Cultural appropriation

• 1. Introduction

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  Cultural appropriation sits at the intersection of art, politics, identity, and power. When model Karlie Kloss walked the Victoria's Secret runway in 2012 wearing a Native American warbonnet, a Navajo Nation spokesman called it a "mockery". A Cherokee academic wrote that the headdress represents respect, power, and responsibility in the communities that wear it. It must be earned, gifted to a leader trusted by the community. Reduced to a runway accessory, that meaning is erased.

  The concept itself is older than these flashpoints suggest. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the phrase to a 1945 essay by Arthur E. Christy about Orientalism. Its widespread use in academic circles began in the 1980s, and today it appears in conversations about mascots, music, food, hairstyles, tattoos, and dance. The question driving all of it is the same: when members of one culture adopt elements from another, who benefits, who is harmed, and does the answer depend on who holds power?

• 2. Defining the Term

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  American anthropologist Jason Jackson offered a definition that cuts through much of the confusion. He describes cultural appropriation as the "structural inversion of assimilation" - a situation in which a powerful group takes aspects of the culture of a subordinated group and makes them its own. This framing, which Jackson developed in a 2021 paper, distinguishes appropriation from acculturation, assimilation, and diffusion, which are other modes of cultural change. Jackson describes appropriation as something done to a certain party from the outside, a source of pain that can produce feelings of loss or violation.

  Linda Martín Alcoff adds the dimension of context: critics of appropriation focus on cases where symbols, music, dance, spiritual ceremonies, modes of dress, or social behaviour are trivialised and used for fashion rather than respected within their original cultural context. The distinction between appropriation and mutual exchange is central here. Mutual exchange, opponents argue, happens on an even playing field, while appropriation involves pieces of an oppressed culture being removed from context by people who have historically oppressed those they are borrowing from.

  Julia Serano, writing in Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism, offers the most systematic framework: appropriation becomes harmful only when it involves what she calls EED - erasure, exploitation, or denigration. Erasure means obscuring the context in which cultural forms emerged. Exploitation means benefiting financially or socially without returning value to the marginalized group. Denigration means treating borrowed elements as trivial, exotic, or deserving of mockery. Serano also allows for cases she calls non-EED appropriation, where borrowing does not inflict structural harm and may even support the originating community.

• 3. Indigenous Cultures Under Pressure

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  The Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality describes those who rise from within the community to authorize the sale of Lakota ceremonial ways to non-Indians as "plastic medicine men" and enemies of the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota people. That phrase captures the intensity with which some indigenous communities have responded to what they see as the commercialization of sacred practice.

  Native American sweat lodge and vision quest ceremonies have drawn particular criticism when led by non-Natives. Critics point to deaths or injuries in 1996, 2002-2004, and several high-profile deaths in 2009, arguing that these events carry genuine safety risks when conducted by those who lack the years of training and cultural immersion required to lead them responsibly.

  In the realm of sports, the United States Commission on Civil Rights released a statement in 2001 calling for an end to the use of Native American names and mascots. The NCAA followed in 2005 with a policy against hostile and abusive names, leading to the removal of many derived from Native American culture. The National Congress of American Indians has tracked the trend, reporting that two-thirds of such names and mascots have been eliminated over the past fifty years.

  The Seminole Tribe of Florida offers a counterexample. After the NCAA attempted to ban Native American iconography in 2005, the tribe passed a resolution explicitly supporting Florida State University's use of the historical leader Osceola and his Appaloosa horse as mascots. The tribe's chairman said in 2013 that the FSU iconography represents the courage of the Seminole people, who he described as "the Unconquered Seminoles." The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma disagreed, expressing disapproval of all indigenous sports mascots the same year.

  Professor Rebecca Tsosie of the Native American Rights Fund argues that the long-term goal must be a legal system, potentially through treaty, that recognizes indigenous cultural expressions and traditional knowledge as collective intellectual property - resources owned by tribal nations, not by any single individual who might give away rights to them.

• 4. Fashion, Bodies, and Commerce

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  In June 2019, Kim Kardashian launched a shapewear line called "Kimono". The name was, by her account, a nod to the beauty and detail of the garment and a riff on her first name. The mayor of Kyoto wrote her an open letter asking her to drop it. Kardashian changed the name the next day, writing that she had acted with the best intentions and was always listening and learning.

  Fashion generates appropriation controversies at a steady pace. In 2017, Topshop sold Chinese-made playsuits imitating the keffiyeh pattern. In 2018, Gucci sent white models down a Milan catwalk wearing Sikh religious headpieces; Sikh Canadian actor Avan Jogia called it offensive and irresponsible. Also in 2018, musician Pharrell Williams and Adidas released a line called "Hu Holi," inspired by the Hindu festival Holi. Raja Zed, president of the Universal Society of Hinduism, called it a trivialization of Hindu traditions, concepts, symbols, and beliefs. The collection included leather items, which violate Hindu beliefs.

  Hairstyles carry their own charged history. Dreadlocks, associated with African and African diaspora cultures including Jamaican Rastafari, became a focus of debate when white actor Zac Efron posted a picture of himself wearing them in 2018. Writer Wanna Thompson popularized the term "blackfishing" the same year, describing white social media influencers who adopt a look associated with Black people, including braided hair, darkened skin, and enhanced lips. Alisha Gaines of Florida State University, author of Black for a Day: Fantasies of Race and Empathy, said blackfishing allows non-Black people to appropriate what is considered cool about Blackness while avoiding its negative consequences, including racism and state violence.

  Tattoos present a similar debate. Since the early 2000s, it has become common for people without East Asian or South Asian heritage to get tattoos using Devanagari, Korean letters, or Han characters, often without knowing the meaning of the symbols. In 2000, footballer David Beckham received a tattoo in Hindi despite having no Indian heritage.

• 5. Music, Language, and Digital Spread

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  K-pop has been identified as a significant site of African American cultural appropriation, with debates centering on outfits, hairstyles, language, and style of music. In April 2025, the group Kiss of Life sparked controversy when its four members dressed in what commentators described as a hip-hop vibe during a livestream celebrating American member Julie Han's birthday. The members wore cornrows, snapback hats, large hoop earrings, and oversized chains. The group was removed from the musical festival KCON LA as a result.

  Pop music, white rap, white rock and roll, and white rhythm and blues have all faced similar scrutiny. Much of the criticism focuses on a lack of acknowledgment and the absence of financial compensation for Black artists whose cultural forms were adopted.

  Language offers a particularly revealing case. African American Vernacular English, known as AAVE, has spread rapidly across TikTok. Words like "slay," "lit," "finna," "sybau," and others are often categorized as Gen Z slang, a label that critics argue erases their origin in the AAVE tradition. Jason Parham, a senior writer at WIRED Magazine, writes that TikTok creators embody Blackness with an amateur virtuosity, taking on Black rhythms, gestures, affects, and slangs. Rachel Elizabeth Laing of Illinois State University argues that this usage by white individuals serves as an intrusion into cultural and personal-enacted-communal identity gaps, and can increase the power imbalance between linguistic majority and minority groups.

  A six-year study on international K-Pop fans, published in 2024 by Angela Gracia B Cruz, Yuri Seo, and Daiane Scaraboto, explored how fans self-authorize their engagement with potentially appropriated media. One commenter quoted in the study, an Asian-American Reddit user named Sam, observed that K-Pop fandom in America felt more like appreciation to them, while Koreaboos who use Korean names for comedy felt more like appropriation.

• 6. Pushback and Critique

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  Yascha Mounk, writing in The People vs Democracy in 2018, argued that the logic of cultural appropriation implies a purist conception of culture, one tied to monoethnic identity. He acknowledged that cultural symbols from minority groups should not be mocked or denigrated, but warned that the broader concept opens the door to what he calls historical nonsense. Cultures have always inspired each other and enriched their own traditions through contact. The drive to segment them into discrete, bounded units, he argued, mirrors the thinking of far-right leaders who insist national cultures should be free of foreign influences.

  Kwame Anthony Appiah, ethics columnist for the New York Times, reframed the central question entirely. He said the term cultural appropriation incorrectly labels contemptuous behavior as a property crime. For Appiah, the key question is not who owns what, but whether an action is disrespectful.

  Pakistani writer Kamila Shamsie criticized the concept as applied to fiction in 2012, saying that telling a male American writer he cannot write about a female Pakistani amounts to saying such a character is unknowable and other. Lionel Shriver made a related argument in 2016, defending the right of majority-culture authors to write in the voice of minority-culture characters. Bernadine Evaristo called the idea that writers must stay in their own cultural lane a total nonsense in 2019.

  Chris Berg argues that culture is simply the current manifestation of a long evolutionary process, and that opponents of appropriation are engaged in a deeply conservative project: first seeking to preserve the content of an established culture, then preventing others from interacting with it. Mathias Siems points out a practical legal problem: some supposed cultural properties belong to groups too large to have any reliable mechanism for consenting collectively to an instance of appropriation, citing women as an example.

  In 2023, Jonas R. Kunst, Katharina Lefringhausen, and Hanna Zagefka named this tension the "dilemma of cultural ownership." The dilemma arises because cultures are not discrete entities owned by specific groups and therefore cannot be straightforwardly stolen, yet the impact of power disparities in cases of alleged appropriation is too large to ignore.

• 7. Art, Fiction, and the Limits of Ownership

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  Kenan Malik defends what he calls the messy interaction of cultures as necessary for artistic life. He writes that nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one, and that inhabiting a culture provides the tools for reaching out to others. He goes further, arguing that those who levy charges of appropriation on behalf of their communities appropriate for themselves the authority to license which forms of cultural engagement are acceptable, entrenching their own power in the process.

  Brian Morton agrees that imagining the lives of others is a crucial form of solidarity. Morton criticizes much of the literature on cultural appropriation as spectacularly unhelpful on the precise question of what constitutes appropriation. He argues that the concept of taking from a culture is so broad as to become incoherent, and that requiring writers to write responsibly about people outside their own culture deprives fiction of the freedom to be offensive or satirical.

  In 1994, ethnomusicologist Timothy Rice argued in his book May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music that scholars studying musical cultures must resist presenting themselves as objective voices that generalize a culture. Though not directly addressing cultural appropriation, the concern was the same: the observer's power to define and flatten what they study.

  American literary theorist Walter Benn Michaels wrote in 2020 that both enthusiasm and disapproval for cultural appropriation make little sense, because both require distinguishing between what a culture actually does and what it is supposed to do, and both derive that distinction from race. He criticized the assumption of cultural belonging and what he called the validation of identity crimes. The conversation, he suggested, cannot resolve so long as it takes racial or cultural ownership as its starting premise. Carey Newman, a Kwakwak'awakw/Coast Salish artist, offered a more concrete answer in an open letter to Canadian visual artist Sue Coleman in 2017: artists being accountable to indigenous communities is the antidote to appropriation.