individuals navigate this tension as it filters to the level of the consumer subject. We use the lens of reflexivity ( Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson et al. 2018 ) to uncover consumers’ capacity to authorize themselves to consume cultural difference in response to the countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. Consumer self-authorization manifests in four distinct strategies: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each self-authorization strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Taken together, these diverse self-authorization strategies constitute a distinct form of identity work that is emerging in the domain of consuming difference—aimed at brokering access to consume others’ cultural resources.

We further observed that the degree to which individuals are sensitized toward the discourses of cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, in concert with their specific sociocultural contexts and idiographic circumstances, grounds which self-authorization strategies they deploy. We witnessed that individuals sensitized toward the harmful effects of neocolonial market dynamics (e.g., due to having their own cultural heritage previously subjected to the harms of cultural appropriation) were more inclined to be empathetic toward those whose differences were consumed and, therefore, to pursue self-authorization through reforming. Consumers who perceived themselves as vulnerable to social judgment (e.g., if they had a prominent public profile) often engaged in restraining to shield the self from moralized public judgments about cultural appropriation, whereas those who were prone to reflect on how one’s cultural background influences their views (e.g., due to experiencing cultural dislocation) commonly deployed recontextualizing. Finally, when consumers were invested in a cosmopolitan worldview and identified with a transnational “we” (e.g., by claiming a shared Asian identity), they tended to dismiss the issues of cultural appropriation and engage in rationalizing.

Aligned with the extended reflexivity thesis—which holds that individuals continually adjust their subject positions in response to shifting social structures ( Adams 2006 ; Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson et al. 2018 ), we also witnessed that consumers have the capacity to adjust and recombine different self-authorization strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and individual conditions. In this vein, some of our participants described how their deployment of self-authorization strategies changed over time (e.g., Avani shifted away from restraining when she felt judged by her high school peers toward recontextualizing as she became more knowledgeable about the sociohistorical backdrop behind K-pop). Other participants detailed how they deploy multiple strategies at the same time (e.g., Nadia’s acute awareness of neocolonialism as a person of color, whose cultural heritage has been appropriated, led her to engage in reforming, while her role as a visible online figure who is exposed to social judgment led her to simultaneously engage in restraining). In essence, when pursuing self-authorization, consumers may adhere to one strategy, change strategies, or combine multiple strategies together. Overall, our account of consumer self-authorization describes diverse pathways through which consumers craft permission to consume cultural difference by configuring who they are in relation to the other. Our work on consumer self-authorization departs from prior work in three important ways.

Beyond the Depoliticization of Marketized Cultural Difference

First, prior research described how ideologies such as neoliberal multiculturalism push forward a depoliticized approach to consuming cultural difference, especially at the level of the individual consumer ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) . As highlighted by Veresiu and Giesler (2018 , 565), the hegemonic ethnic consumer subject “systematically discourages other ethnic subjectivities from surfacing and materializing.” Our analysis shows that this depoliticizing effect is not as totalizing as prior literature suggests. As consumers become more responsibilized for societal issues ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014) , the responsibilized consumer subject is extended to the consumption of cultural difference, repoliticizing it through the cultural appropriation discourse. With two equally compelling and totalizing—yet competing—discourses and respective forms of consumer subjectivity available to them, we find that consumers reflexively pursue self-authorization to continue consuming cultural difference in a repoliticized scenario. Self-authorization is the outcome of consumers trying to address this tension, and in doing so, they manifest a struggle between the depoliticization and repoliticization of the marketization of cultural difference.

Via diverse self-authorization strategies, consumers reflexively engage a critical vocabulary that begins to resurface ethnic and racial inequalities in the marketization of cultural difference. As they engage in self-authorization, consumers articulate their own and others’ lived experiences of dislocation, reflecting on how these dislocations shape their perspectives on cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation in K-pop. We found that international K-pop consumers referenced their own cultural backgrounds to empathize with appropriated minority groups (as in reforming), buttress changes in their own consumption (as in restraining), and situate their respectful consumption of cultural difference in multiple sociohistorical perspectives (as in recontextualizing). The outcome of these consumer self-authorization strategies is that the cultural other is reconfigured from a fetishized object of exchange toward a subject that demands consideration. Consumers reframe themselves from individuals positioned in global circuits of cultural exchange toward individuals with an identity at stake in relation to a shared moral concern. The consumption of cultural difference becomes a learning ground for engaging with cultural politics, where “scripts for thinking about race […] are being called into question” ( Jenkins 2018 , 19). Hence, consumer self-authorization carries the potential for consumers to be enrolled into a reflexive engagement with market-mediated cultural dislocation, informed by issues of race.

Despite these gestures in the direction of repoliticization, consumer self-authorization represents an ambivalent marriage of convenience between the individual-as-moral-subject and individual-as-consumer that places individuals squarely between depoliticization and repoliticization. Consumers’ attempts at repoliticization are not radical or targeted at structural issues. Even though consumers engage with the vocabulary of resistance, they largely leave unquestioned the asymmetrical architecture that unevenly distributes the benefits of marketizing cultural difference. In the international K-pop fandom, while consumers who engaged the reforming strategy often called for apologies for distorted representations of minority cultures, we saw no evidence of calls to redistribute the benefits of marketizing difference, for example, by fostering equitable partnerships with Black hip hop artists who inspire much of K-pop’s musical and aesthetic styles. Seen in this light, consumer self-authorization epitomizes what Schmitt, Brakus, and Biraglia (2022 , 84) describe as an ongoing “dynamic between reconcilement and activism” or what Kanai and Gill (2020 , 10) refer to as “woke capitalism,” in its ambivalent attempt to reinscribe the resurgent politics of cultural diversity within the dominant logic of the market. Ultimately, the goal of consumer self-authorization is to resolve the tension at the level of the individual consumer subject, rather than to radically dismantle the structural and systemic inequalities that continue to disadvantage people of color and people from the Global South.

From Totalizing Discourses to Reflexive Subject Positions

Second, our work shifts the analytical frame from totalizing, top-down discourses to emergent and diverse subject positions that are an outcome of consumer reflexivity. Prior work on the marketization of cultural difference has analytically focused on how dominant discourses that underpin the global flows of cultural difference are sociohistorically and ideologically constituted ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) and, in turn, structure consumers’ experiences. Augmenting these macro-level processes, we show how consumers reflexively consider options and occupy diverse subject positions that enable them to navigate the crosswinds of two equally compelling yet competing discourses.

In shifting the analytical frame, our study contributes to recent research on the tensions surrounding the enactment of consumer responsibilization ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ) by accounting for the role of consumer reflexivity in processes of responsibilization. Prior work shows that consumers experience tension when they, but not others, are called to be responsible, or when there is a lack of market support for the practical enactment of responsibilization ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ; Eckhardt and Dobscha 2019 ; Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021) . By contrast, consumer self-authorization stems from a different source of tension tied to consumer identity projects: a clash between the intention of being responsible and a competing, but equally desirable, intention to appreciate cultural difference. Our account of consumer self-authorization shows the role of consumer reflexivity in navigating this tension. When the responsibilized subject generates identity tension for them, consumers will reflexively determine the amount of responsibility they are willing to take and attribute to others the remaining share. Prior research has identified backlash ( Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021 ), discomfort ( Eckhardt and Dobscha 2019) , and paralysis ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ) as ways in which consumers react to the call for adopting a responsibilized subject position. In our work, we find that just as individual consumers vary in their adoption of different self-authorization strategies, they vary in the extent to which they feel responsibilized. While some consumers (those restraining and recontextualizing) take upon themselves the task of changing their ways of consuming to avoid engaging in cultural appropriation, other consumers (those reforming) demand that others in the market assume part of the responsibility and others yet (those rationalizing) deem responsibilization unnecessary.

Moreover, our work connects to the literature on moralistic identity work ( Luedicke et al. 2010) by dimensionalizing a broader array of strategies that extend beyond the antagonistic defense of an extant identity-enhancing discourse. In the reforming strategy, international K-pop fans voice the clarion calls of responsibilization and direct calls for reform at other actors in the market. Other fans, when restraining, internalized the responsibilizing discourse and directed it at disciplining their own consumption. Still other consumers attempted to recontextualize their consumption of cultural difference by connecting the divergent perspectives in the discourses of cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. These various positions on both sides of, and in between, these countervailing discourses augment antagonistic conceptualizations of moralistic identity work that perhaps stem from an a priori framing of these forms of identity work as a dialectical conflict between competing groups—for example, subcultural consumers of indie culture versus the mainstream appropriations that led them to be labeled as hipsters ( Arsel and Thompson 2011) , Hummer owners versus sustainability activists ( Luedicke et al. 2010) , and indigenes versus immigrants ( Luedicke 2015) . By contrast, the diverse strategies in our theoretical account of self-authorization articulate multiple and emergent subject positions that redeem consumers’ identity work through both antagonistic and conciliatory pathways.

Importantly, consumer self-authorization strategies do not only recharge the meanings of a consumption practice by linking it with heroic discourses ( Luedicke et al. 2010 ) or uncoupling it from culturally devaluing discourses ( Arsel and Thompson 2011 ); they also reconfigure the relationship between the consuming self and the others whose cultures are consumed. Rather than defending their consumption choices against direct confrontations by moral critics belonging to other groups, K-pop consumers are reflexively engaging with the two countervailing discourses and searching for a synthesis that will address the tension at the individual level, so that each of them can continue consuming K-pop.

New Complexities in Animating Cultural Difference as a Valued Market Resource

Third, our account of consumer self-authorization points toward a broad range of consequences for how cultural difference is animated as a valued market resource. Prior research shows that encounters with cultural difference carry value for consumers because they offer a source of novel, exciting, or authentic meanings, enabling consumers to enact a worldly outlook associated with social distinction and mobility ( Figueiredo et al. 2021 ; Holt 1998) . However, consumer self-authorization evidences significant adjustments in the repertoire of identity projects that can be pursued as consumers balance cultural appropriation concerns with the desire to consume cultural difference.

To illustrate one significant shift in more depth, practices of code-switching, a valued performance when considered through the perspectives of cosmopolitan ideology and cultural globalization, can be subdued when consumers engage in restraining. Code-switching, defined as the capacity to “know, command and enact […] multiple cultural vocabularies, discourses and repertoires,” is a valorized everyday performance of cosmopolitan openness ( Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis 2009 , 111–112). When seen in the light of cosmopolitan ideology, code-switching constitutes the consumer as a skillful cultural bricoleur, adept at performing multiple registers of cultural difference that proliferate in the heteroglossic global economy ( Askegaard et al. 2005 ; Figueiredo et al. 2021 ; Oswald 1999) . Seen through the lens of the cultural appropriation discourse, however, the value of this mode of cultural consumption becomes compromised. In our context, for example, shifting out to Korean words in everyday English does not encode a mastery of cultural worlds; rather, it encodes a superficial misappropriation of another’s culture that leads some consumers to manage this identity tension by avoiding such performances altogether.

This suspicion toward code-switching raises unexpected and intriguing implications for cultural globalization. Within theories of cultural globalization, the well-established glocalization thesis holds that the globalization of cultural products offers the potential for creative recombinations of diverse cultural elements that can fuel hybridized transformations of market practices ( Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017) . This is because consumers, as agentic and creative bricoleurs of cultural meanings ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) , routinely repurpose, domesticate, and recombine the available symbolic and material resources in globalizing and multicultural markets to suit their own localized cultural frameworks and identity goals ( Eckhardt and Mahi 2004 ; Sharifonnasabi et al. 2020) . The glocalization thesis might lead one to expect, for example, that encounters between K-pop and its English-speaking fans would legitimize the Koreanization of everyday English among international K-pop fans. Yet, we found that, when restraining, consumers lean in the opposite direction, toward taming performances of cultural hybridity.

Further implications of each self-authorization strategy for consumers, industry, and society are broadly outlined in table 4 . Taken together, self-authorization is reconfiguring the consumption of cultural difference, compelling consumers to craft novel pathways to continue their engagements with cultural difference in the face of responsibilization.

CONSUMER SELF-AUTHORIZATION STRATEGIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSUMERS, INDUSTRY, AND SOCIETY

Boundary Conditions and Transferability of Insights

Other consumption contexts where cultural difference forms an important source of value—American yoga ( Askegaard and Eckhardt 2012 ; Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017) , aestheticized reincarnations of Brazilian cuisine ( Zanette et al. 2021) , and the Westernization of the KonMari tidying method ( Sudnick 2022) —already exhibit their own unfolding versions of self-authorization. Yet, it is not our intention to present self-authorization to consume cultural difference as if it were a totalizing narrative that applies to all forms of consuming cultural difference; there are several boundary conditions. First, consumers who engage in self-authorization strategies must have some knowledge of what cultural appropriation is and why it is problematic, which spurs them to reflect on what forms of cultural difference they consume and how they consume it. In the context of the K-pop fandom, such knowledge is reflexively refracted by an active collective where consumers articulate and discuss issues of cultural appropriation, thereby spurring many international K-pop fans to pursue self-authorization. Second, self-authorization to consume cultural difference is more likely to occur when such consumption is relevant to an individual’s identity. For example, many international K-pop fans construct intimate parasocial relationships with their favorite idols. Accusations of cultural appropriation can threaten these identity investments, triggering the pursuit for self-authorization to consume cultural difference. By contrast, when individuals consume appropriative fast-moving consumer goods where such identity investment may be lacking, the self-authorization to consume cultural difference in response to discourses of cultural appropriation is unlikely to be as intense.

The marketized pursuit of novel and extraordinary experiences traverses not only ethnic and racialized boundaries but also the boundaries of social class, gender, sexuality, and subculture ( Arsel and Thompson 2011) . As consumer responsibilization toward diversity, equity, and inclusion advances ( Arsel et al. 2022) , consumer self-authorization could also emerge in these broader forms of consuming difference.

Over two decades ago, Peñaloza (2001) declared that “the consumption of another culture [is] a fundamental, contemporary market phenomenon […] arguably the single most prevalent consumption phenomenon in the world today.” In an era of heightened sensitivity to critiques of cultural appropriation, our work offers timely insights on how consumers are self-authorizing their consumption of cultural difference and, in doing so, fueling a soft repoliticization of marketized cultural difference that is shifting the implicit rules of this pervasive phenomenon. While our analysis focused on self-authorization at the level of the individual consumer subject, future research may explore the role of institutional actors in creating the resources that consumers reflexively draw upon for self-authorization and orienting consumers toward particular strategies at the expense of others. What kinds of issues are made visible, and what kinds of issues are silenced, in the quest to self-authorize the consumption of cultural difference? We hope that our work on consumer self-authorization helps provide an initial building block for advancing our collective understanding of this nascent phenomenon.

The first author supervised and conducted data collection via in-depth interviews (38 participants) and netnographic immersion in Melbourne, Australia, from February 2016 to May 2022. The second and third authors systematically conducted netnographic immersion focused on cultural appropriation from March to July 2021. Data were discussed on multiple occasions by all authors using transcripts, links to online data, coding notes and tables, and shared data folders. The data are currently stored in a project folder on the first author’s Monash University Google Drive, in line with ethics approval and Monash University’s storage requirements for sensitive and restricted research data. All authors jointly analyzed these data and authored the final conceptual framework.

Angela Gracia B. Cruz ( [email protected] ) is a senior lecturer in marketing at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Yuri Seo ( [email protected] ) is an associate professor of marketing at The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

Daiane Scaraboto ( [email protected] ) is a professor of marketing at The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.

The authors thank all the K-pop fans for their stories and perspectives, Monash Business School for generous financial and research assistance support for this project, the Monash Business Behavioural Lab for support with participant recruitment, and The University of Auckland and The University of Melbourne for research assistance support. They gratefully acknowledge Brenda Preman for her data collection work, and thank Eileen Fischer, Bernardo Figueiredo, Melissa Akaka, Ahir Gopaldas, Pierre-Yann Dolbec, David Crockett, and numerous esteemed colleagues at Schulich School of Business, Australian National University, ANZMAC Melbourne, and ACR Denver for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. Finally, the authors thank the editors, associate editor, and review team for their insightful support and guidance. Supplementary materials are included in the web appendix accompanying the online version of this article.

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Peacemaking May 31, 2020

What Is Cultural Appreciation (And How It’s Different From Cultural Appropriation)?

Preemptive Love

Halloween costumes. Sports mascots. We’re surrounded by examples of cultural appropriation. But where’s the line between appreciating another culture and appropriating it? What even is cultural appropriation, and why is it a problem?

It’s relatively easy for us to experience another culture today. Film, television, and social media keep us connected at all times, giving us a glimpse into how other people around the world live. How they dress. What they eat. What holidays and traditions they celebrate.

All this connection can inspire genuine cultural appreciation. But experiencing another culture doesn’t automatically mean you understand it, or that you should start claiming elements of that culture as your own.

Cultural appreciation can easily turn into cultural appropriation. Instead of honoring another culture, appropriation demeans and dishonors. It perpetuates harmful stereotypes and deepens divides between communities.

But it can be avoided. We can honor and celebrate other cultures without inadvertently diminishing them along the way.

What Is Cultural Appreciation, and How is it Different From Cultural Appropriation?

Cultural appreciation is when you earnestly seek to learn about or explore a different culture.

You learn. You listen. You strive to understand. You seek to honor its beliefs and traditions. Not for your own personal gain—money, fame, or the Instagram photo. But to simply honor the culture and its people.

Appreciating different cultures like this is a fantastic part of being alive today. The problem is, there’s a fine line between appreciating a culture and appropriating from it.

But what exactly is cultural appropriation? It’s something many of us are just recently coming to understand. It wasn’t until 2017 that the term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, which defined it as:

“The unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the practices, customs, or aesthetics of one social or ethnic group by members of another (typically dominant) community or society.”

There are many examples of cultural appropriation, easily visible in pop culture, sports, the arts, and even the fashion industry. But it isn’t just celebrities that get stuck. All of us are susceptible to this.

For example, it’s popular to refer to your group of friends as your “tribe.”

It’s meant to express closeness between you and your friends, but it can actually be a form of appropriation, perpetuating a harmful stereotype of both African and Native American cultures—specifically, the notion that they are somehow less “civilized” than other cultures. Used this way, the term demeans these cultures rather than honoring them.

This is the fine line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation.

Appreciation is to learn more about a culture so you can better understand it. This quickly transforms into appropriation the moment you try to use that culture for yourself. Appreciation has you looking to others to guide the conversation. It keeps you clearly in the role of student.

Appropriation is where you take from others and then put yourself in a position of authority.

A lot of the time, this goes unnoticed. When you use the word “tribe” to describe your friendship group, you don’t actively going out of your way to hurt Native Americans. You may not mean to cause any disrespect, yet taking from another culture for your own gain is a form of stealing, just as taking someone else’s words and using them as your own is plagiarism.

Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation: How To Honor Other Cultures

Step 1 : give more than just credit.

Credit alone is not enough. This is where celebrities and brands alike often go wrong—for example, when they hold a fashion show and dedicate it to a certain culture. They do so as a form of honor and celebration, yet referencing someone else’s culture isn’t enough.

You need to go beyond giving credit to a culture and instead involve them in the conversation.

A white male in his fifties dedicating a fashion show to Indian culture can be seen as cultural appropriation, especially if most of the models are white and not from India. Having Indian models, on the other hand, and including Indian designers from the very start might go further toward fostering cultural appreciation instead of appropriation.

This works on an individual level, too. If you want to celebrate a culture that isn’t your own, don’t go it alone. Involve people in that culture, ask them questions (assuming they want to be involved), and invite them to share their stories and experiences.

Step 2 : Be Conscious and Intentional

Ignorance isn’t bliss. Apologizing later won’t help. So before you do anything, think about what you’re doing and who it may impact.

Ask yourself:

Do I understand the significance of what I’m doing here?
Am I honoring this culture or simply imitating it?
Am I perpetuating a stereotype that might hurt those who belong to this culture?
Am I doing this as a personal opportunity to interact with and experience another culture, or am I doing this for a photo I can post online?

Imagine you’re attending a party and want to celebrate your love of Japanese culture. Will the clothes you wear honor or hurt people? Are you playing to a certain stereotype? Do you really understand the culture you’re trying to honor, or do you just have a basic knowledge of it?

Why are you doing all this? What’s your intention? Take the time to ask yourself the hard questions.

That alone can be enough to make you step back and think. After all, cultural appropriation often comes more from ignorance than hate.

Step 3 : Don’t Borrow What You Don’t Understand

It may sound obvious, but do you actually understand the culture you’re trying to celebrate? Or do you simply have a basic knowledge of it from an article you read or a Netflix documentary you watched?

A good rule of thumb is to only honor cultures you understand in-depth, that you’ve taken serious time to study. Have you spoken to people who are a part of that culture? Can you openly discuss this culture in detail, or would you struggle to hold a conversation?

If you don’t understand a culture, you’re far more likely to fall into cultural appropriation rather than cultural appreciation. People often fall into this trap when getting a tattoo that features a symbol from someone else’s culture, for example. Again, ask yourself your intention of using that symbol. Is it for your gain or are you honoring someone else?

Do you know about the symbol in question, or does it simply look good on your arm?

Understanding a culture in-depth doesn’t make you immune to cultural appropriation, but it is essential to genuine cultural appreciation.

Step 4 : Educate Yourself!

So many aspects of life today were stolen from other cultures.

This is especially true for white cultures, who have laid claim to so many certain foods, dances, figures of speech, and music that originated elsewhere. It’s important we educate ourselves to this fact, whatever culture we’re a part of.

What do you take for granted today that originated from a different culture?

How well do you know your own culture and its relationship to other cultures throughout history?

The reality is, most of us are largely unaware of what happened before us, even if we’ve studied history. Most of us learned about racism and slavery, but do you know the words, customs, and practices that are wrapped up in this part of the American story? Did you know, for example, that popular terms like “peanut gallery” and “uppity” have racist origins?

Once you educate yourself about your own culture and where it came from, it’s easier to practice genuine care and concern for others.

Step 5 : Do It For The Right Reasons

Good intentions alone are not enough to steer clear of cultural appropriation. But they do matter.

Those questions again:

Am I honoring this culture, or simply imitating it?
Am I perpetuating a stereotype and hurting people who belong to this culture?

Ignorance is not bliss. Cultural appropriation is a real issue in today’s connected world. Everyone is capable of connecting with almost everyone else. It’s easier than ever to gain a basic understanding of many cultures. Yet time is sparse, we’re more easily distracted, and we often don’t do the work to discern the good information from the truly Snopes-worthy content on the internet.

Which leads us to merely scratch the surface (at best) instead of going a mile deep. We set out with the intention of appreciating another culture but it transforms into cultural appropriation if we don’t do it the right way, for the right reasons. Get clear on what your reasons are.

3 Great Examples of Cultural Appreciation

1: visit a mosque.

In 2016, a group of Christian pastors visited a mosque for the first time.

They, like many other Americans, didn’t personally know a single person of the Muslim faith. They had never visited a mosque before and didn’t understand the culture. They also lived in a world where headlines were dominated by ISIS, Islamophobia, and toxic stereotypes.

So they committed to learning more, and, more importantly, to gain a real understanding of a new culture. They didn’t just read about it or speak to a single person. They, as a group, visited a mosque so they could experience the culture firsthand.

They asked questions. They listened. They allowed themselves to be taught.

It wasn’t a one-way street. Their Muslim counterparts listened to the pastors’ stories and values, too—their understanding of what it means to be Christian. This is an example of two cultures coming together, leaders building bridges and setting a positive example. Appreciating one another’s culture and embracing their differences.

Most important of all, it was done to learn, share peace, and to instill greater love.

2: Dress Appropriately

If you’re ever invited to a wedding or a celebration that honors a different culture, think about how you can fit in.

Wearing a sari with a choli top for your friend’s birthday party just so you can stand out is appropriation. Whereas wearing a colorful chiffon saree to a Hindu wedding may be a sign of appreciation, because it shows deference to (and appreciation for) the host’s culture. (But make sure you ask before you make a decision.)

Remember, you’re the student. The more you can hold that posture, the more you will learn to genuinely appreciate other cultures and the people who inhabit them.

3: Bless Your Neighbors

One way to appreciate others is to recognize the holidays and traditions that are important to them.

For example, honor your Muslim neighbors during Ramadan (and other holidays).

Acknowledging other cultures’ holidays isa chance for you to learn and show solidarity with your neighbors. Not by mimicking their traditions, but by looking for ways you can honor them.

Ask your Muslim neighbors what Ramadan means to them. Instead of throwing a Cinco de Mayo party, learn about Mexican culture and history, and how the holiday came to exist.

Learn about the Native American nations that once lived on your land. Educate yourself on their customs, language, and art.

Appreciating Culture and Building Bridges

Cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation often come down to one thing: intention.

Wearing henna for a summer music festival can quickly turn into cultural appropriation.

But wearing henna to your Indian friend’s wedding may be a sign of cultural appreciation and respect.

Cultural appropriation divides people and reinforces toxic stereotypes. It leads to misunderstanding and prejudice. And it sets us all up to be at odds with one another.

The differences between cultural appropriation vs. cultural appreciation are often fine.

What begins as a celebration of another culture can quickly transform into appropriation because it’s done for the wrong reasons or because we don’t take the lead from the right people.

We live in a beautiful and diverse world. We should celebrate and enjoy the many different and contrasting cultures. They help give texture and creativity and diversity to our world. But as we appreciate other cultures, let’s be sure we’re doing it with the right intentions—to learn, to gain understanding, and to ultimately show honor and value.

Tagged: Culture Peacemaking

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More From Forbes

Championing inclusivity: what museum directors can learn from women leaders.

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Michele Y. Smith serves as MoPOP 's CEO, a mission-focused leader with extensive experience in nonprofit business development.

Museums are among our most beloved cultural institutions. A well-curated museum can tell us about ourselves and preserve history while inspiring the future. However, there is also a dark past to contend with.

The story of museums is inextricably linked to the history of colonialism and cultural appropriation. Fortunately, the conversation is changing to reshape museums to be more community-focused and representative of the communities they serve.

As more women are appointed into museum leadership roles, I believe you can't ignore the influence of female leadership in this transformation. This diversity helps make museums dynamic spaces that resonate with diverse audiences. As we reflect on Women's History Month, which is celebrated throughout March, I see this as the perfect time to explore the impact of women's leadership on museums.

Reimagining Museum Leadership

I recently celebrated my first anniversary as the CEO of a museum in Seattle. So, the story of female executive leadership in large cultural institutions is very close to my heart. I'm proud to be among the women reimagining museums and what it means to lead them. I also look to my female peers for inspiration in transforming these institutions to be inclusive and representative.

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As I see it, women can bring a fresh perspective to museum leadership by challenging traditional hierarchies. This means fostering an environment of collaboration and ensuring museums represent the experience and knowledge of marginalized groups. I've observed women who also showcase their dedication to inclusivity and equity in their leadership style. They empower staff and other stakeholders through inclusive decision-making processes and transparent communication. Ultimately, I believe this can lead to more innovative and impactful initiatives that allow everyone's voice to be heard.

I've found many women serve as advocates for inclusivity and representation within their museums as well. A New York Times article pointed out that many women museum directors it spoke with consider "elevating other women internally" a priority.

Lessons On Championing Inclusivity And Representation

It's important for directors to champion diverse perspectives, uncover untold narratives and give a platform to voices previously unheard. They also need to be able to adapt swiftly to the changing landscape while simultaneously prioritizing the well-being of their staff and visitors. You can see this in the exhibitions, programs and events curated at museums. By reflecting on the diversity of their communities, leaders can create spaces where all visitors feel seen, heard and valued.

To see what I mean, consider a few examples of women leaders in the museum space. I believe each of these women has helped foster a greater cultural understanding, champion inclusivity or challenge traditional historical narratives.

Thelma Golden, director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, is known for centering and promoting Black artists as far back as 1991. She is also known for her use of the term "post-Black" in a catalog essay, her point being that "Blackness contained multitudes and need not be the defining characteristic" of the artists' work, according to the New Yorker .

Another example is María Inés Rodríguez, an art curator who may be best known for her tenure as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bordeaux (known as CAPC). She was fired in 2018, which sparked a conversation on the shortage of women leaders at French cultural institutions.

There's also Min Jung Kim. She's the eleventh director of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the only woman, immigrant and person of color to have ever held the position in the institution, which was founded in 1879, St. Louis Public Radio said . Upon her appointment in 2021, Kim presented her vision of community engagement and inclusivity for the museum.

As a leader in the museum community, and as a Black woman, I believe it is imperative for museum leaders to learn from examples like these and champion inclusivity themselves. Embracing diversity and inclusivity not only enriches the museum experience but also ensures museums work toward becoming and remaining relevant and accessible to all members of society.

To get started on this journey, museum leaders can take several actions.

1. Commit to diversity in exhibitions and programs. Actively seek out artists, curators and collaborators from underrepresented communities.

2. Foster inclusive spaces. Hold staff training on diversity, equity and inclusion practices, and implement policies promoting accessibility and respect for all visitors.

3. Engage with community partners. This can enable you to co-create programs reflecting the needs and interests of local communities.

4. Prioritize inclusive hiring practices. Promote diversity and equity within museum staff and leadership roles.

5. Actively seek out and amplify the voices of marginalized communities. This can be done through exhibitions, publications and public programs. Create platforms for dialogue and collaboration empowering marginalized groups to share their stories and perspectives.

Empowering Future Generations Of Museum Professionals

Through intentional action and collaboration, museum leaders can demonstrate their commitment to inclusivity and equity, foster a museum environment truly reflective of the diverse communities they serve and continue to build more inclusive and accessible cultural institutions for future generations to enjoy.

I share a mission with many leaders of cultural institutions. I believe the people leading today's museums, and women in particular, can serve as mentors, role models and advocates for future generations of diversity and inclusion. Through astute decision-making and strategic planning, leaders can successfully steer museums toward a future that is both sustainable and forward-thinking.

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On this day in history, April 24, 1800, Library of Congress is born, oldest federal cultural institution in US

O n this day in history , April 24, 1800, President John Adams — the second president of the United States — approved the appropriation of $5,000 for the purchase of "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress," according to the website of the Library of Congress.

The research library — the oldest federal cultural institution in the United States — is celebrating its 223rd birthday on Monday, April 24, 2023.

The books that Adams referred to — first purchased for the Library of Congress — were ordered from London.

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They arrived in 1801, the library also explains on its site.

The collection of 740 volumes and three maps was stored in the U.S. Capitol , which was the library's first home.

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Then, on Jan. 26, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson approved the first legislation that clearly defined the role and functions of the new institution, the library also explains on its website.

Jefferson was the primary shaper of the Library of Congress, it notes, as he "believed that a democratic legislature needed information and ideas in all subjects to do its work."

It goes on, "From the beginning, however, the institution was more than a legislative library, for an 1802 law made the appointment of the Librarian of Congress a presidential responsibility. It also permitted the president and vice president to borrow books , a privilege that eventually was extended to the judiciary, officials of government agencies, and, under certain conditions, members of the public."

Jefferson, over time, remained keenly interested in the library, it says in its history — and instrumental to its continued existence.

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"In 1814, when the British invaded Washington, they destroyed the Capitol, including the Library of Congress. By then retired to Monticello, Jefferson offered to sell his personal library of more than 6,000 volumes to Congress."

That purchased "was approved in 1815, doubling the size of the library. It also expanded the scope of the collections."

Notes the library as well, "Anticipating the argument that his collection might be too wide-ranging and comprehensive for use by a legislative body, Jefferson argued that there was ‘no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.’ The Jeffersonian concept of universality is the philosophy and rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today's library."

It was not until 1897 that the Library of Congress moved into its own building — almost 100 years after its founding.

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"Congress gave the Librarian of Congress sole responsibility for making the Library's rules and regulations," the library says, "and invested in the Senate the authority to approve a president's nomination of a Librarian of Congress."

"Since World War II , [the Library of Congress] has become an international resource of unparalleled dimension and the world's largest library," the library itself notes.

"In its three massive structures on Capitol Hill, the Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and James Madison Memorial Buildings, the Library of Congress brings together the concerns of government, learning, and librarianship — an uncommon combination, but one that has greatly benefited American scholarship and culture ."

However, others stepped in and were responsible for the library's continued growth and development.

Says the library on its website, "The individual responsible for transforming the Library of Congress into an institution of national significance was Ainsworth Rand Spofford, Librarian of Congress from 1864 to 1897."

He "applied Jefferson's philosophy on a grand scale," notes the library.

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"He linked the library's legislative and national functions , building a comprehensive collection for both the legislature and the nation. In obtaining greatly increased support from Congress, Spofford employed a combination of logic, flattery and nationalistic rhetoric."

By 1867, "his acquisitions made the Library of Congress the largest library in the United States."

Among his other top achievements: In 1870, he centralized all U.S. copyright activities at the library — "which ensured the continuing growth of the collections by stipulating that two copies of every book, pamphlet, map, print and piece of music registered for copyright be deposited in the library — and construction of a separate building, a 26-year struggle [that was] not completed until 1897."

Through a service begun by Herbert Putnam, head of the Library of Congress from 1889 to 1939, the library makes its catalog available to many thousands of subscribing American libraries and institutions, Britannica.com points out.

To Putnam, says the library itself, "a national library was more than a comprehensive collection housed in Washington. It was ‘a collection universal in scope, which has a duty to the country as a whole.’ He defined that duty as service to scholarship, both directly and through other libraries."

The Library of Congress has continued to grow over the years — "balancing its legislative, national, and, after World War II, international roles," it says.

"Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish (1939-1944) stressed the library's roles as a symbol of democracy and a cultural institution," the website of the library indicates.

"Luther H. Evans (1945-1953) pushed forward the library's bibliographic and international activities. [And] L. Quincy Mumford (1954-1974) greatly expanded all the library's roles, but particularly its bibliographic activities and foreign acquisitions."

Then, under the leadership of historian Daniel J. Boorstin, Librarian of Congress from 1975-1987, the library's "visibility" greatly increased, the library says of its own history.

"Boorstin's successor, historian James H. Billington (1987-2015) … vigorously pursued a similar course." The library said he "established private sector support groups and an educational role for the library, using new technologies to share the library's collections with the nation."

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On Sept. 14, 2016, Carla Hayden was sworn in as 14th Librarian of Congress, nominated to the position by President Obama on Feb. 24, 2016. Her nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on July 13, 2016.

Here are some other facts and figures associated with today's Library of Congress (all figures courtesy of the library itself).

1. It today contains more than 173 million items.

2. Every working day, the library receives some 15,000 items and adds more than 10,000 items to its collections.

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3. Since 1962, the Library of Congress has maintained offices abroad to acquire, catalog and preserve library and research materials.

4. About half the library's book and serial collections are in languages other than English.

5. The Law Library of Congress is the world's largest law library , with more than 2.9 million volumes.

6. The library holds the largest rare-book collection in North America (over 700,000 volumes), including the largest collection of 15th-century books in the Western Hemisphere.

7. The library has approximately 100 extremely rare children's books, including "The Children's New Play-Thing" (Philadelphia, 1763) and "The Children's Bible" (Philadelphia, 1763).

8. Foremost among the Manuscript Division's holdings are the papers of 23 presidents, ranging from George Washington, first president, to Calvin Coolidge, the nation's 30th president.

9. The Gutenberg Bible, one of the treasures of the Library of Congress, was purchased in 1930. The 15th-century work is one of three perfect copies on vellum in the world.

10. The Library of Congress, in addition, has the most comprehensive collection of American music in the world: over 22 million items, including 8.2 million pieces of sheet music.

11. The American Folklife Center administers the Veterans History Project, created by Congress in 2000 to preserve the reminiscences of the nation’s war veterans . To date, more than 100,000 submissions have been collected.

12. The American Folklife Center also administers and preserves the StoryCorps project, a nationwide grassroots initiative to record the oral histories of ordinary citizens.

13. Since 1931, the library has provided books for the blind in Braille and on sound recordings.

14. The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled has replaced its inventory of recordings on audio cassettes with newly developed Digital Talking Books and digital playback equipment.

15. The X (formerly known as Twitter) account of the Library of Congress has 1.2 million followers.

For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle .

Original article source: On this day in history, April 24, 1800, Library of Congress is born, oldest federal cultural institution in US

An interior shot of one of the buildings of the Library of Congress today in Washington, D.C. On Jan. 26, 1802, President Thomas Jefferson approved the first legislation that defined the role and functions of the new institution. AP Images

Argument: Russia Is Committing Cultural Genocide in Ukraine

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Russia Is Committing Cultural Genocide in Ukraine

Historical falsification, youth indoctrination, and the plunder of artifacts reveal the kremlin’s true objectives., russia’s war in ukraine.

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Paul Krugman

Ukraine aid in the light of history.

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist

On Saturday the House of Representatives finally overcame MAGA opposition and approved a new aid package for Ukraine. The Biden administration presumably had matériel ready to ship , just waiting for congressional authorization, so the effects of this legislative breakthrough will be quick.

Like many observers, I’m simultaneously relieved, ashamed, angry and worried by what has happened. I’m relieved that a nation under siege will probably — probably — get aid in time to survive, at least for a while, something that was increasingly in doubt given overwhelming Russian artillery superiority. I’m ashamed that things got to this point — that America came so close to betraying a democracy in danger. I’m angry at the political faction that blocked aid for so many months, not, as I’ll explain below, because of reasonable concerns about the cost, but probably because they want Vladimir Putin to win. And I’m worried because that faction remains powerful — a majority of Republicans in the House voted against Ukraine aid — and could still doom Ukraine in the years ahead.

But let me set emotions aside and try to do some analysis. In particular, let me take on some myths about aid to Ukraine. No, spending on Ukraine isn’t a huge burden on America, coming at the expense of domestic priorities. No, America isn’t bearing this cost alone, without help from our European allies. Yes, U.S. aid is still crucial, in part because Europe can supply money but isn’t yet in a position to supply enough military hardware.

To understand these points, I find it useful to look back at the obvious historical parallel to current aid to Ukraine: Franklin Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease program, which began delivering aid to Britain and China in 1941, before Pearl Harbor brought America officially into World War II.

It is often forgotten how controversial that aid was at the time. Many people are probably aware that there was an America First movement that opposed any aid to embattled Britain, in part because some of its prominent leaders, notably Charles Lindbergh , were racist and openly sympathetic to the Nazis.

I suspect that fewer people are aware that even in Congress, Lend-Lease was a deeply partisan issue. The initial bill, enacted in early 1941, passed the House with very little Republican support. Even more strikingly, support for Lend-Lease (triangles pointing up in the chart below) was closely correlated with economic ideology (Dimension 1). Almost all liberals favored supporting Britain in its darkest hour; many conservatives didn’t:

Yet the aid passed. Congress appropriated $13 billion before the attack on Pearl Harbor. This was an immense sum at the time — about 10 percent of America’s annual gross domestic product . Somewhat surprisingly, however, not much of that total consisted of weaponry. As the American Historical Association noted: “Our munitions industry was still largely in the tooling up state. And the flow of finished weapons was at first only a trickle.”

Indeed. Europe had begun rearming years before World War II started, while an isolationist United States hadn’t developed much of a defense industry — to take a famous example, the Sherman tank didn’t go into production until 1942. As a result, most of America’s initial aid took the form of food — at first we were less the arsenal of democracy than its breadbasket.

How does aid to Ukraine compare with that experience?

First, it’s vastly smaller relative to the size of our economy. The just-passed package will roughly double the cumulative aid we’ve given Ukraine, but at about $60 billion it’s less than one-fourth of 1 percent of G.D.P. — around one-fortieth the size of the initial Lend-Lease appropriation. Anyone claiming that spending on this scale will break the budget, or that it will seriously interfere with other priorities, is innumerate, disingenuous or both.

What about claims that America is bearing too much of the burden? Last week Donald Trump accused Europe of failing to pay its share : “Why is it that the United States is over $100 Billion Dollars into the Ukraine War more than Europe, and we have an Ocean between us in separation? Why can’t Europe equalize or match the money put in by the United States of America in order to help a Country in desperate need?” (Eccentric, more or less Germanic capitalization in the actual post.)

The answer to his questions is that his assertions are false. As the Kiel Institute reports, “The data show that total European aid has long overtaken U.S. aid — not only in terms of commitments, but also in terms of specific aid allocations sent to Ukraine.” Notably, many though not all European nations are spending substantially more in support of Ukraine as a percentage of G.D.P. than we are:

What is true is that the United States has provided more military aid than Europe:

Why? Remember that in the first year of Lend-Lease, America couldn’t supply much in the way of weapons, despite the immense size of our economy, because years of low military spending had left us with an underdeveloped military-industrial base. It took a couple of years to translate America’s overall industrial might into comparable military might. Right now Europe is in a similar situation: It has the money to help Ukraine, and for the most part it has the will, but it doesn’t have the production capacity to meet Ukraine’s military needs.

Will this change? Europe is moving toward increased military capacity , but more slowly than it should, and American aid remains essential.

So as I said, I’m relieved that America has finally released essential aid, but still very worried about the future. For now, at least, U.S. support remains crucial to Ukraine’s survival.

On being wrong about military spending .

A senior Republican speaks about the G.O.P. and Ukraine.

Have Democrats de facto taken control of the House?

Meanwhile, the U.S. economy keeps powering ahead .

Facing the Music

Just finished a bike trip in Sicily. A lot of the best architecture is from the 18th century, when Italy was still more of a cultural powerhouse than I had realized.

Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a distinguished professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @ PaulKrugman

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COMMENTS

Cultural appropriation
cultural appropriation, adoption of certain language, behaviour, clothing, or tradition belonging to a minority culture or social group by a dominant culture or group in a way that is exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical. An imbalance of power between the appropriator and the appropriated is a critical condition of the concept. Cultural appropriation often is viewed as a problem of ...
Essays on Cultural Appropriation
The Cultural Appropriation in The America. According to Oxford dictionaries, cultural appropriation is, the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, or ideas, of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society. Cultural appropriation has been a huge, controversial topic ...
'Cultural Appropriation' Is Critical to Human Progress
This essay, by Maggie Strauss, age 17, ... Cultural appropriation is just the modern term for a concept that has aided in the development of human society for centuries. Those who perpetuate ...
What Is Cultural Appropriation?
Appropriation refers to taking something that doesn't belong to you or your culture. In the case of cultural appropriation, it is an exchange that happens when a dominant group takes or "borrows" something from a minority group that has historically been exploited or oppressed. In this sense, appropriation involves a lack of understanding of or ...
Cultural appropriation: What it is and why it matters?
Cultural appropriation is a highly contested subject within the media and society more broadly, often provoking moral outrage. It is receiving increasing interest within the academy and the last 20 years have seen the publication of a number of important studies.
What Does Cultural Appropriation Really Mean?
Still, what most people think of today as cultural appropriation is the opposite: a member of the dominant culture — an insider — taking from a culture that has historically been and is still ...
Essay: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible : Code Switch : NPR
Recently, the New York Times published an essay defending cultural appropriation as necessary engagement. But that's a simplistic, misguided way of looking at appropriation, which causes real harm.
The appropriating subject: Cultural appreciation, property and
What is cultural 'appropriation'? What is cultural 'appreciation'? Whatever the complex answer to this question, cultural appropriation is commonly defined as 'the taking of something produced by members of one culture by members of another' (Young 2005: 136), whilst appreciation is typically understood as mere 'exploration': 'Appreciation explores whatever is there'.
Cultural appropriation: What it is and why it matters
Borrowed power: Essays in cultural appropriation. Rutgers University Press. AU T H OR BIOGR APH Y Rina Arya is Professor of Visual Culture and Theory at the University of Huddersfield. She has published widely on Francis Bacon, art and religion, and aspects of South Asian visual culture. She is the author of Francis Bacon: Painting in a Godless ...
(PDF) Cultural Appropriation and the Limits of Identity: A Case for
For Denise Cuthbert, it is an idea. Cultural Appropriation and the Limits o f Identity. Chiedza, Journal of Arrupe Jesuit University, Vol 20, No. 1 May 2018. 12. that erupted as a reaction ag ...
Cultural appropriation
7 essay samples found. This controversial topic has sparked a lot of debate in recent years. It refers to the act of taking elements from one culture and using them in another culture without proper understanding or acknowledgment. To write a strong argumentative essay on cultural appropriation, it is essential to understand its vast background.
What Is Cultural Appropriation?
Cultural appropriation takes place when members of a majority group adopt cultural elements of a minority group in an exploitative, disrespectful, or stereotypical way. To fully understand its consequences, though, we need to make sure we have a working definition of culture itself. Historically, deciding exactly what culture is hasn't been easy.
In Defense of Cultural Appropriation
For this is an essay in defense of cultural appropriation. In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense. The controversy began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of ...
Cultural appropriation
Cultural appropriation is the inappropriate or unacknowledged adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity. This can be especially controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures. According to critics of the practice, cultural appropriation differs from acculturation, assimilation, or equal cultural ...
All Shook Up: The Politics of Cultural Appropriation
In many of his essays, written as far back as sixty years ago, Ellison turns out to be one of the surest guides to the controversies around cultural appropriation that we have. ... Critics of cultural appropriation believe themselves to be involved in a significant political activity, yet the objects of their criticism are usually people who ...
PDF What Is Cultural Appropriation?
an act of cultural appropriation. (As we will see, the representation of other cultures is often regarded as a form of cultural appropriation. I will address this point in the next section.) As the concept of cultural appropriation is used in this essay, it does not necessarily carry with it any moral baggage. Someone might prefer
Cultural Appropriation Definition and Examples
Getty. The term "cultural appropriation" has been used to describe everything from makeup and hairstyles to tattoos, clothing and even food and wellness practices. The phrase originated in the ...
Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation: Why it Matters
It is important to understand, however, that there is a difference between appreciation and appropriation . Appreciation is when someone seeks to understand and learn about another culture in an effort to broaden their perspective and connect with others cross-culturally. Appropriation on the other hand, is simply taking one aspect of a culture ...
13 Cultural Appropriation Examples (2024)
Examples of Cultural Appropriation 1. Native American War Bonnet. Native American war bonnets are among the most instantly recognizable artifacts of Native American culture, and for this reason, often the most appropriated items of Native American culture.. A war bonnet is a piece of headgear made using eagle feathers and beads and worn either during battle or on special ceremonial occasions ...
The Difference Between Cultural Appropriation and Appreciation
Ollie Millington / Getty Images. There's a big difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. If you show love and appreciation for parts of a culture, such as clothing ...
Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self
Abstract. Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption.
What Is Cultural Appreciation (And How It's Different From Cultural
Cultural appropriation is a real issue in today's connected world. Everyone is capable of connecting with almost everyone else. It's easier than ever to gain a basic understanding of many cultures. Yet time is sparse, we're more easily distracted, and we often don't do the work to discern the good information from the truly Snopes ...
What Museum Directors Can Learn From Women Leaders
The story of museums is inextricably linked to the history of colonialism and cultural appropriation. Fortunately, the conversation is changing to reshape museums to be more community-focused and ...
On this day in history, April 24, 1800, Library of Congress is born
The Library of Congress — the U.S.'s oldest federal cultural institution — was born on this day in history, April 24, 1800, when President John Adams approved the use of $5,000 to buy books.
Russia Is Committing Cultural Genocide in Ukraine
The Khersonshchyna cultural project in the occupied Kherson region, for example, claims to expose Ukrainian history as a series of lies and promotes militaristic Russian myths with the aim of ...
Opinion
The just-passed package will roughly double the cumulative aid we've given Ukraine, but at about $60 billion it's less than one-fourth of 1 percent of G.D.P. — around one-fortieth the size ...

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The Washington Football Team

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Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation: Why it Matters

24 thoughts on " Cultural Appreciation vs. Cultural Appropriation: Why it Matters "

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13 Cultural Appropriation Examples

Examples of Cultural Appropriation

2. Native American Iconography in Sports

3. The Svastika and the Hakenkreuz

4. The Arab Keffiyeh

5. The Sikh Turban

6. Dreadlocks

7. Plastic Shaman

9. Whitewashing in Films

10. Plastic Paddy

11. Blackface

12. Mandalas

13. Dream Catchers

What’s Not Cultural Appropriation?

2 thoughts on “13 Cultural Appropriation Examples”

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People of color explain the difference between cultural appropriation and appreciation

Cultural appropriation or appreciation?

Kim Kardashian's 'Bo Derek braids'

Context and upbringing matters

It's always good to be mindful

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Article Contents

Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference

Cultural Appreciation Discourse and the Ethnic Consumer Subject

Cultural Appropriation Discourse and the Responsibilized Consumer Subject

Between the Ethnic and Responsibilized Consumer Subject: The Role of Reflexivity

Research Context: International K-pop Consumers