Or when white people wear Native American headdresses.
(Are headdresses just something that you think are less important than a style of music or marble sculptures? Maybe that’s the real problem here?)
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No, the Elgin marbles are irrelevant in this. The British empire (boo, hiss) bought them from the people who stole them fair and square. They have never claimed them as their own culture, just property. You can definitely say that the ancestors of Normans and Saxons claiming Stonehenge as theirs is cultural appropriation. And, in fact, the modern Greeks claiming the Elgin marbles, since they share almost nothing, genetic, cultural, linguistic (look up “Hellenization”) with the ancient Greeks except geography.
“Receiving stolen goods” doesn’t mean you’re directly a thief, but it rarely means you get to keep the stuff after discovery.
And if you don’t think the British hold up the combined wealth and holdings of the British Museum itself as a foundational example of what British culture is, you’re dreaming.
There’s lots of people who feel that one major part of “to be British” is to have museums with the best examples of other people’s stuff. It’s a collector culture, and that’s a type of cultural expression too.
This actually gets to the heart of what cultural appropriation means. It’s about power. When Hollywood made cowboy-and-indians stereotypes, they weren’t saying “Hollywood is Native American culture”; They were saying they were the one who gets to decide how the culture of another is used. When most hipster racists appropriate cultural symbols, they aren’t saying they are Native Americans; They’re saying they get to decide how Native American symbols are used.
If Native Americans didn’t have their power to decide appropriateness taken away routinely and systematically, then we probably wouldn’t have this thread at all. That’s the difference between this example of appropriated headdresses and all the other “whatabouts” that people are bringing up: The power imbalance that’s real and happening now.
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Did he? I enjoy listening to their famous collaboration.
.
It’s very possible there’s more to the story than I know, but working together and releasing music together is, like, the opposite of ripping off.
Good for you?
That’s not at all the point, given that the music industry is an industry that is well known for being deeply exploitative of non-white artists.
Better than just entirely dismissing it out of hand, and assuming it’s a blanket attack on all white people, rather than an analysis on how power has worked for a while now.
But it can’t happen to Native Americans or African Americans, because reasons?
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Newsflash; you don’t get to define what appropriation is to the cultures that experience it directly - that’s a prime example of self-absorbed privilege.
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That wouod help. In the sixties, mainstream music went in different directions. But the white artists talked about those influences, and some went looking for blues and bluegrass and folk artists who haf faded into obscurity, and some of those old artists made new recordings and performed again.
I guess it days something about white clout, but I know I.bought albums of Bessie Smith and Jimmie Rodgers and blues artists because white artists had pointed to them as influences.
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