"What is Cultural Appropriation" by ardhra

basically ardhra being her awesome self:

I disagree with a lot of the common definitions of cultural appropriation around. Cultural appropriation isn’t simply the “taking or borrowing of some aspects of another culture from someone outside that culture”. Cultures throughout time have traded, adapted, and borrowed artefacts, symbols, technologies and narratives from one another. The issue isn’t the aesthetic and material mingling of cultures, hybridity, or that human creativity crosses cultural boundaries. Those are aesthetic and perhaps moral issues, separate from the real political issue of cultural appropriation.
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The problem isn’t that cultures intermingle, it’s the terms on which they do so and the part that plays in the power relations between cultures. The problem isn’t “taking” or “borrowing”, the problem is racism, imperialism, white supremacy, and colonialism. The problem is how elements of culture get taken up in disempowering, unequal ways that deny oppressed people autonomy and dignity. Cultural appropriation only occurs in the context of the domination of one society over another, otherwise known as imperialism. Cultural appropriation is an act of domination, which is distinct from ‘borrowing’, syncretism, hybrid cultures, the cultures of assimilated/integrated populations, and the reappropriation of dominant cultures by oppressed peoples.
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I think it’s important to start by outlining a political definition of cultural appropriation rather than an aesthetic one (centred around “borrowing” and the particular things being “borrowed”). Too often, skirmishes around the politics of knowledge and authenticity obscure the real problems with appropriation. When conversations about appropriation occur on white peoples’ terms, they usually centre on these abstract issues, and the counter-claims of art and creativity, which are supposed to transcend everything else.

Anything that depoliticises the definition of cultural appropriation as being about cultural “borrowing” erases the reality of how cultural appropriation has come into being and operated. It’s the “colourblind,” i.e. race-aversive and power-aversive, version, that sanitises the history of cultural appropriation.

What white people always erase is that cultural appropriation has historically been accompanied, and enabled, by violence. From weavers’ fingers to genocidal rape, the violence built into cultural appropriation is undeniable.