Non-Black People Are Going to Keep Appropriating Black Culture — We Might As Well Choose Our Own Battles
It’s getting us nowhere.
Black people have been talking about cultural appropriation for the longest time, but if you’re new, cultural appropriation is when someone who is not of a particular culture, steals another culture for economic benefit.
We all know that Black people tend to be the number one victims of this. Everything down from our art, our music, our hairstyles, our slang, was stolen by whites and other non-black persons of color like a trenchcoat. Nowadays, there is a lot more pushback for this, but I’m getting sick of rehashing this conversation over and over again.
Justin Bieber posted pictures on Instagram a while back of him with dreadlocks. I got heated for a moment. But after recognizing how much we talk about this issue, I hung up my cultural appropriation cape for this one because I’m so damn tired of being up in arms when non-black people are willfully ignorant.
I used to think that Black people weren’t gatekeeping enough.
This is true in some instances.
You do have that random Black person on Twitter whose main catchphrase is “I’m Black and I think it’s okay!” You can’t deny that some Black people still give their friends N-word passes and invite them to the cookout. I mistook those coon-ish sentiments online as the majority. The anti-Blackness jumped out of me. I thought the main reason why non-Black people feel it’s okay to steal from our culture so much is that we allow them in all the time.
But alas, intense gatekeeping doesn’t even help because non-black people still hold systemic power over Black people.
No amount of gatekeeping can change the fact that Black people are still at the bottom of the totem pole. Even though we’re more protective of our culture now, that still won’t stop other people from exercising their systemic oppression of Black people.
It’s like saying, “I have power over you so why would I give a fuck about respecting your culture? No one cares anyway.”
