What Is Cultural Appropriation
Cultural appropriation is a toxin to ethnic communities around and throughout the world. Cultural appropriation has come to the forefront of modern consciousness in recent years, mostly because of the age we live in where we are all connected to what's happening at all times.
What is cultural appropriation? Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture, this subsequently robs a cultural group of it’s cultural identity and pride and mocks it at the same time. Cultural appropriation can be confusing, the lines are blurred but blindingly clear once they are crossed. “Cultural Appropriation” can be swapped out with the term “Cultural Appreciation”, when aspects of a culture are taken from …show more content…
This translates into two things: certain people are comfortable appropriating other cultures, and certain people are sensitive to the racial and marginalizing effects of culture being appropriated. Cultural appropriation must come to the forefront of modern race relations if its negative effects are to stymied. I personally have been aware of cultural appropriation from a young age without knowing it. I have always been a fan of hip hop, soul, and R&B music. In 3rd grade, I moved to a predominantly white school. That year, I was socially shamed and forced out of my love for the music genres that I grew up loving and listening to, I was being marginalized and assimilated. After a few years of having my African-American identity whitewashed, I started realizing how many of my white peers had started listening to rap music, dressing in their idea of what “black” was, constantly using AAVE, and subsequently using the “N-word”. I was enraged, appalled, and disgusted with the fact that my cultural identity had been forcibly removed from me and then the very people that took it, warped it and copy-pasted it onto
What is cultural appropriation? Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture, this subsequently robs a cultural group of it’s cultural identity and pride and mocks it at the same time. Cultural appropriation can be confusing, the lines are blurred but blindingly clear once they are crossed. “Cultural Appropriation” can be swapped out with the term “Cultural Appreciation”, when aspects of a culture are taken from …show more content…
This translates into two things: certain people are comfortable appropriating other cultures, and certain people are sensitive to the racial and marginalizing effects of culture being appropriated. Cultural appropriation must come to the forefront of modern race relations if its negative effects are to stymied. I personally have been aware of cultural appropriation from a young age without knowing it. I have always been a fan of hip hop, soul, and R&B music. In 3rd grade, I moved to a predominantly white school. That year, I was socially shamed and forced out of my love for the music genres that I grew up loving and listening to, I was being marginalized and assimilated. After a few years of having my African-American identity whitewashed, I started realizing how many of my white peers had started listening to rap music, dressing in their idea of what “black” was, constantly using AAVE, and subsequently using the “N-word”. I was enraged, appalled, and disgusted with the fact that my cultural identity had been forcibly removed from me and then the very people that took it, warped it and copy-pasted it onto