Rico's friend Kema forwards this, by Frank Vyan Walton from the Daily Kos:
I'm gonna let this largely speak for itself as a statement about modern culture and modern race relations. I will note first that this young lady is only sixteen years old and then I'll add my own commentary.
"The line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange is always going to be blurred,” sixteen-year-old Amandla Stenberg says in her video (above). “But here’s the thing: appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated, but is deemed as high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves. Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in.”
The video, titled Don’t Cash Crop My Corn Rows, began as a school project, but got wider attention after being posted online. Stenberg shows clips of singers Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry engaging in the behavior in both their attire and, in Cyrus’ case, her emphasis on twerking while using black women as “props”.
“What would America be like if we loved black people as much as black culture?” Stenberg asks. Now, Amandia Stenberg isn't just a regular person. Well, not exactly. She's considerably media savvy since she starred as the character Rue in the first installment of the Hunger Games trilogy. She was also the target of a vicious racial backlash because many fans of the book apparently didn't know or realize that the character she played, one that was beloved by many, was always supposed to be black.
Stenberg knows a thing or two about the world’s complicated relationship with race. She was cast in the prominent role of Rue, a young heroine in the first Hunger Games movie. As she was in the books, Rue is the soul of the Panem’s rebellion.
Rue is also black. Yet, when Stenberg was cast as the dark-skinned, brown-eyed character in the film, the Internet showed its ugly face. It also showed that it has an oft-times racist face, and a reading-comprehension problem: Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins has said specifically that Rue and another character in the book and movie, Thresh, “are African-American.”
In the books it's the death of Rue that sparks much of what follows, all the way through to the story's conclusion. On Twitter, some questioned why Thresh was cast as a black man. Others said their sorrow at Rue’s death was lessened because the character was played by a black girl. Some tweets included the word nigger. The outpouring of hatred has spawned an impassioned, and sometimes witty, response.
Never mind that these fans of the Hunger Games story misread basic descriptive sentences in the narrative. Why do some readers automatically assume characters are white? Some perceive it as "wrong" for black characters to be played by black people. That they have less sorrow at their deaths, and less empathy for their life if they have to imagine that person is black. All of that is because they perceived that character as white in their own minds.
In fact the author describes the character this way on page 45:
…and, most hauntingly, a twelve-year-old girl from District 11. She has dark brown skin and eyes, but other than that's she's very like Prim in size and demeanor…What exactly did they think that she had dark brown skin meant, that she had a tan?
And this is just a character in a story, what then do they feel about real black people?
All of this is somewhat off the point of what Amandia so eloquently states in her video, which was originally part of a school project, but it does provide some context. Some people apparently associate "goodness" with "whiteness' and, when that image is broken, they refuse to accept it, they lash out over it.
But when white people effectively steal blackness, grabbing its social power but leaving actual black people on the sidelines, is it wrong to be outraged and bothered by it all? One could argue that it doesn't really matter. No one can "own" a culture or control every aspect of it as others attempt to enjoy or participate in it. We all enjoy food from other cultures, we wear clothes from other cultures, we adopt hair-styles and music from all over. You could suggest that it doesn't matter if Miley Cyrus twerks or Taylor Swift has corn-rows.
But then again, maybe it does matter, if what happens in the end is that the people who originated that culture are essentially getting the shaft in the process. Their ideas are being taken, their point of view is being watered down and turned into parody and comedy.
And it's not like this is the first time this has happened. Long before Hip Hop began to be appropriated by the likes of Vanilla Ice or Limp Bizkit, jazz was appropriated, blues was appropriated, R&B was appropriated, and rock 'n roll was appropriated, all of them, from black people.
Who's the most famous jazz musician in the world? Is is Thelonious Monk or Miles Davis, or is it Kenny G? Who's the most famous blues musician? Is it Buddy Guy or is it Eric Clapton? Won't be long before Maclamore and Ryan Lewis have eclipsed and erased the memory of Tribe Called Quest, N.W.A., Public Enemy, and Tupac.
I personally think we're well on the way, since Eminem has been the biggest rapper in the world for quite some time now. Because that's exactly what happened with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Led Zeppelin appropriated the music of Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Robert Johnson, respectively. All of them, particularly the Stones, worshipped the black artists that had come before them. All of them loved Chuck Berry.
Some of this is inevitable. When you hit a vein, when you strike a nerve, people all over the world are likely to respond and attempt to participate in what you've created. And, in a way, there's nothing wrong with that, as long as it's done with respect to the historical and original cultural elements, unless it's simply being used as an instant ticket to "coolness" by people who have no clue or understanding of what they're copying, while the money men rake in all the cash and the original artists lose relevance.
When this process began in the 1950s with R&B and Rock, in the end what happened was the essential end of the carriers of those original artists, and a completely block wall in front of any artists who wished to follow in their footsteps if they happened to be black as the 2005 documentary Electric Purgatory describes:
When Alan Freed first started playing black-based rock-n-roll music on his radio station, they called it Nigger Music and Freed was called a "nigger lover". In the sanitized American culture of the 1950’s, many felt that Freed had gone too far when he hosted a 1957 television show that featured black teen idol, Frankie Lymon, dancing with a white girl. The show was subsequently cancelled by its sponsors. Freed’s showbiz decline began in earnest when he produced a 1958 concert in Boston, Massachusetts which erupted in violence. There were numerous beatings and stabbings, which brought about a widespread boycott of Freed and his shows among concert hall owners.
If you were to use that term today, Nigger Music, most people would think of Hip Hop, not rock & roll, yet the largest portion of Hip Hop fandom is white. (Although, in truth, some of that claim is a myth designed to help funnel money to Top 40 Radio and away from Urban Stations, which are often responsible for breaking Hip Hop artists in the first place.)
I think Amandia has correctly noted how America, and sometimes the world, often depends on the dynamism of black culture to keep them entertained, to keep them surprised, to shock and sometimes frighten them, but when it comes to truly empathizing with and understanding black people, sometimes it just doesn't translate. We live as abstractions in their minds, as characatures, as props. Scary mean villains to fear and dependent, lazy devils to demonize and ridicule.
What we aren't to them, are people.
They can adopt our hair-styles, which are born of necessity and invention. They can adopt our dance styles, they can adopt our music, but what it seems many of them can't do, and never will have the courage to do, is walk even a single mile in our shoes, with the rest of America staring back at them in a mix of wonder, fascination, obsession, fear, and revulsion.
Let me leave you with Living Colour's Which Way to America, because many of us know it's out there, but we have no way of getting there:
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