Taylor Swift’s newest music video differs dramatically from her previous works. After watching it, I googled it, to see what people were saying about it. One of the first links I found was asking this question: Is Shake it Off offensive?At the heart of the “offensive” argument is the idea of cultural misappropriation. Essentially, critics charge that Swift is taking elements of black culture and using them for her own benefit or in a way that is somehow pernicious to someone.This idea of cultural misappropriation is one that I would like to challenge. In my view, there is no such thing and this complaint is nonsense. It is nonsense both in Taylor’s case, and in any other case where cultural misappropriation is the sole complaint.Culture, is a collection of ideas, language, music, art, stories, and so on. Culture doesn’t belong to anyone and nobody has a realistic basis to claim that someone else can’t use their culture. Any claim as to who can or cannot use culture is especially inherently flawed because people don’t come up with culture on their own.Any cultural element came about by taking existing ideas and modifying them and adding something new. Trying to prevent people from using cultural elements is the same as trying to prevent culture from growing. This idea is pointless exclusivity that would result in cultural deprivation.When I try to think of ways that cultural misappropriation might be bad, I come up with two examples. First, when white musicians of yesteryear essentially stole musical forms from black people. Elvis Presley is the quintessential example. I acknowledge that cultural appropriation happened here (note the missing mis) but I dispute that this is anything bad.The harm in the Elvis case is not that Elvis copied black styles for music and dancing. Elvis has every bit as much right to rock and dance lasciviously as anyone else on the planet. Instead, the harm comes from the underlying root cause, that black people were discriminated against in society to the extent that black musicians, doing basically the same thing as Elvis, couldn’t succeed. In other words, cultural appropriation still isn’t bad here, what is bad is the racist attitudes that prevented black musicians from succeeding in their own right. The solution isn’t to chastise Elvis the music thief, but to build a society where artists can succeed or fail regardless of race.While I don’t think Taylor Swift has done anything wrong, nor Miley, by taking elements of black music and dance; I would be sympathetic to arguments that society is still structured in ways that reduce the likelihood of success for black musicians. Again though, this problem would not be misappropriation, this problem would be society’s racist attitudes.The second example I could think of, but ultimately dismissed, is more extreme (I’m going to Godwin myself). The Nazis adopted the Swastika, which as I understand (from Wikipedia) comes from a Hindi phrase meaning “make good” or something like that. The Nazis appropriated an element of culture and basically ruined it by making it associated with them. Is this an example of cultural misappropriation?I would still say “No” and if I’ve written my argument above right, then hopefully you’ll already understand why, without me having to explain. The harmful things that the Nazis did do not include the drawing of certain symbols on a flag. The harmful stuff is all that mass murder, wars of aggression, eugenics, human experimentation and so on. Because they did harmful things, there is a lot of associated negativity with everything they did, good and bad alike.Another way of thinking about the Nazi example, because certainly I would understand that some Hindi person is upset they can no longer use their swastikas in public in Western countries, is to think of the name Adolph Hitler. Hitler’s parents had to choose what to name him, and when they chose Adolph they basically ruined that name for future generations. Was it a morally bad thing to choose this name?The Nazis picking a symbol for their flags is no different than the Hitlers picking a name for their son. Because the Nazis went on to do atrocities, both of these things became tainted, but it was the atrocities that were bad, not the taking of previously existing cultural ideas (name and symbol respectively) that were bad.In other words, cultural appropriation exists and is good. Cultural misappropriation does not exist. Trying to limit cultural appropriation is bad. Or, can you change my view?
Posted on: Mon, 25 Aug 2014 05:13:26 +0000