Among the lonely hearts from the last century, Walker discovered similar nuggets of hope—attempts to challenge the value placed on certain features and the reduction of women to objects of sight alone. One male writer looking for a girl of “any color” chastised the contributors for their emphasis on color and hair texture: “How in blazes do they expect equality from other races when they don’t even practice it among ourselves?”31
While some Bob Marley lyrics have become ubiquitous to the point almost of cliché, I find myself coming back to those words from “Redemption Song,” which tell us that none save ourselves has the power to free our minds. This is the rallying call. It is the invitation to “tear this shit down,” to “reject that which rejected you.”32 We do not need to further perpetuate psychotic colonial fantasies about who we are. Over a hundred years ago Du Bois wrote about the danger in seeing oneself through the eyes of the colonizer. Yet here we are today, still reproducing the very same norms.
Understanding our past makes it easier for us to identify the future we want to create. So much of what we are conditioned to believe is “natural” is not. Certainly, it is not universal, nor “just the way things are.” We have choices in what we collectively recognize as valuable. For me, great possibilities exist in my recognition that the society I live in was designed with my exclusion in mind. Never again will I mutilate any part of myself in an attempt to one day awkwardly almost-maybe fit in. We have the freedom to design a reality of our own making, one that recognizes our humanity and thus reflects our highest needs. We are the ones we have been waiting for.*
5
Everybody Wanna Sing My Blues, Nobody Wanna Live My Blues
But someday somebody’ll
Stand up and talk about me,
And write about me—
Black and beautiful—
And sing about me,
And put on plays about me!
I reckon it’ll be
Me myself.
Yes, it’ll be me.1
Or if we’re lucky it might be Kim.
Despite its new name and the recent volume of column inches commanded by the cultural-appropriation debate, it’s a story as old as America itself. In the twentieth century, Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes called it as early as 1940 in “Note on Commercial Theatre,” his poetic response to wealthy whites who were flooding into Harlem desperate to “experience” and repackage the culture of the very same people they and their institutions denigrated, segregated, and lynched.
“Father of the Harlem Renaissance” Alain Locke (incidentally, the first African American Rhodes scholar at Oxford University) summed up the paradox:
It almost passes human understanding how a people can be so despised and yet artistically esteemed. So ostracized and yet culturally influential. So degraded and yet a dominant editorial force in American life.2
Yet we seem to believe that everything is new, happening for the first time, and that this is the first outspoken generation, the one that’ll achieve the real gains. Thus we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, perpetually reinventing the wheel. In this context, confusion as to what cultural appropriation actually is remains rife.
Much like understanding racism, the key to understanding what is and isn’t appropriation requires an analysis of power. Cultural appropriation operates as part of a structural power dynamic where the “appropriating” actors belong to an advantaged group. This group systematically extracts the cultural resources of a subordinate group, erasing the subordinate group’s involvement in the process. The structurally advantaged group becomes the primary (financial) benefactor of an innovation that was not theirs.
Thus, individual or isolated examples whereby members of subordinate groups occasionally borrow from structurally advantaged groups do not constitute acts of cultural appropriation. An understanding of power dynamics makes it clear why the wholesale appropriation of black culture that underpins Western popular culture is not comparable to a black woman straightening her hair.
The fact remains that there is no other group of people on earth whose cultural production has the mass appeal of black culture yet is simultaneously derided while effectively repackaged and claimed by everybody else.
Over the last few years cultural appropriation seems to have emerged as a hot, sexy, “woke” topic, up there with “activist models” and corporate feminism, enjoying features in glossy magazines that wouldn’t have touched the topic—or indeed us—five years ago. So let’s celebrate! A new day has dawned: our time has come. That shit sells—hell, we sell. Black people sell. Forgive my skepticism, but the commodification of black lives didn’t work out too swell the first time around.
Until recently, there was a robust critique of capitalism in black activism. The scholar Cedric Robinson describes the Black Radical Tradition that emerged from a split in the black community. On one side, there were those with “a liberal, bourgeois consciousness . . . packed with capitalist ambitions and individualist intuitions.” Their objective was “essentially to gain access to the roles and rewards monopolized by whites.”3 Yet on the other side “there was a radical proletarian consciousness that sought to realize a higher moral standard than the ones embraced by whites and their black imitators.” 4 As George Lipsitz explains, this is the radical consciousness we witnessed when Du Bois condemned the “dream of material prosperity” as America’s emerging ethical and political goal. Du Bois felt that a people who had once been positioned as objects of commerce should have particular insight into the shortcomings of capitalism. He was concerned that the pursuit of commercial value would destroy the “social reciprocity needed for the survival, humanity and democratic hopes of the vast majority of the black population.”5
Today, despite a landscape of increased rights, increased representation, and greater personal freedoms (although with the global rise of the right from the US to Brazil and parts of Europe who knows what the immediate future holds), the infrastructure of authority has not changed much. Wealth and power are still concentrated in mostly white, mostly male hands. Where power resides in black hands, what really changes if they are the hands of the “black imitators” identified by Robinson?
A company might be black-owned, but who designed the business model? A system might become inclusive, but what exactly are we being included in? Is it a world of our design? Or is it a world whose ethics, measurements of value, worth, and success have been created in the image of and in service to (borrowing from Greg Tate) “the same crafty devils that brought you the Middle Passage and the African Slave Trade.”6
The term “cultural appropriation” is now part of the discourse. Liberals argue its finer points at dinner parties; it is debated in prime-time TV slots. Every couple of weeks there will be a high-profile accusation of cultural appropriation. This will most often be in relation to a white celebrity and a black hairstyle and will temporarily set the internet alight. Superficial discussions will follow, but nothing will be resolved; both sides will settle back down into their respective factions. Two weeks, perhaps a month later, the next story will blow up and the same process will play out. Press repeat.