Cultural Appreciation vs Appropriation

I was sitting in the car listening to one of my guilty pleasure artists on Spotify.

You know one of the artists that have a lot of cultural appropriation backlash against them. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a white peer that boiled down to the fact that POC are not held to the same standards when ot comes to appropriation.

But as a person of color who interacts within POC spaces, specifically a Black woman with Caribbean and African orgins who happens to be a Celtic Pagan witch. I am super on this cultural Appropriation versus Appreciation shit. I call really big bull shit that we are not held to similar standards. The impact is just different.

There are real differences between Appreciating a cultural pillar and Approriating it. When you appropriate you taking it and manipulating it because you thought it was cool or because you just felt entitled to it.

Appropriation isn’t about sharing cultures or learning. Its taking something, physical or an idealogy, because you want to own it and control it.

Everyone is capable of appropriatiating another culture, however, European colonization was widespread and demolished or tainted many cutures under the banner of improvement (*cough, cough; whispers* Murder and Slavery).

Imperialistic Cultural Appropriation is often the discussion that is being referenced because it is the most predominant form of appropriation with political power rooted in that history.

Quite a few of the arguments that I see in political based discussions are due to a of lack of understanding of what discipline(s) the discussion is being held in. People actually rarely point these out outside of academia which leads to a lot of confusion in everyday political conversation. In conversations of Cultural Appropriation you need to know what disciplines you are referring to. Are you having a discussion of a sociological or anthropoligical nature? Or a discussion that is political in nature? Both are comparision based discourses, but only one has a major focus specifically referring to power imbalances in the subject at hand. Both are very related however and there are major overlaps, hence the confusion.

When you actually do research on a topic versus just relying on social media and others to teach you, you are able to truly see all the diaciplinary intersects instead of being stuck in just one view.