Your Outrage About Cultural Appropriation Is a Sad Waste of Time
You’re being distracted from real issues. If you want change, focus your righteous efforts on global exploitation
As your token non-white friend, you might ask me what I think about the recent incident of cultural appropriation. And depending on your political leanings, you’re probably surprised, outraged, or pleased that I mostly don’t care.
Should white musicians be allowed to perform even though they wear dreadlocks? Should white women be allowed to wear their husbands’ traditional attire? Can a white woman wear braids?
My first reaction will always be, sure, why would I care? Why do you?
I grew up in a time when people wore insignias of other cultures to show their appreciation or (emotional) closeness to that culture.
My father is Nigerian. Much to his delight, my mum, who is Austrian, wore traditional Nigerian clothes on important occasions.
And my Austrian grandmother bought traditional Austrian costumes — Dirndl and Lederhosen — for her brown grandchildren.
Our cultures melded, and no one thought twice about it.
At university, the left-leaning students grew dreadlocks as a sign of their political stance. We wore the kaffiyeh to show our solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
No one but the conservative establishment cared. They hated seeing the signs of foreign, “inferior” cultures taking over their spaces. They raged against the hair, the clothes and the mindset.
For me, it’s heartbreaking to see the same thing happening from the other side. To now see a mob of unthinking people lashing out at anyone who appreciates other cultures.
Today, women marrying men from other cultures, wearing their traditional clothes at the behest of their mothers-in-law, are crudely attacked and insulted.
Like Leona, who dared to wear a Nigerian dress to her wedding to — wait for it — a Nigerian man. She’s been fending off shitty comments on TikTok for almost two years now. From both sides of the political spectrum:
When you marry a black African man, I think you’re ready for the racists to leave vile comments. But I don’t think you expect to be called a racist yourself by a mob that can’t discern appreciation from appropriation.
Oxford English Dictionary defines cultural appropriation 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.”
Which makes total sense.
But somehow, we’ve now reached a point where any white person who interacts with or uses elements of another culture is immediately confronted with the knee-jerk accusation of cultural appropriation. Regardless of their intent or whether or not they acknowledge the culture they’re using.
Unsurprisingly, these accusations are often made either by other white people in the West, mostly in the USA or by people from that culture living in the West.
I have yet to find a Nigerian living in Nigeria, no matter which tribe they belong to, who is bothered by a white person wearing their cultural attire.
Clearly illustrated by the comments left on Leona’s videos by Nigerians calling her “Our wife” or stating things like “I’m Nigerian, and there’s no issue with the clothes…”
On the Internet, the loudest mob is mostly from the US, and I get it — they have a history of wildly inappropriate behavior towards other cultures. They’ve destroyed indigenous and black culture. Exterminated their roots and culture, taken what they can use, and thrown the rest away.
There are plenty of reasons to be angry and plenty of reasons to be offended.
Thanks to globalization, not only of cultures but also of ideas, the victims of outrage are now everywhere. People who aren’t actually the problem are suddenly in the crosshairs.
The last discussion I had about cultural appropriation involved a man — Hank Ge — who has been traveling to Bali for over 15 years. He opened a restaurant with Indonesian furniture here in Vienna in 2020, where you can enjoy a vegan, very colorful “Bali” brunch.
Hank Ge has also started a cooperation with a large supermarket chain, which enables him to market both Bali breakfast and Bali hair products in their stores.
A group of young activists who call themselves the “Cinta Collective” took issue with him — and other people who, in their opinion, appreciate Bali and the touristic side of Indonesia too much.
They posted a message on Instagram accusing him of cultural appropriation and doubled down by saying that he should not use the name “Bali” for his brunch or products. At the same time, they refused to talk to him when he tried to have a conversation with them.
Discussions around cultural appropriation often ignite themselves around someone making money with something they learned about and liked and thought they’d bring back to their own countries. Think British Museum…
So why do I really not care about these so-called incidents of cultural appropriation that the Internet gets so riled up about?
Short answer: they’re a non-issue.
Focus your energy on the multi-billion dollar corporations that are appropriating the resources of developing countries.
As the great political activist Angela Davis pointed out about capitalism, you’re focusing on the wrong people.
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Just as the shopkeeper on the corner is not the capitalist who is exploiting you, Hank Ge is not the one you should be concerned about if you’re worried about the exploitation of cultures and countries.
You want change? And equal appreciation of all cultures on this earth?
Focus your energy on the multi-billion dollar corporations that are appropriating the resources of developing countries. Fight to put an end to the fundamental issues.
Faceless corporations are not only stealing resources. At the same time, they’re destroying the very foundations of the cultures you’re so concerned about a few people appropriating.
Whether or not Hank Ge and his Instagrammable restaurant exist under whatever name is wholly irrelevant. Attacking him as an individual changes nothing. The best you can achieve is putting a small business owner out of business.
And creating another person who has a hard time surviving under capitalism.
You type your indignant comments about this person who makes a little money from his appreciation of a holiday destination on a device that causes more destruction than anything this man could do.
If you want to be outraged about something, be outraged about the big Tech companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Google destroying people, countries, and cultures to build electronic devices. For years now.
As the BBC reported in 2019:
Apple, Google, Tesla and Microsoft are among firms named in a lawsuit seeking damages over deaths and injuries of child miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Nothing has changed; if anything, the situation has become worse.
Or to stay on the subject of Indonesia. Perhaps we should be more outraged about the number of Indonesian women who fall victim to human trafficking. Or about the forced labor that people are subjected to in Indonesia’s palm oil fields, mines and factories?
The 2023 Global Slavery Index (GSI) estimates that over 1.8 million people were living in modern slavery in Indonesia on any given day in 2021, a prevalence of 6.7 people for every thousand people in the country. This places Indonesia within the top 10 out of 27 countries in the Asia Pacific region when ranked by prevalence of modern slavery,
These are just two randomly picked examples of how real exploitation fueled by global corporations and imbalance of power is destroying lives and cultures.
We’re at a point in history where the exploitation of the masses — everywhere — is accelerating the loss of cultural cohesion and identity. Everything has become a commodity.
But it’s not some random individuals trying to make a living or trying out a hairstyle that is at the root of the problem. It’s the large corporations, the fast fashion industry, the tourism industry and the tech industry.
They’re eating their way through what once were functioning structures and cultures like locusts.
I lack the capacity to get upset about a guy cutting up vegetables and putting them attractively on a wooden plate. And calling it a Bali brunch. To me, that’s not an important incident.
Instead of making our world better, all these pointless discussions about minuscule events that are supposedly cultural appropriation are distractions.
They are a means to divide us and divert our attention from things that can actually make the lives of exploited cultures better.
If some random white woman wears braids, it has absolutely no impact on your well-being. If global corporations exploit the world to the point that Indian and Chinese women have to cut off their hair and sell them to the West for wigs and extensions to survive, that is an issue I’m ready to talk about.
Mobbing individuals on the internet for using elements of other cultures is a sad waste of time that makes the world worse, not better. The way things are going globally, there will be little to nothing left of the cultures you’re trying to “protect” in their original countries in the near future.
If you want to preserve cultures, support organizations that are trying to end the exploitation of the Global South.
Repair and reuse what you already own. Don’t buy a new mobile phone every year. Stop overconsuming cheap products built by the overexploited masses of Africa and Asia. Don’t give your money to mega-corporations. Boycott fast fashion brands. Buy from small, local businesses instead.
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