On a recent trip to Poland, I was collected at the airport by a Polish taxi driver, a white guy who wouldn’t look amiss in a commune for ageing hippies. Inside his car was an Africa-shaped pendant hanging from his rear-view mirror. I was for some reason immediately surprised by this. Jozef proceeded to put on some of the best music I’d ever heard. “What is this?”, I asked. Jozef began listing off various Nigerian musicians, explaining how much he loved this one or that, and telling me about the trips he takes to Nigeria when can in order to experience them live. Later Jozef sent me playlists and photos from his visits, without even a hint of self-consciousness. I wondered why I had been so puzzled to see the pendant in his car? I thought of my Russian-Polish friend Claudia, who to frankly everyone’s surprise, married her groom at the British Embassy in Saudi Arabia dressed in a full Japanese Geisha outfit and makeup, with a similar lack of worry over appropriateness. Is everyone from Eastern Europe coolly unbothered by the pursed lipped judgments of post-graduates wielding critical race theory?

The perceived ‘victims’ of cultural appropriation, are rarely the ones levelling accusations

I thought about my white British friend Amanda, who wore braids during her teen years from time to time. Why? The explanation is simple: her sister braided her hair for her. Her sister is black, had her hair braided at the time and Amanda wanted to be like her big sister. If we live in multicultural societies and engage in a globalised digital village that plays host to cultural forms from around the world, why do accusations of ‘cultural appropriation’ still abound? In multiculturalism cultural markers are always in flux. How could multiculturalism exist without the mixing of cultures? Where does this leave concepts like ‘cultural appropriation’?

Cultural appropriation is roughly understood to be the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of customs, practices, styles, etc. of one group of people in society by members of another, typically more dominant, group in that society. In the globally connected world of the internet, there has been significant concept slippage, where cultural appropriation is not only regularly conflated with cultural appreciation, but anything beyond the cultural forms associated with one’s perceived ethnic heritage are liable to be policed. Policed how? Almost exclusively online, whether through rage baiting, social shaming, or parking on someone’s account because they engaged in not only ‘wrong think’ but ‘wrong activity’.

This kind of online policing peaked in popularity in the late 2010s. Food photographers were informed of their microaggressions, universities with subpar catering heard that undercooking was cultural appropriation, and a teenager attending her High School prom wearing a qipao was declared as acting in ‘parallel to colonial ideology’.

Everyone, it seemed, was liable to face their social media mandated 15 minutes of shame. Shamed by who? Largely the internet, but in real life there were Witchfinder Generals like Eric Rivera, who in 2023 led the campaign against Australian woman Alex Marks opening a sushi restaurant in New York. Rivera  – who is not Japanese – accused Marks of being a ‘coloniser’, but has since moved on after facing charges for domestic violence. In an interesting turn of events, the perceived ‘victims’ of cultural appropriation, are rarely the ones levelling accusations. To make sense of this we need to return to a time where Cultural Studies and race theory were saner.

The late great Marxist thinker Stuart Hall described how, ‘race is a floating signifier’, meaning that race is geographically and historically contingent. Much to the chagrin of Afro-Pessimists, it is not the case that a declining racial line from white to black positions a person along that line into an oppressed or oppressor group in all instances, everywhere on the planet. In this way modern day wokesters are anti-social construction, race essentialists, who either woefully misunderstand or cynically appropriate the academic tradition they claim to descend from. They view race as a concrete, physical and transhistorical characteristic. One that determines social relations in a cultural and social vacuum. The signifier is not floating, not historically or geographically dependent, but a stagnant, unchanging arbiter of moral norms. In reality, which groups are socially dominant, changes from place to place. Expanding this notion of ‘society’ to ‘who we come across globally online’ has meant one country and its racial and social dynamics have come to dominate internet discourse. I am of course referring to Americans. The internet often seems less like a global village, than a backwater of combining the worst kinds of liberalism found on both coasts.

Because of the global reach of the online sphere and, rather ironically, American cultural imperialism, the specific American understanding of cultural appropriation has swum far beyond the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, into waters where it simply cannot stay afloat (I’ll stop with the sea metaphors now). It is indeed the case that cultural appropriation in a real and material way took place in America, driven by the profit motive. During the era of Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation, it was certainly true that white musicians and white industry executives ripped off black musicians, as discussed here. For example, white record label staff would attend music clubs showcasing black musicians, take notes, and find white singer-song writers to perform the music they discovered in overwhelmingly black venues. Those seeking to become wealthy through the music business were less likely to take a risk on a black artist, despite black musicians and singers have success. The more marketable and thus commercially viable product was understood to be white musicians.

This was of course a uniquely American phenomenon, influenced by America’s history of chattel slavery, and knock-on racist policies, that in turn affected American cultural identity. One could argue that British and other Anglosphere artists participated in this sort of cultural pillaging (looking at you The Rolling Stones), but that does not change the reality that this sort interplay between black and white culture, could only be created in an American context, because of its specific history, and is fundamentally an American phenomenon.

Outside America, within the Anglosphere, that will of course have had a ripple effect of a kind, particularly as the music industry globalised, but the same dynamics internal to America are often assumed to exist beyond it by, mainly, Americans (who are fairly well known for their lack of understanding about other countries).

Outside of North America the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ barely makes sense

Commentary on the parasitic dynamic that existed in the American music industry, was probably the basis of what would we would consider cultural appropriation it today, African American novelist and cultural critic James Baldwin, who commented that white Americans need black cultural content to define themselves against, hence their appropriation of it. But Baldwin was keenly aware of the uniquely American dynamics of this situation. In his view the cultural-racial dynamics between white and black Americans was intimately tied to the fate of America a whole. He once remarked on the Dick Cravett show in 1968: “I don’t think there’s much hope for it [racial progress], as long as people are using this peculiar language. It’s not a question of what happens to the Negro here, [though] that is a very vivid question for me. The real question is what’s going to happen to this country?”

Outside of North America the concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ barely makes sense. Most countries are overwhelmingly monolithic ethnically and culturally. Most never had segregation laws, let alone the same history of a society built on plantation slave labour power and all of the racist hangovers that created. People living in culturally monolithic societies have no need to define themselves against other racial groups via culture and art. They have stable, cohesive cultural identities, and therefore do not need to struggle for dominance over a racially different, national in-group. What they have instead is cultural appreciation, particularly in a globalised world, where most culture is mediated and consumed via the internet.

What people attempting to point score for cultural appropriation fail to realise, is that Lithuanian break dancers, and Kimono wearing prom Queens, may have genuine appreciation for the cultures they are attempting to partake in. They aren’t individually deciding, out of racism or a desire to dominate, to denigrate a cultural expression of another cultural group. They have interacted with it, in a way that is meaningful and special to them via the internet, in a globalised society, to such an extent that they want to carry that appreciation away from smart phones into real life. Olympic silver medallist Dominika Banevic probably saw breakdancing online, and was enamoured with it, she urged her parents to take her to real life lessons. There is no profit motive, there is no fraught struggle from national identity. For all the deleterious ways the internet has affected our world, this is probably one of its most positive effects. People around the world can find cultural forms they have authentic appreciation for and actively and meaningfully contribute to them.

The internet both facilitates hostile accusations of cultural appropriation, while providing much of the infrastructure for people to enjoy and appreciate cultures outside of their own

The internet itself is also to blame for cultural appreciation being understood as cultural appropriation, with the currency of Likes and views existing as a kind of moral credit. The individualising disembodied nature of the internet, of experiencing that cultural space as an individual user sat on the train phone scrolling, looking at the one-dimensional image of another person online creates the false sense that they somehow selected their hairstyle or way of dressing, outside of all social or cultural influence. Whereas, in fact there is necessarily a wider context and social influence underpinning all choices we make. That is the entire understanding of social construction: the social world is constructed around us and we are inculcated by it culturally and ideologically. If we have never had real life encounters with a particular cultural form, we either don’t know it exists, or have no way to judge its value it in order to be influenced by it, let alone come to a cultural appreciation (or depreciate it, whatever the case may be).

Even in an American context, is it the case that white Americans, individually decide to participate in black culture to opportunistically profit off it, and denigrate African Americans? Because of articles like this, that branded white musicians as doing ‘black face’ and minstrelsy, it took my watching the 2022 film Elvis to learn the reason Elvis’s early performances were heavily influenced by African-American culture, was due to being around black culture after his single mother was forced to move to the black side of town after her husband went to jail. Elvis spent his youth attending black weddings, black dance halls, black churches, and of course, as anyone would, being influenced by those formative experiences.

I should have known Elvis had grown up around African-American music and dance, because otherwise he would have been terrible at performing anything that resembled either. The whole claim that cultural appropriation is founded on is authenticity and everyone recognises inauthenticity when we see it. As legitimate as Baldwin’s commentary was, would he really extend social shaming and ire to white Americans who authentically and meaningfully contributed to African American art through immersion in it? American society at the time he levelled his criticism, pre-civil rights movement, was not the same society of, for example the Beastie Boys. In the 1960s, white Americans would rarely if ever have genuine interaction with African American culture. It was a deeply segregated society, hence why Elvis, as the rare white person with that sort of experience, became astronomically popular. Indeed, so segregated and so racist was American society days of Elvis’s career, the police shut down his shows, and he was widely considered to be a morally corrupting force on white American youth. If the Beastie Boys had not grown up in 1980s New York during a particular period of hip hop, they would not have become excellent at making 90s hip hop later on.

Why was the Lithuanian break-dancer wearing a durag at the Olympics? For protection during headspins? Probably partly, but also because they are evidently highly immersed in breakdancing and perform in the fashion style it emerged in, given their expertise. Consider for a moment how odd Rachel Gunn looked at the Olympics in what seemed to be an Australian cricket outfit? Whilst she sidestepped cultural appropriation accusations, we could all observe how unfamiliar she was with the actual practice of breaking. What cultures people are familiar or unfamiliar with is not readily observable at a glance. The Lithuanian break-dancer is clearly influenced by African American culture, where breakdancing started, and breakdancing, like lots of American culture, was originally created by African-American youth in New York. Even if this exposure began on the internet, is she culturally appropriating people who existed before she was born, thousands of miles from home? It’s as unreasonable as claiming Larry Stevenson and Californian culture is being appropriated by skateboarder Coco Yoshizawa. The understanding of appropriation as anything adopted by a dominant group from members of a less socially powerful group fails because none of the above are members of the same society, unless we’re going to decide our new worldwide virtual society includes the dead. In an ironic twist, the internet both facilitates hostile accusations of cultural appropriation, while providing much of the infrastructure for people to enjoy and appreciate cultures outside of their own.