essay on cultural appropriation

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Commentary: Cultural Appropriation Is, In Fact, Indefensible

K. Tempest Bradford

Elvis Presley, in the studio in 1956 — Presley's success was undoubtedly driven by the material he appropriated from black musicians. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images hide caption

Elvis Presley, in the studio in 1956 — Presley's success was undoubtedly driven by the material he appropriated from black musicians.

Last week, the New York Times published an op-ed titled "In Defense of Cultural Appropriation" in which writer Kenan Malik attempted to extol the virtues of artistic appropriation and chastise those who would stand in the way of necessary "cultural engagement." (No link, because you have Google and I'd rather not give that piece more traffic than it deserves.) What would have happened, he argues, had Elvis Presley not been able to swipe the sounds of black musicians?

Malik is not the first person to defend cultural appropriation. He joins a long list that, most recently, has included prominent members of the Canadian literary community and author Lionel Shriver.

But the truth is that cultural appropriation is indefensible. Those who defend it either don't understand what it is, misrepresent it to muddy the conversation, or ignore its complexity — discarding any nuances and making it easy to dismiss both appropriation and those who object to it.

At the start of the most recent debate , Canadian author Hal Niedzviecki called on the readers of Write magazine to "Write what you don't know ... Relentlessly explore the lives of people who aren't like you. ... Win the Appropriation Prize." Amid the outcry over this editorial, there were those who wondered why this statement would be objectionable. Shouldn't authors "write the Other?" Shouldn't there be more representative fiction?

Yes, of course. The issue here is that Niedzviecki conflated cultural appropriation and the practice of writing characters with very different identities from yourself — and they're not the same thing. Writing inclusive fiction might involve appropriation if it's done badly, but that's not a given.

Cultural appropriation can feel hard to get a handle on, because boiling it down to a two-sentence dictionary definition does no one any favors. Writer Maisha Z. Johnson offers an excellent starting point by describing it not only as the act of an individual, but an individual working within a " power dynamic in which members of a dominant culture take elements from a culture of people who have been systematically oppressed by that dominant group ."

That's why appropriation and exchange are two different things, Johnson says — there's no power imbalance involved in an exchange. And when artists appropriate, they can profit from what they take, while the oppressed group gets nothing.

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Dear white artists making music videos in india: step away from the 'holi' powder, author lionel shriver on cultural appropriation and the 'sensitivity police'.

I teach classes and seminars alongside author and editor Nisi Shawl on Writing the Other , and the foundation of our work is that authors should create characters from many different races, cultures, class backgrounds, physical abilities, and genders, even if — especially if — these don't match their own. We are not alone in this. You won't find many people advising authors to only create characters similar to themselves. You will find many who say: Don't write characters from minority or marginalized identities if you are not going to put in the hard work to do it well and avoid cultural appropriation and other harmful outcomes. These are different messages. But writers often see or hear the latter and imagine that it means the former. And editorials like Niedzviecki's don't help the matter.

Complicating things even further, those who tend to see appropriation as exchange are often the ones who profit from it.

Even Malik's example involving rock and roll isn't as simple as Elvis "stealing" from black artists. Before he even came along, systematic oppression and segregation in America meant black musicians didn't have access to the same opportunities for mainstream exposure, income, or success as white ones. Elvis and other rock and roll musicians were undoubtedly influenced by black innovators, but over time the genre came to be regarded as a cultural product created, perfected by, and only accessible to whites .

This is the "messy interaction" Malik breezes over in dismissing the idea of appropriation as theft: A repeating pattern that's recognizable across many different cultural spheres, from fashion and the arts to literature and food.

And this pattern is why cultures and people who've suffered the most from appropriation sometimes insist on their traditions being treated like intellectual property — it can seem like the only way to protect themselves and to force members of dominant or oppressive cultures to consider the impact of their actions.

This has lead to accusations of gatekeeping by Malik and others: Who has the right to decide what is appropriation and what isn't ? What does true cultural exchange look like? There's no one easy answer to either question.

But there are some helpful guidelines: The Australian Council for the Arts developed a set of protocols for working with Indigenous artists that lays out how to approach Aboriginal culture as a respectful guest, who to contact for guidance and permission, and how to proceed with your art if that permission is not granted. Some of these protocols are specific to Australia, but the key to all of them is finding ways for creativity to flourish while also reducing harm.

All of this lies at the root of why cultural appropriation is indefensible. It is, without question, harmful. It is not inherent to writing representational and inclusive fiction, it is not a process of equal and mutually beneficial exchange, and it is not a way for one culture to honor another. Cultural appropriation does damage, and it should be something writers and other artists work hard to avoid, not compete with each other to achieve.

For those who are willing to do that hard work, there are resources out there. When I lecture about this, I ask writers to consider whether they are acting as Invaders, Tourists, or Guests, according to the excellent framework Nisi Shawl lays out in her essay on appropriation . And then I point them towards all the articles and blog posts I've collected over time on the subject of cultural appropriation , to give them as full a background in understanding, identifying, and avoiding it as I possibly can.

Because I believe that, instead of giving people excuses for why appropriation can't be avoided (it can), or allowing them to think it's no big deal (it is), it's more important to help them become better artists whose creations contribute to cultural understanding and growth that benefits us all.

K. Tempest Bradford is a speculative fiction author, media critic, teacher, and podcaster. She teaches and lectures about writing inclusive fiction online and in person via WritingTheOther.com .

Home — Essay Samples — Sociology — Sociological Theories — Cultural Appropriation

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Cultural Appropriation and How It Can Cause Harm

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Cultural Appropriation: Why Humans Define Nature Differently

The negative connotation surrounding cultural appropriation, john stuart mill and his ideas about cultural appropriation, the cultural plunge: an exploration of benefits and challenges.

Cultural appropriation refers to the adoption, borrowing, or imitation of elements, practices, symbols, or artifacts from a marginalized culture by individuals or groups belonging to a dominant culture, often without proper understanding, respect, or acknowledgment of the cultural context or significance. It involves the selective appropriation of certain aspects of a culture, typically for personal gain, fashion trends, or entertainment, while disregarding the historical, social, or religious meaning behind those elements.

Cultural appropriation, as a concept, traces its origins to the early 20th century, primarily in the field of anthropology and cultural studies. It emerged as a way to address the power dynamics and inequalities that exist between different cultures. The history of cultural appropriation can be seen within the context of colonialism and imperialism, where dominant cultures often appropriated elements from marginalized or colonized cultures for their own benefit. This included the appropriation of cultural symbols, artifacts, clothing, music, and other cultural practices. The discourse around cultural appropriation gained significant attention and evolved throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. It has become a subject of debate and critique, raising questions about cultural sensitivity, respect, and the commodification of cultural elements. Proponents argue that cultural exchange is beneficial and can foster understanding, while critics assert that appropriation can perpetuate stereotypes, exploit cultures, and erase the significance of cultural practices.

In the US, cultural appropriation is often observed in the realm of fashion, music, art, and even Halloween costumes, where elements from different cultures are sometimes used without proper understanding or respect. This can range from the adoption of cultural hairstyles, attire, or religious symbols to the appropriation of cultural rituals and practices. The public opinion on cultural appropriation in the US is diverse. Some individuals view it as a form of appreciation and cultural exchange, while others perceive it as a form of disrespect, erasure, and even exploitation of marginalized communities. Activists and social media platforms play a crucial role in raising awareness about cultural appropriation, promoting dialogue, and encouraging individuals to be mindful of the cultural origins and significance of what they adopt or represent. As society becomes more aware of the complexities surrounding cultural appropriation, there is a growing emphasis on fostering cultural understanding, respecting cultural boundaries, and engaging in responsible cultural exchange. The conversation on cultural appropriation in the US continues to evolve, highlighting the importance of education, empathy, and sensitivity to different cultures and their histories.

Fashion and Style: This includes the adoption of cultural attire, accessories, or hairstyles without understanding their cultural significance. Examples include wearing Native American headdresses or African tribal prints without knowledge or respect for their cultural context. Language and Slang: Appropriating language or slang terms from different cultures without understanding their origins can be seen as a form of cultural appropriation. This often happens when words or phrases are taken out of their original cultural context and used without proper understanding or respect. Music and Dance: Borrowing elements of music and dance from different cultures without giving credit or respecting the cultural roots is another form of cultural appropriation. This can involve taking traditional music styles, instruments, or dance moves and using them without acknowledging their cultural significance. Art and Symbols: Appropriation of cultural symbols, religious icons, or traditional artwork without understanding their cultural meanings can be seen as disrespectful. It involves using these symbols for aesthetic purposes or commercial gain without recognizing their cultural heritage. Rituals and Traditions: Adopting or modifying cultural rituals and traditions without proper understanding or respect for their significance is another aspect of cultural appropriation. This can involve appropriating religious practices, ceremonies, or spiritual symbols without understanding their sacredness.

Iggy Azalea: The Australian rapper faced criticism for appropriating African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in her music and performances. Her adoption of African American culture and style drew accusations of cultural appropriation. Katy Perry: The pop singer has been accused of cultural appropriation for incorporating elements of various cultures, such as Japanese, Indian, and African, in her music videos and stage performances. Kylie Jenner: The reality TV star and entrepreneur faced backlash for appropriating Black culture through her hairstyles, such as wearing cornrows, which some viewed as a misappropriation of a traditionally African hairstyle. Marc Jacobs: The fashion designer faced criticism for featuring white models wearing dreadlocks on the runway, which was seen as cultural appropriation of a hairstyle deeply rooted in African and African American culture. Miley Cyrus: The singer and actress faced controversy for appropriating elements of Black culture, including twerking and adopting a hip-hop-inspired persona during her Bangerz era.

Power Dynamics: This theory emphasizes the power imbalances between dominant and marginalized cultures. It argues that cultural appropriation occurs when elements of a marginalized culture are adopted and commodified by the dominant culture without proper understanding or respect, perpetuating inequalities and erasing the cultural context. Appreciation vs. Appropriation: This theory distinguishes between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. It suggests that appreciation involves respectfully learning about and engaging with different cultures, while appropriation involves taking elements out of context, often for personal gain, without understanding or respecting their cultural significance. Commodification: This theory focuses on the commercial aspect of cultural appropriation. It highlights how cultural elements, such as fashion, music, or art, are often commodified and stripped of their original cultural meaning, resulting in the exploitation of marginalized cultures for profit. Cultural Exchange: This theory acknowledges that cultural borrowing and exchange have existed throughout history. It suggests that cultural exchange becomes problematic when it lacks mutual respect, consent, and acknowledgment of power dynamics, leading to the erasure or exploitation of the culture being borrowed from.

Borrowing Elements: Cultural appropriation involves the adoption or borrowing of cultural elements, including symbols, traditions, clothing, music, language, or rituals, from another culture. Power Imbalance: Cultural appropriation often occurs within a power dynamic where a dominant culture adopts elements from a marginalized culture. The dominant culture may hold more social, economic, or political power, resulting in the exploitation or erasure of the culture being appropriated. Lack of Understanding: Cultural appropriation often reflects a lack of understanding, knowledge, or respect for the cultural significance, history, and context of the borrowed elements. It can lead to misrepresentation, distortion, or trivialization of the original culture. Commercialization and Commodification: Cultural appropriation frequently involves the commodification and commercial exploitation of cultural elements, turning them into trendy fashion, consumer products, or entertainment without proper acknowledgment or compensation to the source culture. Harmful Stereotypes: Cultural appropriation can perpetuate harmful stereotypes, reinforce prejudices, or contribute to the marginalization and discrimination of the culture being appropriated. Absence of Consent and Recognition: Cultural appropriation occurs when elements are taken without the consent or involvement of the originating culture, often without giving credit or recognizing the contributions of the culture being appropriated.

Marginalization and Exploitation: Cultural appropriation can contribute to the marginalization and exploitation of marginalized communities. When elements of their culture are taken out of context or commodified without proper understanding or respect, it can perpetuate power imbalances and reinforce inequalities. Cultural Misrepresentation: Cultural appropriation can lead to misrepresentation and distortion of cultures. It can perpetuate stereotypes, misconceptions, and simplifications, reducing rich and diverse cultural practices to shallow and inaccurate portrayals. Erosion of Cultural Identity: When cultural elements are taken and divorced from their original context and meaning, it can erode the cultural identity and significance attached to them. This can lead to the loss of cultural heritage and the devaluation of traditions, rituals, and symbols. Appropriation vs. Appreciation: The influence of cultural appropriation highlights the need for a shift from appropriation to appreciation. It encourages a more respectful approach to cultural exchange that involves learning, understanding, and honoring the source culture's perspectives, histories, and contributions. Social Awareness and Activism: Cultural appropriation has fueled social awareness and activism. It has sparked discussions and movements that aim to challenge and address the harmful effects of appropriation, promote cultural sensitivity, and advocate for the rights of marginalized communities.

The topic of cultural appropriation is important to write an essay about due to its far-reaching implications and significance in today's diverse and interconnected world. Cultural appropriation raises critical questions about power dynamics, identity, representation, and social justice. By exploring this topic, one can delve into the complexities of cultural exchange, appreciation, and exploitation. Writing an essay on cultural appropriation allows for an examination of the historical context, current manifestations, and the impact it has on marginalized communities. It provides an opportunity to critically analyze the ethical, social, and cultural implications of borrowing elements from different cultures. The essay can delve into the importance of recognizing and respecting the origins, meanings, and value systems associated with cultural practices and artifacts. Moreover, addressing cultural appropriation fosters a deeper understanding of privilege, cultural sensitivity, and the need for cross-cultural dialogue. It encourages individuals to reflect on their own role in perpetuating or challenging appropriation, and prompts discussions on the responsibility of individuals and institutions in promoting cultural understanding and equity.

1. Alcoff, L. M. (2019). The problem of speaking for others. In The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies (pp. 210-222). Routledge. 2. Anderson, K. (2009). Cultural appropriation and the arts. Wiley-Blackwell. 3. Choo, H. Y., & Ferree, M. M. (2010). Practicing intersectionality in sociological research: A critical analysis of inclusions, interactions, and institutions in the study of inequalities. Sociological Theory, 28(2), 129-149. 4. Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2017). Critical race theory: An introduction. New York University Press. 5. Hooks, B. (1992). Black looks: Race and representation. South End Press. 6. Lentin, A. (2008). Racism and anti-racism in Europe. Pluto Press. 7. Matthes, E. H. (2017). Cultural appropriation and the arts. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. 8. McLeod, J. (2017). The ethics of cultural appropriation. Wiley-Blackwell. 9. Richardson, J. E. (2019). (Mis)appropriation, hybridity, and resistance: Revisiting the cultural politics of rap music. In Popular culture and the civic imagination: Music, dissent, and social change (pp. 67-89). Routledge. 10. Young, R. (2008). Colonial desire: Hybridity in theory, culture, and race. Routledge.

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What Is Cultural Appropriation?

Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of "Therapy in Focus: What to Expect from CBT for Social Anxiety Disorder" and "7 Weeks to Reduce Anxiety." She has a Master's degree in psychology.

Akeem Marsh, MD, is a board-certified child, adolescent, and adult psychiatrist who has dedicated his career to working with medically underserved communities.

Verywell / Alison Czinkota

• Identification

Cultural appropriation refers to the use of objects or elements of a non-dominant culture in a way that reinforces stereotypes or contributes to oppression and doesn't respect their original meaning or give credit to their source. It also includes the unauthorized use of parts of their culture (their dress, dance, etc.) without permission.

In this way, cultural appropriation is a layered and nuanced phenomenon that many people may have trouble understanding and may not realize when they are doing it themselves.

It can be natural to merge and blend cultures as people from different backgrounds come together and interact. In fact, many wonderful inventions and creations have been born from the merging of such cultures (such as country music).

However, the line is drawn when a dominant cultural group makes use of elements of a non-dominant group in a way that the non-dominant group views as exploitative.

Cultural appropriation can be most easily recognized by asking this question of the non-dominant group: Does the use of this element of your culture in this way bother you?

Elements of Cultural Appropriation

Taking a step backward, how do we define cultural appropriation? It helps to consider what is meant by each of the terms in the phrase, as well as some related terms that are important to understand.

Culture refers to anything associated with a group of people based on their ethnicity, religion, geography, or social environment. This might include beliefs, traditions, language, objects, ideas, behaviors, customs, values, or institutions. It's not uncommon for culture to be thought of as belonging to particular ethnic groups.

Appropriation

Appropriation refers to taking something that doesn't belong to you or your culture. In the case of cultural appropriation, it is an exchange that happens when a dominant group takes or "borrows" something from a minority group that has historically been exploited or oppressed.

In this sense, appropriation involves a lack of understanding of or appreciation for the historical context that influences what is being taken. Taking a sacred object from a historically marginalized culture and producing it as part of a Halloween costume is one example.

Cultural Denigration

Cultural denigration is when someone adopts an element of a culture with the sole purpose of humiliating or putting down people of that culture. The most obvious example of this is blackface, which originated as a way to denigrate and dehumanize Black people by perpetuating negative stereotypes.

Cultural Appreciation & Respect

Cultural appreciation, on the other hand, is the respectful borrowing of elements from another culture with an interest in sharing ideas and diversifying oneself . Examples would include learning martial arts from an instructor with an understanding of the practice from a cultural perspective or eating Indian food at an authentic Indian restaurant.

When done correctly, cultural appreciation can result in deeper understanding and respect across cultures as well as creative hybrids that blend cultures together.

Dehumanizes oppressed groups

Takes without permission

Perpetuates stereotypes

Ignores the meaning and stories behind the cultural elements

Celebrates cultures in a respectful way

Asks permission, provides credit, and offers compensation

Elevates the voices and experiences of members of a cultural group

Focuses on learning the stories and meanings behind cultural elements

Types of Cultural Appropropriation

There are four main types of cultural appropriation:

• Exchange : This form is defined as a reciprocal exchange between two cultures that are approximately equal in terms of power and dominance.
• Dominance : This type involves a dominant culture taking elements of a subordinate culture that has had a dominant culture forced upon it.
• Exploitation : This type is defined as taking cultural elements of a subordinate culture without compensation, permission, or reciprocity.
• Transculturation : This form involves taking and combining elements of multiple cultures, making it difficult to identify and credit the original source.

Context of Cultural Appropriation

Learning about the context of cultural appropriation is important for understanding why it is a problem. While some might not think twice about adopting a style from another culture, for example, the group with which the style originated may have historical experiences that make the person's actions insensitive to the group's past and current experience.

For example, consider a White American wearing their hair in cornrows. While Black Americans have historically experienced discrimination because of protective hairstyles like cornrows, White Americans, as part of the dominant group in the U.S., can often "get away" with appropriating that same hairstyle and making it "trendy," all the while not understanding or acknowledging the experiences that contributed to its significance in Black culture in the first place.

Examples of Cultural Appropriation

When considering examples of cultural appropriation, it's helpful to look at the types of items that can be a target. They include:

• Clothing and fashion
• Decorations
• Intellectual property
• Religious symbols
• Wellness practices

In the United States, the groups that are most commonly targeted in terms of cultural appropriation include Black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic and Latinx Americans , and Native Americans.

The following are some real-world examples of cultural appropriation to consider.

Rock 'N' Roll

In the 1950s, White musicians "invented" rock and roll; however, the musical style was appropriated from Black musicians who never received credit. In fact, music executives at the time chose to promote White performers over Black performers, reinforcing the idea that cultural appropriation involves a negative impact on a non-dominant group.

Sweat Lodge

In 2011, motivational entrepreneur James Arthur Ray was convicted of three counts of negligent homicide after the death of three participants in his pseudo sweat lodge . This is an extreme example of the cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of Native American traditions.

Do you remember the "voguing" craze made popular by Madonna back in the 1990s? Voguing as a dance actually had its roots in the gay clubs of New York City and was pioneered by Black members of the LGBTQ+ community. Madonna defends her right to artistic expression, but the question remains—how many people still mistakenly think she invented voguing?

Team Mascots

There is a history of major sports teams in the United States and Canada being involved in the cultural appropriation of Indigenous cultures through their names and mascots. Past and present examples include the Chicago Blackhawks, Cleveland Indians, Washington Redskins, and Edmonton Eskimos. (The Redskins and Eskimos have since undergone name changes.)

"Redskin" is a derogatory term for Indigenous people, and the term "eskimo" has been rejected by the Inuit community.

How to Know If Something Is Cultural Appropriation

If you are unsure how to decide if something is cultural appropriation, here are some questions to ask yourself:

• What is your goal with what you are doing?
• Are you following a trend or exploring the history of a culture?
• Are you deliberately trying to insult someone's culture or are you being respectful?
• Are you purchasing something (e.g., artwork) that is a reproduction of a culture or an original?
• How would people from the culture you are borrowing from feel about what you are doing?
• Are there any stereotypes involved in what you are doing?
• Are you using a sacred item (e.g., headdress) in a flippant or fun way?
• Are you borrowing something from an ancient culture and pretending that it is new?
• Are you crediting the source or inspiration of what you are doing?
• If a person of the original culture were to do what you are doing, would they be viewed as "cool" or could they possibly face discrimination?
• Are you wearing a costume (e.g., Geisha girl, tribal wear) that represents a culture?
• Are you ignoring the cultural significance of something in favor of following a trend?

Explore these questions and always aim to show sensitivity when adopting elements from another culture. If you do realize that something you have done is wrong, accept it as a mistake and then work to change it and apologize for it .

If you aren't sure if something is considered cultural appropriation, you need to look no further than the reaction of the group from whom the cultural element was taken.

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation

You can avoid cultural appropriation by taking a few steps, such as these:

• Ask yourself the list of questions above to begin to explore the underlying motivation for what you are doing.
• Give credit or recognize the origin of items that you borrow or promote from other cultures rather than claiming them as your original ideas.
• Take the time to learn about and truly appreciate a culture before you borrow or adopt elements of it. Learn from those who are members of the culture, visit venues they run (such as restaurants) and attend authentic events (such as going to a real luau).
• Support small businesses run by members of the culture rather than buying mass-produced items from big box stores that are made to represent a culture.

A Word From Verywell

Cultural appropriation is the social equivalent of plagiarism with an added dose of denigration. It's something to be avoided at all costs, and something to educate yourself about.

In addition to watching your own actions, it's important to be mindful of the actions of corporations and be choosy about how you spend your dollars as that is another way of supporting members of the non-dominant culture. Do what you can when you can as you learn to do better.

National Conference for Community and Justice. What is cultural appropriation? .

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Cultural competence in health and human services .

History. How the history of blackface is rooted in racism .

Rogers RA. From cultural exchange to transculturation: a review and reconceptualization of cultural appropriation . Commun Theory . 2006;16(4):474-503. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00277.x

Penal MA. Blonde braids and cornrows: Cultural appropriation of black hairstyles . ResearchGate . 2020. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30870.98885

Cherid M. "Ain't got enough money to pay me respect": Blackfishing, cultural appropriation, and the commodification of blackness . Cult Stud Critical Methodol . 2021;21(5):359-364. doi:10.1177/15327086211029357

Kleisath C. The costume of Shagri-La: Thoughts on white privilege, cultural appropriation, and anti-Asian racism . J Lesbian Stud . 2014;18:142-157. doi:10.1080/10894160.2014.849164

Fan Y. The identity of Pilsen—Spanish language presence, cultural appropriation, and gentrification . University of Chicago English Language Institute.

Reed T. Fair use as cultural appropriation. California Law Review.

Boxill-Clark C. In search of harmony in culture: An analysis of American rock music and the African American experience . Dominican University of California.

Harris D, Effron L. James Ray found guilty of negligent homicide in Arizona sweat lodge case . ABC News .

History. How 19th-century drag balls evolved into house balls, birthplace of voguing .

Sharrow E, Tarsi M, Nteta T. What's in a name? Symbolic racism, public opinion, and the controversy over the NFL's Washington Football team name . Race Social Prob . 2020;13:110-121. doi:10.1007/s12552-020-09305-0

Kaplan L. Inuit or eskimo: Which name to use? . Alaska Native Language Center.

National Institutes of Health. Cultural respect .

Thagard P. Cultural appropriation, appreciation, and denigration .

Williamson T. Yes, cultural appropriation can happen within the Indigenous community and yes, we should be debating it .

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of "Therapy in Focus: What to Expect from CBT for Social Anxiety Disorder" and "7 Weeks to Reduce Anxiety." She has a Master's degree in psychology.

Winter 2024

All Shook Up: The Politics of Cultural Appropriation

In the era of global capitalism, imagining the lives of others is a crucial form of solidarity.

I first heard the phrase “Stay in your lane” a few years ago, in a writing workshop I was teaching. We were talking about a story that a student in the group, an Asian-American man, had written about an African-American family.

There was a lot to criticize about the story, including an abundance of clichés about the lives of Black Americans. I had expected the class to offer suggestions for improvement. What I hadn’t expected was that some students would tell the writer that he shouldn’t have written the story at all. As one of them put it, if a member of a relatively privileged group writes a story about a member of a marginalized group, this is an act of cultural appropriation and therefore does harm.

Arguments about cultural appropriation make the news every month or two. Two women from Portland, after enjoying the food during a trip to Mexico, open a burrito cart when they return home but, assailed by online activists, close their business within months. A yoga class at a university in Canada is shut down by student protests. The author of a young-adult novel, criticized for writing about characters from backgrounds different from his own, apologizes and withdraws his book from circulation. Such a wide variety of acts and practices is condemned as cultural appropriation that it can be hard to tell what cultural appropriation is .

Much of the literature on cultural appropriation is spectacularly unhelpful on this score. LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant, a professor of Africana studies at Williams College, says that the term “refers to taking someone else’s culture—intellectual property, artifacts, style, art form, etc.—without permission.” Similarly, Susan Scafidi, a professor of law at Fordham and the author of Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law , defines it as “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

These definitions seem enlightening, until you think about them. For one thing, the idea of “taking” something from another culture is so broad as to be incoherent: there’s nothing in these definitions that would prevent us from condemning someone for learning another language. For another, they rely on an idea—“permission”—that doesn’t, in this context, have any meaning.

Permission to use another group’s cultural expressions isn’t something that it’s possible to receive, because ethnicities, gender identities, and other such groups don’t have representatives authorized to grant it. When novelists, for example, write outside their own experience, publishing houses now routinely enlist “sensitivity readers” to make sure they say nothing that will offend—but once the books are published, novelists are on their own. There’s nothing they can do to rebut the accusation that the products of their imagination were “unauthorized,” nothing they can do to ward off the charge that they’ve caused harm by straying outside their lanes.

Something like the admonition to stay in one’s lane lay behind the protests that arose when Dana Schutz’s portrait of Emmett Till in his casket was displayed in an exhibit at the Whitney Museum in 2017—probably the most acrimonious chapter of the cultural appropriation discussion in recent memory. The artist Hannah Black wrote an open letter to the Whitney “with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed.” Black continued: “Through his mother’s courage, Till was made available to Black people as an inspiration and warning. Non-Black people must accept that they will never embody and cannot understand this gesture. . . .”

Schutz’s response identified the problem with the idea of staying in one’s lane. “I don’t know what it is like to be black in America,” she said,

but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother. . . . Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection. I don’t believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have) but neither are we all completely unknowable.

She was saying that the lane that she shared with Mamie Till-Mobley by virtue of being a mother was just as salient as the lane of race.

A similar point was made by the political scientist Adolph Reed, in an article that highlighted the many ways in which the history of Black Americans and white Americans have been intertwined. Reed remarked that “one might argue that Schutz, as an American, has a stronger claim than [the British-born] Black to interpret the Till story. After all, the segregationist Southern order and the struggle against that order, which gave Till’s fate its broader social and political significance, were historically specific moments of a distinctively American experience.”

When Till-Mobley defied the authorities by displaying her son’s mutilated body in an open coffin, it was not with the aim of making his image available only for Black people. Till-Mobley said that “They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.” The author Christopher Benson, who co-authored Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America with Till-Mobley, wrote that “She welcomed the megaphone effect of a wider audience reached by multiple storytellers, irrespective of race: Bob Dylan’s song ‘Ballad of Emmett Till’; Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem ‘The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till’; James Baldwin’s play Blues for Mister Charlie ; Bebe Moore Campbell’s novel Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine ; and Rod Serling’s numerous interpretations in his TV shows, including The Twilight Zone .”

In writing about cultural appropriation in art, then, the point isn’t that artists should be permitted to imagine the experiences of others as long as they can establish that they share a lane. There are no two people on the planet who don’t share a few lanes. The point is that artists imagine the experiences of others by virtue of a common humanity.

A common humanity: the phrase seems quaint, anachronistic, even as I type it. But I think the restoration of the dignity and prestige of the idea is one of the tasks of the contemporary left.

In the world of fiction—the area of artistic endeavor that I know best—imagining other lives is part of the job.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch wrote, “We judge the great novelists by the quality of their awareness of others.” If Tolstoy is considered by many to be the greatest novelist who ever lived, this isn’t because of the beauty of his sentences or the shapeliness of his plots. It’s because he could bring to life so many wildly different characters, from the young girl preparing eagerly for her first ball to the old man dying in his bed, from the aristocrat on a foxhunt to the serf watching the aristocrat ride by. Tolstoy’s intense responsiveness to life jolts us into an awareness of how much more deeply we could be living; his intense responsiveness, in particular, to other people, jolts us into an awareness of how much more keenly we could be entering into the experiences of the people around us.

One of Tolstoy’s contemporaries, George Eliot, wrote explicitly about the effort to imagine the minds of others as a sort of moral necessity. In Middlemarch , Eliot introduces us to a vibrant young woman, Dorothea Brooke, who is about to marry a desiccated scholar named Casaubon. Dorothea naively believes that Casaubon is a man of great intellect and great humanity; everyone else who knows them sees what she can’t see: that she’s about to marry a cold, humorless, ungenerous man.

Around seventy-five pages into the novel, Eliot does a remarkable thing. She stops the action and says, in effect, we’ve heard what everyone else thinks of Casaubon, but what does Casaubon think about himself?

Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labours; what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring his heart to its final pause. Doubtless his lot is important in his own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place in our consideration must be our want of room for him. . . . Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own world. . . .

This little passage is one of the most beautiful statements of the novelist’s creed that I know. Everyone is the center of a world. The novelist’s work is to honor this truth, and one of the ways in which a novelist does so is to imagine what it is to live in other people’s skin.

A common objection to sentiments like this holds that the freedom to imagine other lives has long been held almost exclusively by white writers, who have abused the freedom by creating inaccurate and demeaning images of others, and that it’s therefore especially important for white writers to stay in their lane. In this account, silence is recommended as a form of collective penance.

The novelist Kamila Shamsie has answered this argument thoughtfully. She writes that there is

something deeply damaging in the idea that writers couldn’t take on stories about the Other. As a South Asian who has encountered more than her fair share of awful stereotypes about South Asians in the British empire novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I’m certainly not about to disagree with the charge that writers who are implicated in certain power structures have been guilty of writing fiction which supports, justifies and props up those power structures. I understand the concerns of people who feel that for too long stories have been told about them rather than by them. But it should be clear that the response to this is for writers to write differently, to write better. . . . The moment you say, a male American writer can’t write about a female Pakistani, you are saying, Don’t tell those stories. Worse, you’re saying, as an American male you can’t understand a Pakistani woman. She is enigmatic, inscrutable, unknowable. She’s other. Leave her and her nation to its Otherness.

Although it’s not uncommon to hear people say that writing from the point of view of someone outside one’s “identity group” is never permissible, critics and reviewers seem to have reached a softer consensus about the subject. They tend to say that fiction writers should of course claim the freedom to imagine the interior lives of others, but they must do so “responsibly.”

On one level, this is obviously reasonable. If someone wrote a story about a devout Muslim with a scene in which the main character came home from work and made himself a pork chop, it would be reasonable to tell the writer that he needed to find out a little more about Islamic customs and beliefs, and it would be reasonable to tell him to approach the subject more responsibly.

But if we think about it, this notion of responsibility has disquieting implications.

Isaac Babel, the great Russian-Jewish short story writer, published most of his work before the Stalin regime came to power. After Stalin began to imprison and execute writers and intellectuals, Babel tried to stay alive by staying silent. But even while he tried to display his allegiance to the regime, he couldn’t suppress his independence of mind. At a writers’ conference in Moscow in 1934, Babel said that “the party and government have given us everything and have taken from us only one right—that of writing badly. Comrades, let’s be honest, this was a very important right and not a little is being taken from us.”

Babel was saying that Stalin had taken away everything. Without the freedom to write badly, the writer has no freedom at all.

Just as writers need the freedom to write badly, they need the freedom to write irresponsibly. The best fiction is deeply moral—George Eliot’s creed of empathy is the highest ethical idea I can conceive of—and yet fiction couldn’t be written at all if it lost its connection to the world of irresponsible play.

After the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini proclaimed a fatwa against Salman Rushdie for publishing The Satanic Verses , some writers and intellectuals expressed their solidarity with Rushdie, while others murmured that he should have written more responsibly. Without admitting it to themselves, they were standing with his persecutors, implying that he brought the fatwa down upon himself through his provocative literary behavior. The right to offend, the right to satirize, even the right to get things wrong—all of these are precious, and anyone who believes oneself a friend of art and literature needs to defend them without qualification.

I should make it clear that I’m not saying that people who grouse about cultural appropriation are as bad as Stalin or the Ayatollah. I’m saying they don’t respect the anarchic energies of art.

When Diaghilev commissioned Jean Cocteau to write the libretto for one of his ballets, his only words of instruction were, “Astonish me!” What young artists today are being told is something more along the lines of “Watch your step!”

Just as the critics of cultural appropriation have a puritanical view of art, they have a puritanical view of culture as well. Let’s look again at Susan Scafidi’s definition: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture’s dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc.”

We imagine the arbiter of cultural appropriation as a kindergarten teacher, sternly telling the children not to use one another’s toys without asking. But this isn’t the way culture develops. There is no product of culture that isn’t the result of mixing—that isn’t the result of taking things without permission—from the meals we make to the music we enjoy to the language that I’m using to write this essay.

Much of the mixing has been on horribly unequal terms. But not all of it. In our current way of looking at it, cultural appropriation is always pictured as a vampire-like dominant culture draining the blood of a minority culture too weak to defend itself. A more confident social justice movement might see some of these borrowings as evidence of the strength of popular creativity. Ralph Ellison, in a review of a book about music and race in America, was getting at this idea when he wrote of the origins of the blues as “enslaved and politically weak men successfully imposing their values upon a powerful society through song. . . .”

In many of his essays, written as far back as sixty years ago, Ellison turns out to be one of the surest guides to the controversies around cultural appropriation that we have. Here he is in his essay “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”:

It is here, on the level of culture . . . that elements of the many available tastes, traditions, ways of life, and values that make up the total culture have been ceaselessly appropriated and made their own—consciously, unselfconsciously, or imperialistically—by groups and individuals to whose own backgrounds and traditions they are historically alien. Indeed, it was through this process of cultural appropriation (and misappropriation) that Englishmen, Europeans, Africans, and Asians became Americans. The Pilgrims began by appropriating the agricultural, military and meteorological lore of the Indians, including much of their terminology. The Africans, thrown together from numerous ravaged tribes, took up the English language and the biblical legends of the ancient Hebrews and were “Americanizing” themselves long before the American Revolution. . . . Everyone played the appropriation game. . . . Americans seem to have sensed intuitively that the possibility of enriching the individual self by such pragmatic and opportunistic appropriations has constituted one of the most precious of their many freedoms. . . . [I]n this country things are always all shook up, so that people are constantly moving around and rubbing off on one another culturally.

Ellison’s friend and comrade-in-arms Albert Murray had a similar perspective. “American culture,” he wrote, “even in its most rigidly segregated precincts, is patently and irrevocably composite. . . . Indeed, for all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences, the so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.”

After you spend time reading Ellison and Murray, critics of cultural appropriation begin to seem like members of a weird purity cult, issuing edicts and prohibitions against the kinds of mixing that are an inevitable part of life.

For an eloquent and lively example of a viewpoint largely opposed to the one I’m expressing here, I’d recommend Lauren Michele Jackson’s White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue . . . And Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation . Jackson writes with wit and gusto about these issues, at times sounding like an observer in the tradition of Ellison and Murray. “Appropriation is everywhere, and is also inevitable. . . . The idea that any artistic or cultural practice is closed off to outsiders at any point in time is ridiculous, especially in the age of the internet.”

But although much of her book celebrates this kind of mingling, when she considers examples of white artists who are influenced by Black culture, she tends to find the consequences malign. “When the powerful appropriate from the oppressed,” she writes, “society’s imbalances are exacerbated and inequalities prolonged. In America, white people hoard power like Hungry Hungry Hippos. In the history of problematic appropriation in America, we could start with the land and crops commandeered from Native peoples along with the mass expropriation of the labor of the enslaved. The tradition lives on. The things black people make with their hands and minds, for pay and for the hell of it, are exploited by companies and individuals who offer next to nothing in return.”

But if the practice of cultural mingling, as Jackson so vividly demonstrates, is as natural and inevitable as breathing, it can’t be the practice itself that’s the cause of the inequalities she rightly condemns. The causes must lie elsewhere.

Listen to the historian Barbara J. Fields:

Everybody inhabits many [cultures], all simultaneous, all overlapping. It was true for Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley, and it is true for us today, sharing a history beyond our individual experience and therefore sharing the culture that history has produced. Differences of political standing and economic power ensure that some people can monetize a shared cultural inheritance more than others, just as some enjoy greater wealth and higher incomes, live in better housing, receive better educations, and live longer and healthier lives. But that is because of political and economic exploitation, not cultural appropriation. . . . [P]olitical action, not cultural policing, is needed to tackle it.

It makes little sense to condemn an artist or entertainer for taking something from another population on unequal terms while failing to note that all of us—anyone who might read Lauren Michele Jackson’s book, anyone who might read this essay—are doing the same thing during every moment of our lives. In a globalized capitalist economy, every object we buy or use or wear or touch is likely to have been made by workers without significant labor rights in faraway places.

The way forward isn’t to pursue a dream of staying within our lanes. (Stop wearing clothes! Stop using phones! Stop eating food you didn’t grow yourself!) The only way forward is for those of us who are not among the one percent to make common cause in order to put an end to these inequities.    

The more one reads about cultural appropriation, the more difficult it is to resist the conclusion that the preoccupation with staying in your lane is a sort of counterfeit politics.

Critics of cultural appropriation believe themselves to be involved in a significant political activity, yet the objects of their criticism are usually people who are relatively powerless—the yoga teacher, the women with the burrito cart, the visual artist, the novelist who dares to venture out of her lane. It would be hard to make the case that the critique of cultural appropriation constitutes an assault on unjust hierarchies in our society, since those who hold real power are rarely the objects of this critique.

Charges of cultural appropriation are also often made against successful artists and celebrities, from Elvis Presley to Kim Kardashian to Jeanine Cummins, the author of American Dirt —but it would be fanciful to say that entertainers represent the source of power and unjust hierarchy in our society either.

In 2013, the internet spent a few minutes mulling over the question of whether the band Arcade Fire was guilty of cultural appropriation when it put out the album Reflektor , which was heavily influenced by the music of Haiti. It wasn’t a major controversy, as internet controversies go, but it was significant enough to make its way to the pages of the Atlantic . (Finally, most of the people who discussed this were willing to give the band a pass, since its frontman, Win Butler, had been immersed in the music of Haiti for years, and his wife and bandmate, Régine Chassagne, is of Haitian descent.)

Not too long before this, ordinary Haitians had endured a different form of appropriation, a form that went unremarked upon by those who were pondering the question of how much disapproval to express toward Arcade Fire.

In 2009, Haiti’s parliament raised the national minimum wage to 61 cents an hour. Foreign manufacturers, along with the U.S. State Department, immediately pushed back, prevailing on Haiti to lower textile workers’ minimum wage to 31 cents an hour. This came to about $2.50 per day, in a country whose estimated daily cost of living for a family of three was about $12.50.

Powerful corporations from the most powerful country on earth exerted pressure that intensified the destitution of people in Haiti. Among the corporations were Levi Strauss and Hanes, whose CEO was at that time receiving a compensation package of about $10 million a year. Yet you could have searched Facebook and Twitter and the rest of the internet for a long time before finding any Americans who cared or even knew about any of this, even after WikiLeaks and the Nation brought it to light in 2011.

In 2017, the two Portland women who’d opened a burrito cart closed their business after being assailed by online activists for appropriating the cuisine of Mexico. The following year, when the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company fired dozens of workers who were trying to launch an independent trade union at its factory in San Luis Potosí, Mexico, few in the world of online outrage took any notice.

Of course, the pressure exerted on working people in Haiti and Mexico is the same pressure that corporate power exerts all over the world, including within this country, where capital’s long war against labor rights and social welfare provisions seems to grow more intense every year. This is true appropriation—the stealing of people’s life chances, the repression of their opportunity for leisure and health and safety, the bulldozing of any possibility of equitable local development. The malefactors here aren’t women running a burrito cart or musicians soaking up influences or white models wearing dreadlocks or writers trying to dream their way into other people’s lives, but corporate actors making decisions that degrade us all.

Sometimes I wish we were equipped with an extra sense, a sense that would allow us to perceive how connected we are to one another. When I put on my shirt, I would feel the labor of the garment worker in Nicaragua who pieced it together; when I use my phone, I would be aware of the child laborer in the Democratic Republic of the Congo who mined the cobalt for its battery; when I peel an orange, I would feel the presence of the worker in Florida who picked it.

Lacking such a sense, we need to cultivate the sympathetic imagination. We need to try to imagine the lives of others.

So I’m not finally arguing that when artists try to imagine the lives of others, we should lighten up and see their efforts as basically harmless. I’m arguing that imagining the lives of others is an essential part of the effort to bring into being a more human world.

We can embrace a sort of cultural solipsism that holds that different groups have nothing in common, or we can understand that our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of people we’ll never know. We can deny what we owe to one another, or we can seek to retrieve the vision of a shared humanity. We can choose to believe that it’s virtuous to try to stay in our lanes, or we can choose to learn about the idea of solidarity. It’s an old idea, but for those of us concerned with freedom and equality, it’s still the best idea we have.

Brian Morton ’s novels include Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon .

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Cultural appropriation and oppression

• Published: 17 December 2018
• Volume 176 , pages 1003–1013, ( 2019 )

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• Erich Hatala Matthes 1  

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In this paper, I present an outline of the oppression account of cultural appropriation and argue that it offers the best explanation for the wrongfulness of the varied and complex cases of appropriation to which people often object. I then compare the oppression account with the intimacy account defended by C. Thi Nguyen and Matt Strohl. Though I believe that Nguyen and Strohl’s account offers important insight into an essential dimension of the cultural appropriation debate, I argue that justified objections to cultural appropriation must ultimately be grounded in considerations of oppression as opposed to group intimacy. I present three primary objections to the intimacy account. First, I suggest that in its effort to explain expressive appropriation claims (those that purportedly lack an independent ground), the intimacy account doubles down on the boundary problem. Second, I question whether group intimacy possess the kind of bare normativity that Nguyen and Strohl claim for it. Finally, I argue that these objections give us reason to accept the importance of group intimacy to the cultural appropriation debate, but question the source of its significance as identified by Nguyen and Strohl.

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I follow Young ( 2011 ) in adopting a pluralistic understanding of oppression.

For a more detailed overview of these and other issues related to cultural appropriation, please see Matthes ( 2018 ).

Though it is worth noting that the idea of cultural property itself need not (and, I’ve argued, ought not) be understood in a depoliticized, universalist sense either (Matthes 2017 ).

For a broader discussion of gendered behavioral control, see Manne ( 2017 ).

For an interesting example of appropriation used as a tool to combat oppression, see Walsh and Lopes ( 2012 ). Even in this case, though, it’s not clear that the appropriation challenges the dominant group’s autonomy per se.

Compare with the idea that we should repatriate material culture to former colonies independently of their claim to any particular item, but rather, as an act of recognition and redress for the undermining of their autonomy (Ypi 2013 ; Matthes 2017 ).

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Acknowledgements

This paper has benefited from helpful discussions with Shen-yi Liao, Nick Riggle, Thi Nguyen, Matt Strohl, and audience members at the 2018 APA Pacific Division meeting in San Diego. Special thanks to Dominic McIver Lopes and Margaret Moore. Some parts of this paper were further developed in blog posts at Aesthetics for Birds : thanks to Alex King for feedback and providing an excellent venue for work in aesthetics. Thanks always to Jackie Hatala Matthes.

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Matthes, E.H. Cultural appropriation and oppression. Philos Stud 176 , 1003–1013 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1224-2

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Published : 17 December 2018

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Article Contents

Theoretical development, self-authorization to consume cultural difference, data collection information, author notes.

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Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference

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Angela Gracia B Cruz, Yuri Seo, Daiane Scaraboto, Between Cultural Appreciation and Cultural Appropriation: Self-Authorizing the Consumption of Cultural Difference, Journal of Consumer Research , Volume 50, Issue 5, February 2024, Pages 962–984, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucad022

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Countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation are fueling a tension between the ethnic consumer subject, who views the consumption of cultural difference as a valorized identity project, and the responsibilized consumer subject, who is tasked with considering the societal impacts of such consumption. Drawing on an extended qualitative investigation of international K-pop consumers, this study illustrates that this tension spurs consumers to pursue self-authorization—the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world—through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference. Four consumer self-authorization strategies are identified: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Findings show notable conditions under which each self-authorization strategy is deployed, alongside consumers’ capacity to adjust and recombine different strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and idiographic conditions. Overall, this study advances understanding of how consumers navigate the resurgent politics of marketized cultural diversity in an era of woke capitalism.

“Based on my experience, sometimes I see something as cultural appreciation, sometimes I see something as cultural appropriation. It really depends on the exact situations that I have been in. […] As an Asian American, seeing K-pop fans in America, I see it as cultural appreciation; on the flip side, when I see Koreaboos who use Korean names just for the fun of it, I see it as cultural appropriation because my name has been made fun of before.” (Sam, Reddit thread, September 2020)

The consumption of cultural difference refers to the market-mediated creation of desirable contrasts to everyday life and mainstream notions of identity using another culture’s objects, symbols, styles, motifs, and subjects ( Peñaloza 2001 ; Schroeder 2015 ; Young and Brunk 2009 ). For the past decades, a prevailing ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism suited to the demands of transnational capitalism institutionalized a desire to appreciate cultural difference as a valorized consumer identity project ( Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) . This prevailing discourse of cultural appreciation constitutes the ethnic consumer subject, who is hailed to “embrace differences through consumption” ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 , 556). However, as Sam’s quote illustrates, a fairly recent change is emerging in popular understandings of this consumption domain. More and more, the consumer appreciation of cultural difference is being challenged by a countervailing set of ideas: the discourse of cultural appropriation that constitutes the responsibilized consumer subject.

Cultural appropriation refers to the use of elements of one culture by members of another culture, in ways that are perceived as unacknowledged or inappropriate ( Young and Brunk 2009 ; Ziff and Rao 1997 ). Although scholars have long problematized complex cultural inequities that surface when other, often marginalized, cultures are transformed into palatable sources of consumable difference ( hooks 2006 ; Peñaloza 2001 ; Root 1996 ; Skrbis and Woodward 2007 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ), these critiques have only recently filtered into more pervasive public discussions and emerged as a significant concern for consumers ( Finkelstein and Rios 2022 ; Mosley and Biernat 2021 ; web appendix A ). In a sociocultural zeitgeist politicized through the lens of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” ( Kanai and Gill 2020) , consumers are hailed as responsibilized consumer subjects ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 )—exhorted to take responsibility for how their actions intersect with issues of cultural diversity, equity, and inclusion ( Arsel, Crockett, and Scott 2022 ; Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021 ; Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ; Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021 ). Consequently, the “Western neoliberal idyll of market-based inclusion and diversity” ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 , 554) that calls the ethnic consumer subject to appreciate other cultures is being undercut by this countervailing discourse that calls the responsibilized consumer subject to engage with issues of cultural appropriation. Against this backdrop, an important question requires attention: how do consumers manage the tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation when they pursue the consumption of cultural difference?

To address this question, we conducted a 6-year qualitative study of international (non-Korean) fans of Korean pop (K-pop). Through our time in the field, we observed vibrant consumer discussions of a tension between the competing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation. The theoretical lens of reflexivity, which holds that individuals are tasked with the adaptive construction of their own identities in relation to a systemically uncertain social world ( Adams and Raisborough 2008 ; Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson, Henry, and Bardhi 2018) , provided a starting point for analyzing consumer discussions. This approach led us to identify consumer self-authorization, defined in our work as the reflexive reconfiguration of the self in relation to the social world through which consumers grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference when confronting an identity-relevant tension between the ethnic consumer subject and the responsibilized consumer subject. We describe four consumer self-authorization strategies: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each strategy represents a distinct configuration of understandings of the self in relation to the social world aimed at conferring permission for oneself to continue consuming another culture’s elements.

Our theoretical account of consumer self-authorization illustrates how individuals carve diverse pathways through a tension that sits at the heart of consuming cultural difference. Inscribed in a nexus of countervailing discourses embedded in divergent ideologies of multiculturalism and hailing oppositional versions of consumer subjectivity, we find that consumers pursue diverse routes to craft permission to consume cultural difference while configuring who they are in relation to multiple others. Ultimately, however, consumer self-authorization is not aimed at radically dismantling systemic inequalities that continue to disadvantage people of color and people from the Global South. Instead, it constitutes an attempt to manage the tension between cultural appreciation and appropriation at the level of the individual consumer subject, carrying a broad range of consequences for how cultural difference is animated as a valued market resource.

The consumption of cultural difference is located at a nexus of two countervailing discourses. A cultural appreciation discourse frames the “making one’s own” of another culture’s elements ( Young and Brunk 2009 ) as an unproblematic process of cultural diffusion and blending. By contrast, a cultural appropriation discourse frames the “taking” of elements from another culture in problematic terms ( Ziff and Rao 1997 )—as a harmful act of distortion, decontextualization, and domination. Each discourse comprises three interwoven elements that sustain one another: a set of ideological assumptions about the power relationships between cultures, a moral interpretation about acts of consuming difference, and a vision of the ideal consumer subject ( table 1 ). Taken together, these countervailing discourses constitute a tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation that has filtered into popular media and public debates ( Mosley and Biernat 2021 ), offering individuals varied interpretive resources to understand acts of consuming cultural difference.

CONSUMING CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: TWO COUNTERVAILING DISCOURSES

Cultural Appreciation Discourse and the Ethnic Consumer Subject

The discourse of cultural appreciation , rooted in the ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism, foregrounds moral interpretations of consuming cultural difference as a desirable and depoliticized consumer identity project. Prior research shows that this approach to consuming difference can manifest in multiple domains, including the consumption of foreign food ( Thompson and Tambyah 1999) , festivals ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ), wellness techniques ( Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017) , and popular music ( Peterson and Bennett 2004) . The pervasive appreciation of cultural difference in consumers’ everyday lives reflects an institutionalized consumer desire to construct authentic meanings and pursue distinctive identity projects ( Peñaloza 2001 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ). This desire for difference is further sustained by commodified transnational circulations of cultural objects, meanings, and practices, which result in ever-shifting recombinations of global, regional, local, and multicultural consumer cultural formations ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008 ; Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006 ; Sharifonnasabi, Bardhi, and Luedicke 2020 ). Fueling these circulations are market actors who routinely mine reference systems originating in specific groups to construct commercial myths aimed at communicating desired lifestyles and identities ( Arsel and Thompson 2011 ; Beverland et al. 2021 ; Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) . Furthermore, through the practices of the state, media, commercial actors, and consumers, cultural otherness is collectively reframed from a site of inequality and conflict to a valorized and normalized source of consumable difference ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ). In essence, the market performs a pivotal role in constituting, amplifying, and normalizing the consumption of difference across cultures ( Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ).

Outside of consumer research, proponents of the cultural appreciation discourse similarly advance a normalizing view of the consumption of cultural difference by foregrounding the relationality, hybridity, and intertextuality of relationships between cultures. This perspective casts the sociohistorical circulation of objects, ideas, motifs, and styles between cultural groups as an a priori condition of all societies, viewing cultures as relational and ever-evolving phenomena. From this perspective, cultural elements offer open affordances for ongoing processes of creative and transformative reconfiguration ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008 ; Figueiredo, Larsen, and Bean 2021 ). Schneider (2003) further argues that borrowing across cultures is not only endemic but beneficial: appropriative acts can promote the recognition of another culture’s practices. Seen in this light, the use of elements from other cultures is a transformative and creative practice, expanding the horizons of those who appropriate, while extending the social life of an appropriated practice, artifact, or text by investing it with renewed significance ( Schneider 2003 ). In essence, when situated within a lens of reciprocal exchange and cultural hybridity, the use of elements from other cultures is viewed as a depoliticized, even desirable, practice that promotes cultural adaptation, diffusion, learning, and blending.

The outcome of the cultural appreciation discourse is that it sustains the consumption of difference by constituting individuals as ethnic consumer subjects ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ). Whether indigene or immigrant, the ethnic consumer subject is hailed to welcome cultural difference via the logic of the market and express their willingness to engage with other cultures through commodified artifacts, texts, practices, and experiences ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 ). In distinguishing high cultural capital from low cultural capital ( Holt 1998) or the cosmopolitan from the local ( Figueiredo et al. 2021 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999) , the pursuit of difference enables the realization of a marketized version of individual subjectivity molded to the demands of intensifying multiculturalism and transnational capitalism. Against this backdrop, the ethnic consumer subject is exhorted to “negotiate his/her cultural background(s) and engage with different ethnicities predominantly through individual consumption choices made in a multicultural marketplace” ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018 , 554).

Cultural Appropriation Discourse and the Responsibilized Consumer Subject

The prevailing perspective advanced in the cultural appreciation discourse is being challenged by a countervailing discourse of consuming difference as cultural appropriation . The cultural appropriation discourse is scaffolded by the ideology of critical multiculturalism. Composed of heteroglossic intellectual traditions encompassing postcolonial theory, critical race theory, and critical perspectives on globalization and cosmopolitan consumption ( Arsel et al. 2022 ; Crockett 2017 ; Luedicke 2015 ; Varman and Belk 2009) , this long-standing scholarly project is broadly aimed at foregrounding, problematizing, and dismantling the systemic inequalities that disproportionately marginalize and harm people of color and cultures of the Global South. Seen through the lens of inequitable power relationships that structure the terms of cultural exchange between groups, consuming cultural difference is morally interpreted as a problematic and politically charged practice.

The literature on cultural appropriation identifies two distinct forms of cultural exchange under conditions of asymmetrical power relations: assimilation and exploitation ( Rogers 2006 ). Assimilation is when members of a less powerful group (e.g., immigrants) use the elements of a more powerful group (e.g., indigenes). Insights about this form of cultural exchange are well established in theories of consumer acculturation. Immigrants, for example, encounter and make use of dominant cultural elements that are not “theirs,” but that nonetheless exert a powerful force in their daily lives ( Askegaard, Arnould, and Kjeldgaard 2005 ; Luedicke 2015 ; Weinberger 2015 ). Such negotiations are delimited by asymmetrical power relationships between cultures and individuals’ positionalities with respect to these power structures ( Luedicke 2015 ). Luedicke (2015) analyzed how immigrants’ use of indigenes’ valorized brands and cultural resources is understood through the lens of historically unequal power configurations between immigrants and indigenes. Within this relational configuration, immigrants’ assimilation of dominant cultural elements is perceived as a threat by indigenes, paradoxically sustaining discriminatory views of immigrants. By contrast, exploitation denotes the opposite configuration: when a more powerful group or individual uses the cultural elements of a less powerful group ( Rogers 2006) . Media critiques of appropriative commodification of elements from marginalized cultures by more powerful institutions or individuals ( web appendix B ) are largely consonant with this latter view of appropriation-as-exploitation.

While acknowledging that not all uses of marginalized culture elements are exploitative, the cultural appropriation discourse foregrounds the harm that can be perpetuated through appropriative acts and outlines when these harms are more likely to occur. Specifically, appropriative acts are harmful when they involve inhabiting a cultural voice or performing a cultural practice in a way that erodes a marginalized culture’s distinctive identity, infringes cultural property rights without credit or compensation, misrepresents or profoundly offends another’s culture, or fetishizes another’s culture as a commodity or a costume ( Cherid 2021 ; Young and Brunk 2009 ; Ziff and Rao 1997 ). Seen in this light, the consumption of cultural difference is rendered in more sinister shades, as an act of misrecognition, infringement, and exploitation ( Cherid 2021 ; Lalonde 2021 ; Root 1996) .

The outcome of the cultural appropriation discourse is that, as it increasingly filters from academic literature into popular culture and public discussions ( Finkelstein and Rios 2022 ; Mosley and Biernat 2021) , individuals become constituted as responsibilized consumer subjects ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ) with respect to the issue of cultural appropriation. Prior literature shows that consumers are increasingly held accountable for the broader societal impact of their individual practices across a range of consumption domains ( Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021 ; Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ; Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021 ). Although consumers carry comparatively less power than institutional actors such as the state and multinational corporations to shape market practices, responsibilization positions the consumer on par with these institutional actors. This discursive positioning of the consumer as sovereign and morally agentic, as Giesler and Veresiu (2014) explain, is part of a larger process in which responsibility and risk are shifted away from the state and institutions and toward the individual. Consumer responsibilization toward the issue of cultural appropriation, which has filtered into public consciousness via mainstream and social media ( Kanai and Gill 2020 ), manifests a more “organic” responsibilization that differs from the institutionally driven process described in Giesler and Veresiu’s (2014) work. The orientation toward responsibilization now permeates consumer subjectivities across so many domains that many consumers readily frame social issues raised in the media through the lens of their own consumption. Consequently, in relation to the cultural appropriation discourse, individuals are oriented toward a “moralistic mandate” ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 , 842) that exhorts them to understand consuming difference in relation to its broader societal impacts and to take responsibility for the consequences of their consumption choices. This means that consumers feel compelled to care about cultural appropriation concerns, reflect on consuming difference in moralized terms, and link these moralized concerns to their own ethical responsibility.

Between the Ethnic and Responsibilized Consumer Subject: The Role of Reflexivity

Taken together, these countervailing discourses constitute a tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation that offers divergent interpretative resources to frame the consumption of difference. On the one hand, consumers are encouraged to appreciate the consumption of difference as a valorized act of cultural adaptation, and on the other hand, consumers are increasingly reminded that the consumption of difference risks distorting, decontextualizing, and dominating other cultures, leading them to feel the discomfort ( Eckhardt and Dobscha 2019) and challenges ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ) of responsibilization. Hence, we ask: how do consumers manage this tension?

The theoretical concept of reflexivity offers a useful starting point for this question. Reflexivity is broadly defined as the “awareness of the self within the social world” ( Akaka and Schau 2019 , 502) and encompasses “the act of an individual subject directing awareness towards itself, reflecting upon its own practices, preferences and even the process of reflection itself” ( Adams and Raisborough 2008 , 1168). Originating from the works of Giddens (1991) and Beck (1992) , reflexivity is theorized to play a central role in the processes of self-identity construction in late-modern societies. Specifically, Giddens (1991) argues that, as the result of dynamic social changes that characterize post-traditional settings of modernity, making sense of the self relies less on traditional institutional categories, such as gender and social class. Instead, the focus has shifted toward self-reliance and obligation on the self to make wise choices. This, in turn, promotes a reflexive awareness that carries potentialities to shape one’s own identity and even broader social structures. Adams (2006) terms this tenet “the extended reflexivity thesis,” emphasizing the reflexive capabilities of individuals in the context of systemic social change.

The extended reflexivity thesis has been explicitly translated in consumer research by Thompson et al. (2018) as the ideal type of existential reflexivity. Here, consumers are conceived to strategically deploy market resources to accomplish volitional identity projects from the position of agentic autonomy. In the absence of strong institutional structures that guide identity formation ( Giddens 1991 ), or when faced with disruptions to taken-for-granted social structures ( Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson et al. 2018 ), individuals must draw on available sociocultural resources to create subject positions that allow them to manage salient identity tensions. Similarly, in many contexts of consuming cultural difference, there is currently no institutional consensus on how to appreciate cultural difference without appropriating or on who can grant permission to consume on behalf of a cultural group. Hence, when confronted with an identity-relevant tension between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject, individuals must reflexively engage with available sociocultural discourses and moral interpretations to craft manageable subject positions vis-à-vis others whose differences are consumed.

Research Context: International K-pop Consumers

To understand how individuals navigate the consumption of cultural difference at the nexus of the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject, we conducted a 6-year qualitative study of international (non-Korean) consumers of K-pop. K-pop is an immersive media universe, comprising a plethora of youth musical, aesthetic, fashion, dance, and performance styles embodied by groups of K-pop celebrities—referred to as idols ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021) . K-pop content embodies a Korean flavor: song lyrics are mostly in Korean; almost all idols are Korean and have Korean names; narrative themes reflect popular tropes from Korean media culture; and dance choreographies privilege synchronized collective precision over individualized expression ( Shin and Kim 2013 ). Music videos are an important component, advancing thematic concepts for each idol group’s new release that comprise an aesthetic, narrative, and performance motif. International consumers can follow their favorite idols not only through their music and music video releases but also through their ubiquitous appearances on talent and variety shows, Korean dramas, and global concert tours. Each idol group’s fandom has a distinct name (e.g., BTS Army, ATINY, Moomoo), with fan practices initiated and coordinated through official fan clubs based in Seoul. Fans orchestrate market reactions to their favorite idols’ content, for example, by organizing fan chants at K-pop concerts, generating views online through streaming marathons and reaction videos, or creating English subtitles for other international fans ( Cruz, Seo, and Binay 2021 ).

This dense universe of celebrity-driven music, fashion, and media offerings embodies the latest iteration of Hallyu or the (South) Korean Wave—a rise in the global popularity of South Korean popular cultural products ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021 ). The Korean Wave began in the late 1990s with regionally focused exports of Korean dramas to China and then to other East Asian and Southeast Asian nations, followed by a more recent global diffusion of K-pop to Western markets ( Cruz et al. 2021 ). The extensive international diffusion of K-pop is fueled by Korean cultural producers’ deliberate strategies to create a distinctly Asian, yet globally palatable, alternative to Western cultural imagery ( Oh 2014) . Three main Korean entertainment companies shape K-pop’s global image and centrally control the artist training process that cultivates K-pop idol groups ( Shin and Kim 2013 ). Moreover, the Korean government actively promotes K-pop as a nationalistic platform for maintaining Korea’s position at the forefront of regional globalization from Asia ( Shin and Kim 2013 ). As a result of these forces, K-pop has developed a loyal international following among consumers across multiple countries.

International K-pop consumers’ engagements with cultural difference in K-pop offered an appropriate empirical setting for our analysis. While we did not set out to theorize self-authorization to consume cultural difference, through our time in the field, we observed vibrant consumer reflections that evidenced a consumer-level tension between the competing discourses of cultural appreciation versus cultural appropriation. Consonant with the cultural appreciation discourse, K-pop can be interpreted as a cosmopolitan assemblage of diverse musical, aesthetic, and performance styles inspired by multiple cultures—indeed, K-pop’s culturally hybrid and syncretic form is designed to enhance its appeal to a transnational youth market ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021 ). Seen through the celebratory lens of global cosmopolitanism ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) , K-pop’s growing global popularity represents the latest moment in ongoing global circulations of youth culture, offering its mostly young fans a desirable departure from the everyday while connecting them to the modern and global circuits of cultural difference.

Concurrently, consonant with the cultural appropriation discourse, international K-pop fans questioned their own, and others’ right to consume Korean culture—and elements of other cultures—in the form of K-pop. We found that international K-pop fans engaged in extended conversations about cultural appropriation as it pertains to what cultural differences they consume in K-pop (i.e., the representations of cultural difference that they consumed in K-pop) and how they consume cultural difference (i.e., individual approaches to consuming cultural difference). International K-pop fans reflected on what it meant to enjoy the diversity of cultural styles in K-pop’s music, choreography, and fashion concepts (e.g., hip hop, R&B, dreadlocks) that originate from historically marginalized cultures ( Garza 2021) . International fans also considered how they, as non-Korean fans, could express their passion for K-pop in light of a long history of racialized discourses that fetishize Asian bodies and cultures ( Oh 2014) . Among international fans, the derogatory figure of the Koreaboo parodies the fetishistic consumption of K-pop and Korean culture ( web appendices D and E ). These consumer-level discussions cement a connection between the responsibilizing discourse of cultural appropriation and the many ways in which cultural difference becomes a desirable commodity in K-pop.

Data Collection

We conducted an extensive qualitative study, collecting data from multiple sources, including in-depth interviews, online forums and websites, social media platforms, and news media. Table 2 summarizes the dataset, detailing how each type of data contributed to our understanding of the phenomenon.

SUMMARY OF DATA SOURCES

In-Depth Interviews

Interviews were conducted between 2017 and 2022 with 38 non-Korean consumers of K-pop living in a large Australian city. Opening with a grand tour question (how and when did you first develop an interest in K-pop?), the interview covered a range of topics such as what appealed to participants about K-pop, their experiences of K-pop concerts in Australia, their relationship with other consumers, the various social activities that accompanied their K-pop consumption, and how K-pop had affected other aspects of their lives. As the research evolved to focus on emergent issues of cultural dislocation, later interviews probed more extensively into what the emic terms “Koreaboo” and “cultural appropriation” meant to participants and how these notions shaped their K-pop consumption.

The researchers recruited participants through personal contacts and referrals, an ad posted on an Australian-based K-pop Facebook page, a university student subject pool, and snowball sampling. Participants comprised 28 women and 10 men, ranging in age from 19 to 25 years. The rather homogeneous demographic nature of the sample reflects the most actively engaged and visible supporters of K-pop idol groups, who tend to be young and predominantly female, as much K-pop content is targeted to appeal to this lucrative segment. Nonetheless, we employed theoretical sampling throughout and pursued opportunities to identify variations in K-pop consumption through a constant comparative method. Participants had been involved in K-pop between 1 and 13 years and engaged in K-pop consumption in various ways, from predominantly consuming K-pop among close friends to actively participating in dance cover groups and organizing online and offline community events ( web appendix C ).

Netnographic Observations and Media Sources

To contextualize participant interviews and triangulate their narratives within spontaneous conversations that are not directed by the researchers, we conducted several waves of netnographic immersion ( Kozinets 2019) among English-speaking K-pop consumers. At the outset, we were broadly interested in understanding the globalization of K-pop. Each successive wave of netnographic investigation refined this focus further. During our immersions, we examined archival material from well-established online sources that had large numbers of active members who frequently posted consumer-to-consumer comments pertaining to K-pop. The first wave in 2016–2017 sensitized us to the K-pop phenomenon and the vast online universe of K-pop consumption, including the language, practices and rituals, and salient tensions within the international K-pop fandom. Informed by issues of cultural dislocation emerging in the online and interview data, the second wave of netnographic immersion in 2018–2019 focused on tensions between Korean “K-fans” and “international” fans. As we read threads and posts, we focused on those most relevant to understanding key issues for international consumers of K-pop. In these discussions, the term “cultural appropriation” or its acronym “CA” was often employed by consumers. This led us to refine our research focus and adjust our online data collection approach to better capture the tensions in consuming cultural difference. Consequently, in the third wave of netnographic immersion from March to July 2021, while we continued occasionally observing a wide range of online sources, we narrowed our data collection focus to sources that afforded opportunities for consumers to engage in conversations that could evidence reflexivity in this domain.

To keep the online and social media data to manageable levels, we collected data from two main online sources, Reddit and Quora, both websites where people often ask questions, engage in discussion, and offer advice to one another. These sites offered us with online data that were richer than those we found on Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. On these selected sites, we searched relevant keywords including “international,” “koreaboo,” “cultural appropriation,” and “CA.” This search resulted in threads such as “What do you think of the culture [ sic ] appropriation in the K-pop world,” “I want an honest discussion about GLOBAL cultural appropriation,” and “Why is it bad to be a Koreaboo?” ( web appendix D ). We retained these threads and followed links shared on comments by consumers (e.g., to “Koreaboo cringe compilation” videos on YouTube).

In addition, we read news articles (e.g., web appendix B ) to help illuminate the popular discourse about cultural appropriation that spans multiple consumption contexts, including K-pop. We particularly focused on those news articles that were shared by consumers in discussion boards and other online sources.

Data Analysis

We engaged in an iterative part-to-whole process of constant comparison between data collection, analysis, and development of theoretical concepts ( Goulding and Saren 2010 ; Thompson 1997 ). We began by closely reading participant interviews and online conversations among international K-pop fans to gain an understanding of the relevant issues for these consumers. Initially, our theoretical focus was on the cultural dislocations experienced by international K-pop fans. Once our theoretical focus was refined and set on the tensions between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, we approached the interviews and the data from the last wave of netnographic immersion using thematic analysis ( Braun and Clarke 2022 ). We started with open coding to identify provisional themes, concepts, and categories. The entire dataset was manually coded by the authors. Each author initially coded a portion of the dataset for emergent codes. In further discussions among the authors, the identified codes and code illustrations were discussed and aggregated into initial themes (e.g., accusing market actors, mimicking authentic K-pop consumption, delegitimizing K-pop). These themes were refined as we iterated between existing literature and the dataset until we developed a framework that explains how consumers navigate the countervailing discourses in consuming cultural difference.

During the process of analysis, regular researcher meetings were employed to explore divergence in perspectives and enrich the theorization. Researcher reflexivity was enhanced by the researchers’ firsthand familiarity with diverse cultural perspectives and their various levels of engagement with K-pop (e.g., one of the authors is fluent in Korean and has consumed K-pop since 2006; the others do not speak Korean and were not familiar with K-pop until starting this research project). This process of immersion and iteration led us to our present theorization of consumer self-authorization.

Our analysis of international K-pop fans and their conversations about cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation led us to identify a set of four self-authorization strategies that consumers deploy to grant themselves permission to continue consuming cultural difference when confronting an identity-relevant tension between the ethnic consumer subject and the responsibilized consumer subject: reforming, recontextualizing, restraining, and rationalizing. When consumers engage in reforming, they problematize the harms of cultural appropriation as it applies to their consumption of cultural difference and cast themselves in the subject position of an activist custodian. When consumers engage in restraining, they limit their appreciation of cultural difference to less controversial forms and enact the subject position of a cautious appreciator. When consumers pursue self-authorization through the recontextualizing strategy, they situate their appreciation of cultural difference within its informing sociohistorical backdrop and cast themselves in the subject position of a respectful outsider. Finally, when consumers engage in rationalizing, they refute the relevance of cultural appropriation to their appreciation of cultural difference and cast themselves in the subject position of a connected cosmopolitan. As summarized in table 3 , each of these self-authorization strategies is bolstered by a distinct recombination of countervailing discourses that supports each subject position and includes a set of tactics that are either directed at what cultural difference is consumed (e.g., should international K-pop fans support K-pop group Blackpink after they used sacred elements of Hindu culture in a music video?) or how cultural difference is consumed (e.g., should international K-pop fans use Korean words and slang terms?). There are also notable conditions under which these strategies are likely to be deployed by consumers. In the following sections, we unpack each strategy, illustrating them with quotes from our dataset ( web appendix E includes additional quotes for each category).

CONSUMER SELF-AUTHORIZATION STRATEGIES

Reforming: Consumer as Activist Custodian

“From a personal experience, I decided for myself that I can still enjoy K-pop contents AND speak up about things that they do wrong (CA, sexism, colorism, unfair treatment of artists etc.) For me, the ugly sides do not cancel out the good things that K-pop brings. I believe speaking up and making our voices heard will make an impact, especially nowadays K-pop has evolved into a global genre and international markets can be crucial for an artist’s success. I was born and raised in Southeast Asia where racism, colorism and CA were painfully prevalent. Education for racial and cultural awareness was nonexistent. From my years of consuming South Korean and Chinese content, I think the situation is similar in those areas. With globalizing, the level of awareness has been increasing, albeit very slowly. […] I think enjoying and appreciating someone’s art and speaking up about things they get wrong are not mutually exclusive. My ult bias member [favorite singer in favorite group] has also got heat for controversial things but has shown so much growth from constructive criticism. I still love and appreciate his art every day. But if he didn’t learn and kept on making the same mistakes, I would have stopped supporting him as well. I hope you continue to find the joy in K-pop. It is quite fun.” (KoiT, Reddit thread, December 2020)

KoiT’s excerpt captures the first self-authorization strategy of reforming. Here, consumers problematize the harms of cultural appropriation as it applies to their consumption of cultural difference, while positioning themselves as activist custodians who are animated by a concern for the consumed “other.” In this excerpt, KoiT names and gives examples of how cultural appropriation often manifests in K-pop. Mobilizing the critical vocabulary and motifs that form the ideological subtext of the cultural appropriation discourse (e.g., “racism,” “colorism”), KoiT connects these manifestations to longstanding structural inequities that disproportionately harm other cultures. In doing so, KoiT’s reflection helps other international fans make sense of what cultural appropriation might mean in the context of K-pop consumption, while advancing a moral interpretation of appropriative acts as distorting, decontextualizing, and dominating historically marginalized cultures. The harms of cultural appropriation when consuming K-pop are similarly raised and problematized by interview participants and in numerous online fan conversations ( web appendices D and E ). Together, these debates surface two main self-authorization tactics, directed at what forms of cultural difference should not be consumed by K-pop consumers and how cultural difference should not be consumed by K-pop consumers.

Reforming What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“K-pop is supposed to be fun and a break from the world. It should inspire you and make you feel happy. You should not have to deal with all the cr*p you see in the rest of the world in your fan spaces. So personally I feel it’s my job to look out for and speak up for fans who are confronted with painful imagery/problematic behavior from their idols. […] As for [CA] being an American concept that South Koreans have the right to ignore, I call b*llsh*t. Many corporations around the world have consultants to find out if their branding or logos are offensive in other cultures. SK [South Korea] is not some random backwater that can’t be expected to know what’s going on in the markets they’re selling to. And in some cases there is no plausible excuse. It doesn’t take an ethnoanthropologist or PhD in critical race theory to know the curry song is making fun of another culture. And enough idols have had controversies over Black hairstyles that you would think they’d have heard that’s a no-go zone unless you like scandals. And if you still don’t know what the hair thing is about there are plenty of online resources. […] Why not worry about your fellow fans and hold your idols accountable? We can have nice things if we just speak up and out after all.” (LouLou, Reddit comment, July 2020)

Importantly, even though cultural appropriation critiques are ostensibly about the culture of production, these critiques are framed as an identity-relevant concern for international K-pop consumers and directed at consumers who unquestioningly consume pop culture aesthetics that distort and decontextualize others’ cultural elements. By connecting concerns about what cultural difference is consumed to a concern for the other, LouLou enacts the subject position of an activist custodian, motivated to protect others from harm while consuming cultural difference. Positioning themselves as an activist custodian of the K-pop consumer experience, LouLou promotes the goal of protecting other K-pop fans from “offensive” and “painful” content. LouLou ends their reflection with a responsibilizing call to other consumers to engage in similar forms of questioning. Hence, consumers are framed as complicit in the routinization of cultural appropriation, where “hold[ing] your idols accountable” becomes part of a K-pop fan’s moral responsibility in promoting a culturally safe space for all consumers.

“I am a Desi and a Muslim, and the number of times our South Asian traditions and religions have been ridiculed is really disappointing […] Having your culture or religion being made fun of is really upsetting and angering. Now here are a few examples: 1- When G-IDLE used a mosque as an ‘aesthetic’ while dancing; now a mosque is somewhere we Muslims go for praying and it is also known as a pure place and the house of God. Dancing in front of it for ‘aesthetic’ purposes is really disgusting. 2- When a Hindu God was disrespected in a Blackpink MV [music video]; Lord Ganesha is an important God for Hindus, and they placed them on the ground beside her which is very disrespectful and stupid, I personally want YG [producing company] to apologize for this disgusting behavior. Even though I am Muslim I have a deep respect for this religion, and really support whoever is calling out on this behavior. These are just two but I can rant on and on about how they think that our Desi culture (Desi means people from Pakistan and India and Bangladesh) is not an aesthetic for you!” (Ana, Quora post, November 2020)

Reforming can manifest as part of collective consumer action. As alluded to in Ana’s quote, a 2020 music video by female K-pop idol group Blackpink depicted a statue of the Hindu deity Ganesha on the floor. Deemed offensive to the Hindu religion and South Asian community, this use of a sacred Hindu symbol as a performance prop incited numerous calls by international K-pop fans—both South Asian and non–South Asian—to “unite against [production company] YG” and “support us in our fight to safeguard our religion and culture” under social media hashtags including #MyCultureIsNotYourAesthetic, #BlackPinkApologize, and #YGApologisetoHindus ( Jeong 2020 ). Fans further collectively petitioned the production company for a response. Four days after the video’s initial release, the offending image was quietly edited out.

Reforming How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“Anyone who fetishizes Korean culture, [it means] to take the Korean culture and reduce it to only those tiny little things that aren’t representative of it that you think are amazing, and you love and you want to embody. So not learning the language, but you want to throw in some words here and there, because it makes you look cool. Or trying to do your makeup to make yourself look Korean. That’s what I consider Koreaboo and I consider it to be a negative thing. […] If you were just like, ‘Korea’s, like, so perfect. Like, everything’s perfect. Koreans are perfect! I want to, like, marry a Korean guy, you know, they’re perfect! They’re much better than, like, white people.’ That sort of thing that’s going way overboard, because that’s just reducing a culture to only these positive things that you see in it. […] I definitely do get a bit irritated if someone’s just looking at a culture so one dimensionally. I think it’s very degrading, very infantilizing.” (Melissa, interview)

“They [Koreaboos] would get the idea that all Korean men are these like soft, sensitive guys. And there’s a lot of history of Asian men being seen as weaker than white men, or black men, or whatever. So they perpetuate that ideal without realizing that it can have harmful effects, when it’s based off of the idea of their ideal boyfriend. […] It’s like you’re basing your idea of this entire race of people off of what you think is desirable, rather than what they actually are.” (Claire, interview)

In sum, via reforming, the tension between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation is amplified as an identity-relevant issue that matters for international K-pop fans’ consumption of cultural difference. When reforming, consumers foreground the power asymmetries of consuming cultural difference, leading them to attempt to enroll others into this perspective and try to oppose cultural appropriation. It is not surprising, therefore, that this self-authorization strategy is deployed mostly by consumers who are sensitized to the harmful consequences of neocolonial market dynamics—a sensitivity that allows them to empathize with those whose differences are consumed. Such sensitivity often stems from these consumers’ prior socialization and education. For example, by drawing on her firsthand experience as an Indian member of the Desi ethnicity who has seen her sacred dance “mocked […] as ignorant hand movements,” Maya can more readily perceive how repeated appropriative representations diminish a consumed culture (“Imagine someone bowing the way Koreans do to each other and laughing at that—would that be funny? No, right?”). This sensitization toward harm is not only limited to persons of color. While Claire is not of Asian descent, her ability to empathize with those whose differences are appropriated reflects a growing awareness of neocolonialism among younger consumers in Western industrialized nations such as the USA and Australia. This growing awareness has been driven by a changing educational curriculum that attempts to engage with difficult histories of racism and colonization (Vee: “if you’re an American, and you grew up learning about that history, you’d be like, why is/how is this a thing where Koreans think it’s cool to imitate this.”). This growing awareness is also amplified by the popular and social media coverage of cultural appropriation episodes (Ruby: “back when I was in high school, I don’t think I ever read anything about cultural appropriation […] I didn’t know any examples, there were no proper cases.”) and the popularization of social movements aimed at resisting entrenched institutional racism (Nadia: “Black Lives Matter, for example […] this was a big thing.”). Under these enabling conditions, we find that consumers feel empowered to inhabit the activist custodian subject position and hold other market actors accountable on the issue of cultural appropriation.

It may seem perplexing that consumers who engage in reforming are, in effect, amplifying a troubling tension in their own consumption of cultural difference. But by pursuing this strategy, their implicit goal is to safeguard themselves and others against these harmful practices while consuming cultural difference. Consumers’ subject position when reforming thus resembles an archetypical “morality play myth in which a moral protagonist is called upon to defend the sacrosanct virtues and ideals from the transgressive actions of an immoral adversary” ( Luedicke, Thompson, and Giesler 2010 ); in essence, reforming imbues their consumption of cultural difference with heroically redemptive qualities.

Importantly, however, international K-pop fans who engage in reforming are not responding to “outside-in” attacks, as in the case of the Hummer brand community responding to attacks from oppositional groups ( Luedicke et al. 2010) , gay consumers living with stigmatizing representations ( Eichert and Luedicke 2022 ; Kates 2002) , or indie consumers responding to devaluing hipster stereotypes ( Arsel and Thompson 2011) . Rather, reminiscent of the consumers who mobilize change from within a consumption field ( Scaraboto and Fischer 2013) , the reinvigoration of tensions in the consumption of cultural difference is being amplified by active participants who are deeply invested in this consumption context. The reforming strategy reflects less a morality conflict between insiders and outsiders than an emergent “inside out” responsibilization of consumers ( Bajde and Rojas-Gaviria 2021 ; Giesler and Veresiu 2014) .

Reforming, however, falls short of the radical or sustained resistance aimed at redressing structural inequities between cultural groups. For example, we did not see international K-pop fans calling for long-term partnerships between the K-pop industry and marginalized artists or communities. Nonetheless, reforming incrementally repoliticizes others toward the interests, safety, and well-being of the consumed other. Reading through or participating in these types of discussions, consumers learn about what is considered cultural appropriation in K-pop, become sensitized to its harmful effects, and apprehend that cultural appropriation carries consequences for members of appropriated cultures and themselves as participants in the consumption of cultural difference. In dozens of responses to LouLou’s and Ana’s posts, for example, other consumers share their own impression of the episodes (e.g., “I don’t think BP [Blackpink] had anything to do with the Ganesha thing”) and engage in ambiguous, contested, and emotionally charged reflections. As such, reforming is generative of reflexivity in others, when it is visibly performed via consumers’ networked social interactions, as it is in the K-pop fandom. In short, reforming triggers further reflexive pathways to self-authorizing the consumption of cultural difference.

Restraining: Consumer as Cautious Appreciator

“I’m tired. Tired of racism, cultural appropriation, and plain disrespect as a black person. It’s almost like a cycle. I get into a group and love them with all my heart. Then I find out about all the bad things they’ve done and it leaves me heartbroken and devastated. I move on to another group and the cycle continues. Eventually, I learned to do ‘background checks’ on groups to see what they did and if it’s worth listening to their music/supporting the artist. Nowadays I feel like I don’t even have the energy to get into any more groups/soloists in K-pop and just focus on the ones I already listen to because I’m so tired of being let down. According to Very Well Mind, ‘the term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the feelings of discomfort that result when your beliefs run counter to your behaviors and/or new information that is presented to you.’ This accurately describes me (and most likely many of you) as a black K-pop fan. How can I be pro-black while supporting an anti-black industry? I feel guilty for even listening to K-pop, and honestly sometimes wish I never got into it in the first place.” (Livy, Reddit post)

Livy’s quote introduces the self-authorization strategy of restraining—when consumers circumvent the tension between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject by limiting their appreciation of cultural difference to less controversial expressions. Unlike reforming, which is directed at shifting the understandings and practices of other actors (e.g., K-pop industry and idols, “Koreaboo” consumers) and triggering adjustments at the level of the collective, restraining is about disciplining the self. Animated by the desire to shield the self from moralized judgments about cultural appropriation while consuming cultural difference, when restraining, consumers enact a self-disciplining approach to their consumption, thereby constituting themselves as cautious appreciators.

Restraining What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

When managing the tension as it pertains to what cultural difference is consumed, consumers attempt to carefully select which K-pop idols they follow and try to divert their allegiance away from K-pop idols contaminated by cultural appropriation controversy. For example, Livy morally interprets repeated cycles of cultural appropriation in the K-pop industry in relation to their lived experience “as a black person.” Internalizing the moral imperatives of the cultural appropriation discourse, Livy responsibilizes themselves to “move on” from K-pop idol groups that engage in cultural appropriation and even performs “background checks” before deciding to support a new K-pop artist. Yet, moving on is difficult: like many other fans, Livy invests significant time, money, and emotion to follow each K-pop idol group—an investment from which it is often taxing to detach. Livy is further taxed with the emotional burden of guilt, dissonance, and regret when they fail to completely restrain their consumption. Reflecting the disproportionate impact of responsibilization on the individual consumer ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014 ), Livy directs the moralistic mandates of the cultural appropriation discourse at themselves, ultimately bearing both the costs of disciplining their own consumption choices and the costs of failing to do so.

“I would stan a group or I’d go on Twitter and before someone stans a group they’d be like, ‘Is this group problematic?’ And then you click the thread and then it’d be like this group’s done blackface, this group’s done cornrows, this group said the N word. I think with woke culture now being such a prevalent thing in the media, before someone stans a group they’re like, ‘Okay, just to double check is this group okay to stan?’ Because a lot of people don’t want to seem like they’re promoting this behavior. […] If I’m on Twitter at the moment I’ll be looking through a friend’s account or someone else’s account and it’ll be like, ‘Don’t follow me if you’re a fan of this group, this group, this group or this group because I don’t want to be associated with even the fans of that group.’ So they think that just because you’re a fan of that group you support their behaviors. They just don’t want to be mutuals with someone who supports people that they don’t like. So let’s say if Super Junior for example did something really culturally not right, they assume that their fans then are supporting what they did after continuous, repeated behaviors, which is why they don’t want to be associated with those groups of fans. […] One of my favorite groups—or used to be one of my favorite groups—was Oh My Girl, they were not necessarily racist but they were doing a lot of cultural appropriation. They were wearing bindis and specifically making fun of Indian culture. When I first started stanning they did do some stuff in the past and I gave them the benefit of the doubt because I was like, they’re young, we all make mistakes and they haven’t made a mistake in two years, I’m assuming they’ve grown from that. They did it again and I’m like, ‘No, I can’t.’” (Nadia, interview)

Restraining How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“Obviously, you have a fine line between actually being a fan and it turning into… a fine line between being a fan and appropriating, being a bit too much. I guess there’s certain things that are just a bit strange after certain points. For example, I’m sure nobody’s going to have a problem with you dressing in, I don’t know, Korean style clothes or what not, but after you start looking a bit too… trying to emulate a Korean person’s facial features and trying to speak Korean out of nowhere… I think for international fans, as long as you’re not going overboard. […] There’s a fine line between trying to be somebody and appreciating somebody’s culture. You don’t have to do the whole eyes and the whole hair and the whole face, you can sort of dress the way they do which is not changing your whole personality to become somebody’s culture. It’s appreciating and wearing the clothes, the styles, but not really changing the whole face and everything to be Korean. […] It’s sort of like a music interest. It’s not like a personality interest. I like Korean K-pop, but it’s not something that I liked that much where it changed me. I think some people have—Korea just starts becoming their personality. If you’re a [Koreaboo], I guess, Korea and Korean’s things are mainly your personality. […] But for sure, you definitely get the risk of being considered a Koreaboo, definitely.” (Jerry, interview)

“If one was to accept they’re not Korean, but then they like the language, culture, that is not going to be a Koreaboo. But then if some were to suddenly try and speak their so little knowledge of Korean, and show it off to everyone, then that would be like a different story. After the term Koreaboo appeared, I think that the internet is trying to not be seen as Koreaboos nowadays. Because I remember back in the—few years ago, I would randomly see phrases of Korean, like the Romanization of Korean in their captions. But nowadays I don’t really see that at all. It’s either you’re not Korean, you don’t understand it. Or you’re not Korean, but you do understand it, so you’re trying to assist people with the translations. Not throwing random phrases in there.” (Anna, interview)

In sum, restraining is when consumers delimit their consumption of cultural difference to non-controversial forms. This individual-directed strategy enrolls consumers into the ongoing work of mapping and steering clear of submerged “danger zones” in the consumption of cultural difference. Restraining tends to be deployed when consumers perceive significant risk of social judgment, sanction, and conflict as a consequence of their consumption of cultural difference. This sense of heightened vulnerability can erupt as a function of the kinds of social spaces that consumers are navigating or the perceived visibility of their actions within those spaces. Spaces such as high school and online fanwars emerged as typical examples of unsafe spaces where consumers felt exposed to social judgment (Anna: “there’s this stereotype that non-Korean fans who like K-pop are Koreaboos […] when I was in high school, the people who didn’t like K-pop would go judging those who liked K-pop.”). Consumer vulnerability to social judgment is also heightened by participants’ perceived visibility within these spaces. For example, Nadia’s status as a K-pop content creator makes her actions visible among other K-pop content creators and international fans, and therefore, more prone to social scrutiny (“they think that just because you’re a fan of that group you support their behaviors”). Under such conditions where the stakes are simply deemed too high, restraining offers a viable strategy for protecting the self. By dampening and disciplining their own consumption, individuals achieve self-authorization by performing compliance with the cultural appropriation discourse.

In some ways, restraining resembles previously documented strategies that consumers adopt in response to social conflict. This strategy is captured, for example, with Star Trek fans ( Kozinets 2001 ) or members of the indie subculture ( Arsel and Thompson 2011 ) who create safe zones to manage conflict. Eichert and Luedicke (2022 , 10) relatedly found that some gay men enact an underground self-representation and “meticulously avoid objectifying their identity.” While these previously documented underground strategies emerged in response to stigmatizing discourses, it is intriguing that a similar strategy is being deployed by international K-pop fans to address a tension that is now arising between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject.

Recontextualizing: Consumer as Respectful Outsider

“Any culture can be appropriated, I think. I feel like it’s just about the respect. Like if you’re just interacting with this person’s culture disrespectfully, then that’s cultural appropriation, because that’s not yours, and you’re not being respectful about it. [But] I feel like people are so quick to jump to conclusions nowadays. Like, you have to look at the context.” (Melissa, interview)

The third self-authorization strategy, recontextualizing, is where consumers situate their appreciation of cultural difference within its informing sociohistorical context, while constituting the subject position of a respectful outsider. In contrast to the previous strategy of restraining, which often demands a deliberate dampening of investment, recontextualizing involves a deepening of investment. This is because this strategy relies on a deeper understanding of salient cultural dynamics, which helps consumers present a more nuanced perspective on what cultural difference is consumed and how they consume it.

Recontextualizing is contingent on consumers acquiring the relevant sociohistorical knowledge and skills needed to navigate complex cultural dynamics and relate to diverse cultural viewpoints. Involving a deft ability to bridge across the countervailing frames of the cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation discourses, recontextualizing is reminiscent of the traversing strategy employed by non-celebrators of Christmas who perform a “delicate dance” between conflicting desires to connect with others through a dominant cultural ritual and the desire to express an ideologically rooted identity ( Weinberger 2015 , 395). Consequently, recontextualizing commonly manifests among consumers who are prone to reflect on how one’s cultural background influences their views. In particular, we observed that reflections about one’s race, ethnicity, and cultural background are often made explicit in consumer discussions about cultural appropriation in K-pop: “I’m an Indian who lives in America. I have Indian parents who immigrated here from India”; “I’m a black person who comes from Africa. I am not American, but I’m from Europe (France to be precise). I also come from a Christian family”; “I am mixed, coming from both black and white backgrounds and I was raised in an environment with both black and white people.” Here, participants’ lived experiences of dislocation provide an important resource for recontextualizing what cultural difference is consumed. By connecting the countervailing discourses of cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation with their individual identity resources, consumers adopt a subject position of the respectful outsider, adept at making space for diverse cultural viewpoints and connecting “both sides.”

Recontextualizing What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“Keep in mind that CA [cultural appropriation] is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of a different culture or identity—the problems with CA therefore differ because of the context in which it happens not just the definition itself. […] Cultural appropriation functions differently in the West (US) than it does in K-pop but we react to them (us the Western fans) the same way. The reason why we often have such strong reactions to CA is that we assume that because we are in a violent environment (btw this is talking about the US) where things like CA is rooted in violent intent for our culture and wellbeing. […] It [CA] matters VERY MUCH in the political climate of the United States. The US is an ‘ethnic melting pot’ but the well-being of these ethnicities is tied to a government that harms these people because of racism. […] However, in K-pop while it’s morally wrong that’s really all it is. […] It’s not that it doesn’t MATTER because everyone is entitled to feel wronged when their culture is disrespected but it functions DIFFERENTLY. And if you wanted to know: my ethnicity is black and my nationality is Nigerian (Yoruba) and I live in the US.” (Elena, Reddit, June 2020) “I believe since K-pop is growing more global, not everyone is on the same wavelength with cultural appropriation. Definitely there are boundaries that these K-pop idols shouldn’t cross, since now there are more international fans than before. […] That said, cultural appropriation is something that is dependent on the individual. As someone who is half Black and half Asian, I can definitely see both sides.” (Megan, Quora, June 2020)

Recontextualizing How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“I think the first step is acknowledging that this is their culture. This is their way of life. If you try to take that on without any understanding of the ramifications of it. […] I think by listening to K-pop and trying to understand its culture is the way I try to go about it. I try to gain more understanding and knowledge in a way to prevent myself from appropriating. […] So learning about the Korean history, especially like the North and South Korea, the differences, what happened, the impact on what that had to South Korea. […] I try to put that into perspective, try to understand all of the cultural and social issues, and then attempt to not overstep the line. Because I don’t want to be viewed as someone who takes on someone else’s culture, because I still, I respect my own culture and where I come from, and I’m proud of that. Yeah it’s just that the media and the music and the messages that they have in Korean music, I also enjoy.” (Avani, interview)

Arsel and Thompson (2011) discussed how high cultural capital can become a resource for consumers to demythologize cultural meanings that devalue their extended identity investments in a consumption field. Consumers mobilize various resources, including distinctive displays ( Crockett 2017 ; Kates 2002) and moralistic interpretations ( Luedicke et al. 2010) , to resist threats to their consumption-related identities. Similarly, because of their extended identity investments in the field of K-pop, consumers like Elena, Megan, and Avani have developed a heightened knowledge of the broader politics of K-pop’s globalization and sociohistorical dynamics of Korean culture. This knowledge allows them to recontextualize what difference they consume and how they consume it. Overall, recontextualizing constitutes a new subject position based on respectful—that is, more sophisticated, knowledgeable, and self-aware—consumption of cultural difference.

Rationalizing: Consumer as Connected Cosmopolitan

“We live in a very global world, it’s a little ridiculous to act like any sort of influence from different cultures is appropriation.” (online forum post)

The forum post above animates the final self-authorization strategy of rationalizing—when consumers refute the relevance of cultural appropriation discourse to what cultural difference they consume and how they consume it, thereby exempting their consumption of cultural difference from responsibilization. In contrast to the previous strategy of recontextualizing, in which consumers position themselves as respectful outsiders, when rationalizing, consumers craft a shared “we” that connects them to the cultures whose differences they consume. By emphasizing the liquidity of the boundary between the consuming self and the consumed other, consumers defend the valorized subject position of the connected cosmopolitan.

Rationalizing What Cultural Difference Is Consumed

To refute the relevance of the cultural appropriation discourse as it applies to what cultural difference they consume, international K-pop fans rationalized their consumption by framing K-pop in de-exoticized terms. If the cultural appropriation discourse assumes a clear boundary between cultural outsiders and cultural insiders, and a clear sense of what belongs to a culture and what does not ( Rogers 2006) , when de-exoticizing K-pop, consumers challenge these assumptions by emphasizing the liquidity of the self–other boundary as it applies to K-pop. Squarely aligned with the tenets of the cultural appreciation discourse, this strategy emphasizes a view of cultures as intermingling, shared, and cosmopolitan. For example, Nasrine understands K-pop as a form of cultural difference that is deliberately packaged to be consumed across cultures (“Korea, with the way they’ve been exporting all of this, I feel like they want their culture to be blended with the Western world, or in general, with everyone.”). Here, Nasrine frames what cultural difference she consumes in K-pop as a symptom of valorized processes of cultural diffusion, blending, and adaptation—a routinized expression of global remix culture. From this vantage point, Nasrine is rendered a connected cosmopolitan, deftly participating in the global flows of youth culture ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) .

“You know how people complain when a non-black person wears braids in their hair, like dreadlocks, I feel it’s a bit nonsensical because I don’t feel like you're disrespecting a culture by participating in the cultural activity or cultural norms. […] I don't get why people say only members of that race should participate in their cultural norms. If everyone wants to live in a diverse community, they should mingle a bit. It lets you, at the very least, accept the other cultures as a member of the community, I feel. […] You wouldn’t say that listening to Taylor Swift is a cultural appropriation of American norms or listening to someone like Of Monsters and Men being appropriation of Icelandic norms. So I don’t feel like it is an issue because, to me, it’s more distinct. I don’t see the relationship between cultural appropriation and K-pop fans, to be honest. I don’t see a relationship. That’s just me.” (Jeff, interview)

In this excerpt, Jeff reframes the debate as one between promoting cultural exchange versus cultural insularity. Notice how Jeff draws an equivalence between the use of Western-originated music by non-Western consumers and the use of black cultural elements in K-pop. In viewing these ways of consuming cultural difference in the same light, Jeff’s reflection elides asymmetrical conditions of production and reception that underpin different flows of global cultural exchange. By drawing on the neoliberal multicultural tenets ( Veresiu and Giesler 2018) embedded in the cultural appreciation discourse, Jeff’s reflection articulates an affirmative cosmopolitan vision of global interconnection and intermingling wherein such cultural inequities are rendered irrelevant. From this depoliticizing ideological standpoint, Jeff self-authorizes the consumption of cultural difference by asserting the value of a cosmopolitan worldview.

Rationalizing How Cultural Difference Is Consumed

“The reason it [K-pop] stuck with me I think is because it connected me to my Asian identity that I never really got to experience, because I moved [to Australia] when I was one so I lost a lot of my—I pushed a lot of my Asian culture away because I was trying to fit into Australian culture. […] It was really cool because you get to see Asian culture, and it’s so cool now seeing K-pop groups perform at Coachella, which is so insane because you wouldn’t see that normally. And BTS winning the Grammys, it’s so cool being able to see Asian creators and Asian musicians being at the forefront of Western music as well, and it exposes people. I think I really resonated or really appreciated having K-pop in that time because it showed that being Asian isn’t something to be ashamed of, look at the cool stuff that we have.” (Nadia, interview)

In sum, via rationalizing, consumers demonstrate creative ways to contest the boundaries of cultural difference, belonging, and ownership. Adopted by those like Nasrine, a connected cosmopolitan participant of global youth culture ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) , or Ruby and Nadia who claim a shared regional Asian consciousness ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) , rationalizing enables consumers to address the tension between the ethnic and responsibilized consumer subject by constructing themselves as insiders of a shared transnational collective. By connecting culturally diverse consumers to an inclusive identity ( Beverland et al. 2021 ; Cayla and Eckhardt 2008) , this movement toward a shared “we” can carry transformative effects in consumers’ lives. Indeed, the rationalizing strategy, reliant upon the utopic cosmopolitan vision embedded in the cultural appreciation discourse, is consonant with K-pop’s global mainstreaming and discourses which position K-pop as a culturally syncretic blend of modern musical expressions from around the world ( Cicchelli and Octobre 2021) . As such, rationalizing represents the most ready-to-hand and taken-for-granted pathway for consumers who have primarily experienced cultural difference as an identity-enhancing resource from a privileged position of unfettered market access. By advancing celebratory interpretations of cultural exchange, rationalizing helps consumers defend this privileged position. While our analysis focuses on consumers who explicitly reflect on an identity-relevant tension between appreciation and appropriation, we acknowledge that there are many consumers who, like Jeff, are dismissive of the debate (“I don’t feel like it is an issue”) or do not engage with the debate at all and, as such, fall outside our sample. The urge to defend a privileged and longstanding source of distinction may similarly motivate such manifestations of the rationalizing strategy. Yet, echoing the neocolonial logic of cosmopolitan consumption ( Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) , the rationalizing strategy reinscribes a depoliticized and dehistoricized view of the complex relationship between cultural groups. Ultimately, rationalizing self-authorizes the consumption of cultural difference by deflecting discussions away from the ongoing harms of cultural appropriation to historically marginalized cultures.

Prior work has theorized the tensions endemic to the marketization of cultural difference ( Peñaloza 2001 ; Root 1996 ; Skrbis and Woodward 2007 ) and, more recently, outlined cautionary implications for the use of cultural elements by commercial actors ( Kennedy and Makkar 2020 ; Thomas et al. 2020 ; Zanette et al. 2021 ). By contrast, our work focuses on how individuals navigate this tension as it filters to the level of the consumer subject. We use the lens of reflexivity ( Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson et al. 2018 ) to uncover consumers’ capacity to authorize themselves to consume cultural difference in response to the countervailing discourses of cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. Consumer self-authorization manifests in four distinct strategies: reforming, restraining, recontextualizing, and rationalizing. Each self-authorization strategy relies upon an amalgam of countervailing moral interpretations about acts of consuming difference, informing ideologies about the power relationships between cultures, and emergent subject positions that situate the consuming self in relation to others whose differences are packaged for consumption. Taken together, these diverse self-authorization strategies constitute a distinct form of identity work that is emerging in the domain of consuming difference—aimed at brokering access to consume others’ cultural resources.

We further observed that the degree to which individuals are sensitized toward the discourses of cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation, in concert with their specific sociocultural contexts and idiographic circumstances, grounds which self-authorization strategies they deploy. We witnessed that individuals sensitized toward the harmful effects of neocolonial market dynamics (e.g., due to having their own cultural heritage previously subjected to the harms of cultural appropriation) were more inclined to be empathetic toward those whose differences were consumed and, therefore, to pursue self-authorization through reforming. Consumers who perceived themselves as vulnerable to social judgment (e.g., if they had a prominent public profile) often engaged in restraining to shield the self from moralized public judgments about cultural appropriation, whereas those who were prone to reflect on how one’s cultural background influences their views (e.g., due to experiencing cultural dislocation) commonly deployed recontextualizing. Finally, when consumers were invested in a cosmopolitan worldview and identified with a transnational “we” (e.g., by claiming a shared Asian identity), they tended to dismiss the issues of cultural appropriation and engage in rationalizing.

Aligned with the extended reflexivity thesis—which holds that individuals continually adjust their subject positions in response to shifting social structures ( Adams 2006 ; Akaka and Schau 2019 ; Thompson et al. 2018 ), we also witnessed that consumers have the capacity to adjust and recombine different self-authorization strategies as they navigate changing sociocultural and individual conditions. In this vein, some of our participants described how their deployment of self-authorization strategies changed over time (e.g., Avani shifted away from restraining when she felt judged by her high school peers toward recontextualizing as she became more knowledgeable about the sociohistorical backdrop behind K-pop). Other participants detailed how they deploy multiple strategies at the same time (e.g., Nadia’s acute awareness of neocolonialism as a person of color, whose cultural heritage has been appropriated, led her to engage in reforming, while her role as a visible online figure who is exposed to social judgment led her to simultaneously engage in restraining). In essence, when pursuing self-authorization, consumers may adhere to one strategy, change strategies, or combine multiple strategies together. Overall, our account of consumer self-authorization describes diverse pathways through which consumers craft permission to consume cultural difference by configuring who they are in relation to the other. Our work on consumer self-authorization departs from prior work in three important ways.

Beyond the Depoliticization of Marketized Cultural Difference

First, prior research described how ideologies such as neoliberal multiculturalism push forward a depoliticized approach to consuming cultural difference, especially at the level of the individual consumer ( Cayla and Eckhardt 2008 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) . As highlighted by Veresiu and Giesler (2018 , 565), the hegemonic ethnic consumer subject “systematically discourages other ethnic subjectivities from surfacing and materializing.” Our analysis shows that this depoliticizing effect is not as totalizing as prior literature suggests. As consumers become more responsibilized for societal issues ( Giesler and Veresiu 2014) , the responsibilized consumer subject is extended to the consumption of cultural difference, repoliticizing it through the cultural appropriation discourse. With two equally compelling and totalizing—yet competing—discourses and respective forms of consumer subjectivity available to them, we find that consumers reflexively pursue self-authorization to continue consuming cultural difference in a repoliticized scenario. Self-authorization is the outcome of consumers trying to address this tension, and in doing so, they manifest a struggle between the depoliticization and repoliticization of the marketization of cultural difference.

Via diverse self-authorization strategies, consumers reflexively engage a critical vocabulary that begins to resurface ethnic and racial inequalities in the marketization of cultural difference. As they engage in self-authorization, consumers articulate their own and others’ lived experiences of dislocation, reflecting on how these dislocations shape their perspectives on cultural appropriation versus cultural appreciation in K-pop. We found that international K-pop consumers referenced their own cultural backgrounds to empathize with appropriated minority groups (as in reforming), buttress changes in their own consumption (as in restraining), and situate their respectful consumption of cultural difference in multiple sociohistorical perspectives (as in recontextualizing). The outcome of these consumer self-authorization strategies is that the cultural other is reconfigured from a fetishized object of exchange toward a subject that demands consideration. Consumers reframe themselves from individuals positioned in global circuits of cultural exchange toward individuals with an identity at stake in relation to a shared moral concern. The consumption of cultural difference becomes a learning ground for engaging with cultural politics, where “scripts for thinking about race […] are being called into question” ( Jenkins 2018 , 19). Hence, consumer self-authorization carries the potential for consumers to be enrolled into a reflexive engagement with market-mediated cultural dislocation, informed by issues of race.

Despite these gestures in the direction of repoliticization, consumer self-authorization represents an ambivalent marriage of convenience between the individual-as-moral-subject and individual-as-consumer that places individuals squarely between depoliticization and repoliticization. Consumers’ attempts at repoliticization are not radical or targeted at structural issues. Even though consumers engage with the vocabulary of resistance, they largely leave unquestioned the asymmetrical architecture that unevenly distributes the benefits of marketizing cultural difference. In the international K-pop fandom, while consumers who engaged the reforming strategy often called for apologies for distorted representations of minority cultures, we saw no evidence of calls to redistribute the benefits of marketizing difference, for example, by fostering equitable partnerships with Black hip hop artists who inspire much of K-pop’s musical and aesthetic styles. Seen in this light, consumer self-authorization epitomizes what Schmitt, Brakus, and Biraglia (2022 , 84) describe as an ongoing “dynamic between reconcilement and activism” or what Kanai and Gill (2020 , 10) refer to as “woke capitalism,” in its ambivalent attempt to reinscribe the resurgent politics of cultural diversity within the dominant logic of the market. Ultimately, the goal of consumer self-authorization is to resolve the tension at the level of the individual consumer subject, rather than to radically dismantle the structural and systemic inequalities that continue to disadvantage people of color and people from the Global South.

From Totalizing Discourses to Reflexive Subject Positions

Second, our work shifts the analytical frame from totalizing, top-down discourses to emergent and diverse subject positions that are an outcome of consumer reflexivity. Prior work on the marketization of cultural difference has analytically focused on how dominant discourses that underpin the global flows of cultural difference are sociohistorically and ideologically constituted ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006 ; Thompson and Tambyah 1999 ; Veresiu and Giesler 2018) and, in turn, structure consumers’ experiences. Augmenting these macro-level processes, we show how consumers reflexively consider options and occupy diverse subject positions that enable them to navigate the crosswinds of two equally compelling yet competing discourses.

In shifting the analytical frame, our study contributes to recent research on the tensions surrounding the enactment of consumer responsibilization ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ) by accounting for the role of consumer reflexivity in processes of responsibilization. Prior work shows that consumers experience tension when they, but not others, are called to be responsible, or when there is a lack of market support for the practical enactment of responsibilization ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ; Eckhardt and Dobscha 2019 ; Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021) . By contrast, consumer self-authorization stems from a different source of tension tied to consumer identity projects: a clash between the intention of being responsible and a competing, but equally desirable, intention to appreciate cultural difference. Our account of consumer self-authorization shows the role of consumer reflexivity in navigating this tension. When the responsibilized subject generates identity tension for them, consumers will reflexively determine the amount of responsibility they are willing to take and attribute to others the remaining share. Prior research has identified backlash ( Gonzalez-Arcos et al. 2021 ), discomfort ( Eckhardt and Dobscha 2019) , and paralysis ( Cherrier and Türe 2022 ) as ways in which consumers react to the call for adopting a responsibilized subject position. In our work, we find that just as individual consumers vary in their adoption of different self-authorization strategies, they vary in the extent to which they feel responsibilized. While some consumers (those restraining and recontextualizing) take upon themselves the task of changing their ways of consuming to avoid engaging in cultural appropriation, other consumers (those reforming) demand that others in the market assume part of the responsibility and others yet (those rationalizing) deem responsibilization unnecessary.

Moreover, our work connects to the literature on moralistic identity work ( Luedicke et al. 2010) by dimensionalizing a broader array of strategies that extend beyond the antagonistic defense of an extant identity-enhancing discourse. In the reforming strategy, international K-pop fans voice the clarion calls of responsibilization and direct calls for reform at other actors in the market. Other fans, when restraining, internalized the responsibilizing discourse and directed it at disciplining their own consumption. Still other consumers attempted to recontextualize their consumption of cultural difference by connecting the divergent perspectives in the discourses of cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. These various positions on both sides of, and in between, these countervailing discourses augment antagonistic conceptualizations of moralistic identity work that perhaps stem from an a priori framing of these forms of identity work as a dialectical conflict between competing groups—for example, subcultural consumers of indie culture versus the mainstream appropriations that led them to be labeled as hipsters ( Arsel and Thompson 2011) , Hummer owners versus sustainability activists ( Luedicke et al. 2010) , and indigenes versus immigrants ( Luedicke 2015) . By contrast, the diverse strategies in our theoretical account of self-authorization articulate multiple and emergent subject positions that redeem consumers’ identity work through both antagonistic and conciliatory pathways.

Importantly, consumer self-authorization strategies do not only recharge the meanings of a consumption practice by linking it with heroic discourses ( Luedicke et al. 2010 ) or uncoupling it from culturally devaluing discourses ( Arsel and Thompson 2011 ); they also reconfigure the relationship between the consuming self and the others whose cultures are consumed. Rather than defending their consumption choices against direct confrontations by moral critics belonging to other groups, K-pop consumers are reflexively engaging with the two countervailing discourses and searching for a synthesis that will address the tension at the individual level, so that each of them can continue consuming K-pop.

New Complexities in Animating Cultural Difference as a Valued Market Resource

Third, our account of consumer self-authorization points toward a broad range of consequences for how cultural difference is animated as a valued market resource. Prior research shows that encounters with cultural difference carry value for consumers because they offer a source of novel, exciting, or authentic meanings, enabling consumers to enact a worldly outlook associated with social distinction and mobility ( Figueiredo et al. 2021 ; Holt 1998) . However, consumer self-authorization evidences significant adjustments in the repertoire of identity projects that can be pursued as consumers balance cultural appropriation concerns with the desire to consume cultural difference.

To illustrate one significant shift in more depth, practices of code-switching, a valued performance when considered through the perspectives of cosmopolitan ideology and cultural globalization, can be subdued when consumers engage in restraining. Code-switching, defined as the capacity to “know, command and enact […] multiple cultural vocabularies, discourses and repertoires,” is a valorized everyday performance of cosmopolitan openness ( Kendall, Woodward, and Skrbis 2009 , 111–112). When seen in the light of cosmopolitan ideology, code-switching constitutes the consumer as a skillful cultural bricoleur, adept at performing multiple registers of cultural difference that proliferate in the heteroglossic global economy ( Askegaard et al. 2005 ; Figueiredo et al. 2021 ; Oswald 1999) . Seen through the lens of the cultural appropriation discourse, however, the value of this mode of cultural consumption becomes compromised. In our context, for example, shifting out to Korean words in everyday English does not encode a mastery of cultural worlds; rather, it encodes a superficial misappropriation of another’s culture that leads some consumers to manage this identity tension by avoiding such performances altogether.

This suspicion toward code-switching raises unexpected and intriguing implications for cultural globalization. Within theories of cultural globalization, the well-established glocalization thesis holds that the globalization of cultural products offers the potential for creative recombinations of diverse cultural elements that can fuel hybridized transformations of market practices ( Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017) . This is because consumers, as agentic and creative bricoleurs of cultural meanings ( Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006) , routinely repurpose, domesticate, and recombine the available symbolic and material resources in globalizing and multicultural markets to suit their own localized cultural frameworks and identity goals ( Eckhardt and Mahi 2004 ; Sharifonnasabi et al. 2020) . The glocalization thesis might lead one to expect, for example, that encounters between K-pop and its English-speaking fans would legitimize the Koreanization of everyday English among international K-pop fans. Yet, we found that, when restraining, consumers lean in the opposite direction, toward taming performances of cultural hybridity.

Further implications of each self-authorization strategy for consumers, industry, and society are broadly outlined in table 4 . Taken together, self-authorization is reconfiguring the consumption of cultural difference, compelling consumers to craft novel pathways to continue their engagements with cultural difference in the face of responsibilization.

CONSUMER SELF-AUTHORIZATION STRATEGIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR CONSUMERS, INDUSTRY, AND SOCIETY

Boundary Conditions and Transferability of Insights

Other consumption contexts where cultural difference forms an important source of value—American yoga ( Askegaard and Eckhardt 2012 ; Coskuner-Balli and Ertimur 2017) , aestheticized reincarnations of Brazilian cuisine ( Zanette et al. 2021) , and the Westernization of the KonMari tidying method ( Sudnick 2022) —already exhibit their own unfolding versions of self-authorization. Yet, it is not our intention to present self-authorization to consume cultural difference as if it were a totalizing narrative that applies to all forms of consuming cultural difference; there are several boundary conditions. First, consumers who engage in self-authorization strategies must have some knowledge of what cultural appropriation is and why it is problematic, which spurs them to reflect on what forms of cultural difference they consume and how they consume it. In the context of the K-pop fandom, such knowledge is reflexively refracted by an active collective where consumers articulate and discuss issues of cultural appropriation, thereby spurring many international K-pop fans to pursue self-authorization. Second, self-authorization to consume cultural difference is more likely to occur when such consumption is relevant to an individual’s identity. For example, many international K-pop fans construct intimate parasocial relationships with their favorite idols. Accusations of cultural appropriation can threaten these identity investments, triggering the pursuit for self-authorization to consume cultural difference. By contrast, when individuals consume appropriative fast-moving consumer goods where such identity investment may be lacking, the self-authorization to consume cultural difference in response to discourses of cultural appropriation is unlikely to be as intense.

The marketized pursuit of novel and extraordinary experiences traverses not only ethnic and racialized boundaries but also the boundaries of social class, gender, sexuality, and subculture ( Arsel and Thompson 2011) . As consumer responsibilization toward diversity, equity, and inclusion advances ( Arsel et al. 2022) , consumer self-authorization could also emerge in these broader forms of consuming difference.

Over two decades ago, Peñaloza (2001) declared that “the consumption of another culture [is] a fundamental, contemporary market phenomenon […] arguably the single most prevalent consumption phenomenon in the world today.” In an era of heightened sensitivity to critiques of cultural appropriation, our work offers timely insights on how consumers are self-authorizing their consumption of cultural difference and, in doing so, fueling a soft repoliticization of marketized cultural difference that is shifting the implicit rules of this pervasive phenomenon. While our analysis focused on self-authorization at the level of the individual consumer subject, future research may explore the role of institutional actors in creating the resources that consumers reflexively draw upon for self-authorization and orienting consumers toward particular strategies at the expense of others. What kinds of issues are made visible, and what kinds of issues are silenced, in the quest to self-authorize the consumption of cultural difference? We hope that our work on consumer self-authorization helps provide an initial building block for advancing our collective understanding of this nascent phenomenon.

The first author supervised and conducted data collection via in-depth interviews (38 participants) and netnographic immersion in Melbourne, Australia, from February 2016 to May 2022. The second and third authors systematically conducted netnographic immersion focused on cultural appropriation from March to July 2021. Data were discussed on multiple occasions by all authors using transcripts, links to online data, coding notes and tables, and shared data folders. The data are currently stored in a project folder on the first author’s Monash University Google Drive, in line with ethics approval and Monash University’s storage requirements for sensitive and restricted research data. All authors jointly analyzed these data and authored the final conceptual framework.

Angela Gracia B. Cruz ( [email protected] ) is a senior lecturer in marketing at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Yuri Seo ( [email protected] ) is an associate professor of marketing at The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand.

Daiane Scaraboto ( [email protected] ) is a professor of marketing at The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.

The authors thank all the K-pop fans for their stories and perspectives, Monash Business School for generous financial and research assistance support for this project, the Monash Business Behavioural Lab for support with participant recruitment, and The University of Auckland and The University of Melbourne for research assistance support. They gratefully acknowledge Brenda Preman for her data collection work, and thank Eileen Fischer, Bernardo Figueiredo, Melissa Akaka, Ahir Gopaldas, Pierre-Yann Dolbec, David Crockett, and numerous esteemed colleagues at Schulich School of Business, Australian National University, ANZMAC Melbourne, and ACR Denver for helpful comments on earlier versions of this work. Finally, the authors thank the editors, associate editor, and review team for their insightful support and guidance. Supplementary materials are included in the web appendix accompanying the online version of this article.

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Advanced Essay #2: Cultural Appropriation

Introduction: I wanted to write about a topic that I am very passionate about. Everyone who is somewhat close to me knows how much on a daily basis I talk about cultural appropriation and my views and belief on it. I felt like this was the perfect opportunity to do so. In this essay, I explore the cons of cultural appropriation, as well as explain the parallels of cultural appropriation vs. appreciation. I also included a scene of memory that is a bit personal, but I'm proud in doing so because it is important that people come to know battles that you've struggled with because they may have struggled with those problems too and in return find closure in what you've wrote. As a writer, I plan to grow a bit more by exploring different topics like these and not being afraid to share my opinions on controversial topics such as this.

Suffocated by the soft, downy pillows and encapsulated by the fleecy fabric of my comforter, I lay on my bed engulfed into the images etched onto the screen of my phone. It is a long afternoon awaited; I just got back home from school and my entire body AND brain aches from the daily school-tasks of, writing, studying and thinking, purely exhausting. What better way to relax than to scroll endlessly, drifting off into a hazy cloud of social media? Away I go! “Hmmm, I think I’ll go on Instagram first.”  I think to myself. The hazy cold-blue light of the cellular device projects onto my face when suddenly my eyes widen with confusion. Images of people with distorted lips appear all on my news feed. Their bruised abnormal mouths match their painful expressions. Below these images I see in big, bold, blue text:

                                              #KYLIEJENNERLIPCHALLENGE

“Ugh! Kylie Jenner!” I say aloud. I’ve already expressed my disdain for this girl because of her “Kylie Jenner Lips” but c’mon! Now people all over social media are creating entire hashtags in honor of something she didn’t even have a whole year ago! I feel a surge of anger flow through my veins; the prickly heat of rage and disappointment seeps throughout my blood. Why does social media praise this girl as if she the almighty creator of big lips? Black girls are born into this world with big full lips but instead of admiration, we receive mockery.

But why? Because culture that people of color identify themselves with are only seen as significant and appropriate when associated with white people. This can be described as “cultural appropriation”. Society values the cultural objects, identities and items of an oppressed people when it is in the possession of a white person.

As a young black girl, I rarely ever saw any depiction of my features in the media. Even now, it is still hard to see any representation of black women. Because of that, I grew up very insecure and never saw the real beauty in me and people similar to me.

I stand in front of the spotless mirror in the corner of my bedroom. I examine every crevice and curve of my face. I trace the slope of my wide nose, wishing it was slimmer, touch thickness of my cupid’s bows, hoping it would become thinner and inspect the complexion of my skin, wondering why I couldn’t be lighter. It’s ugly, all of it. My eyes pour water out my tear ducts and in them, I bask in the rainfall of self-hate.

That was years ago, when I was uncomfortable with my looks, but now I’ve accepted who I was born as and love myself. But I am not the only black female who has experienced this self conflict. We, as blacks girls were, and still are, teased for our “gargantuan” features. From our broad noses, to our thick lips, to our curvy hips and voluptuous behinds. Cloaks of shame are thrown onto our bodies and our identities. But for our white female counterparts, (and sometimes on other women of color), when sporting our “anomalies” it is “exotic”and “acceptable” on them. They adopt what we identify with and make it into their own.

Cultural appropriation: the adopting of one’s culture as a trend, while simultaneously, ignoring the cultural significance of the object that is being appropriated, and being praised for it. Cultural appropriation is an extremely disrespectful act. Not only are you taking a culture’s object to identify yourself, but the people of that culture that you are appropriating, are completely disregarded. In other words, as described by Twitter user @slytherinpunk , cultural appropriation is like “...working on a project and getting an F and then someone copies u and gets an A & credit. That’s the big problem with cultural appropriation; the appropriator is praised for the adoption of one’s culture while the creators of that culture are criticized for representing their culture. However, there are some cases where the appropriator is unaware of the cultural significance of the item, in which the appropriation of the object/culture is in use of ignorance.

Some may argue that instead of “appropriation” of one’s culture, it is “appreciation” of that culture. The person who is committing the act may not be intentionally appropriating one’s culture to adopt as its own, but to show its common interest in that culture. However, it is still not suitable to do so. For example, a white man decides to grow dreadlocks, with preconceived information about the value of growing this popular black hair-style and the symbolism it represents. He wears them, without undergoing the several obstacles that a black man with locks will deal with. He is not called a thug, he is not looked at as if he sells drugs, he will not be told that he looks like he smells like “weed and patchouli”, but he may very well might fit all of those described. But it is the black man with dreadlocks who will suffer those stereotypes because of his race. The white man will not suffer because of his privilege. So out of respect, even if the perpetrator is showing his appreciation of a culture, it is best that he doesn’t. Because the one who the culture belongs to will be treated unfairly compared to the one who is appropriating it.

Cultural appropriation is a product of white privilege  and oppression. When people of color came to this country (excluding Native Americans) they were shunned for expressing their culture. Whites were able to express their culture freely.  People of color were forced to accept white culture as a means of being accepted. For example, many blacks were forced to tame their wild afros which held such liberal significance throughout the civil rights movement and instead get relaxers, just so they could get hired for a white man’s job/company. Many other people of color were teased for their vernacular and slang and told to speak “normal” or “proper”. So when a white person appropriates those things, it’s a slap in the face because not to long ago, they made sure that we felt ashamed by the way we walk, talk, dress, look and dance. When people of color explore other people of color’s culture, that is diversity. We as people of color, know how it feels for someone to make fun of our culture, so when we see other people of color exploring and rocking our culture, we see it as appreciation because at least we understand. When a white person does it, it’s somewhat mockery. For instance, Rachel Dolezal, the white woman who passed off as a black woman; complete disrespect to black women everywhere. To walk around pretending to be black is mockery because as a white woman, she’ll never know the ups and downs, trials and tribulations it is to be black AND female.  Because at the end of the day, Rachel can straighten her hair and lose the tan and go back to getting all the white privilege she can get her hands on. But it doesn’t work the other way around. people of color can never be accepted by whites, no matter how good their income is, what degree they have nor how well they speak, because we’ll always be seen as a minority.

It is important that people learn their boundaries with one’s culture.  Channeling a culture as your own is impertinent. Hopefully, there comes a time where people can learn to embrace their own identities, rather than taking someone else's.

Jabbar, Kareem Abdul. "Cornrows and Cultural Appropriation." Time . Time, 26 Aug. 2015. Web. 25 Nov. 2015. < http://time.com/4011171/cornrows-and-cultural-appropriation-the-truth-about-racial-identity-theft/ >.

Johnson, Maisha Z. "What’s Wrong with Cultural Appropriation? These 9 Answers Reveal Its Harm." Everyday Feminism . Everyday Feminism, 14 June 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. <http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/cultural-appropriation-wrong/>.

"Watch Amandla Stenberg's Primer on Cultural Appropriation." Dazed . N.p., 16 Apr. 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. < http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/24431/1/watch-amandla-stenbergs-primer-on-cultural-appropriation >.

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People of color explain the difference between cultural appropriation and appreciation

• There's a big difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation. 
• If you show love and appreciation for parts of a culture, such as clothing, hairstyles, or accessories, but remain prejudiced against its people, that's appropriation.
• On the other hand, if you learn, explore, and understand a different culture and then show that in a style that you've developed over time, that's appreciation. 
• Below, people of color tell Insider what you should remember when you want to appreciate another culture, and why it's damaging when you get it wrong.
• Visit Insider's homepage for more stories .

If the headlines are anything to go by, Adele caused quite a stir with her latest Instagram photo . Over the last weekend of August, she posted a tribute to Notting Hill Carnival — which was was held online this year due to the coronavirus pandemic — wearing bantu knots and a Jamaican flag bikini top.

"Adele accused of cultural appropriation over Instagram picture," wrote the Guardian , while the Daily Express went for: "Piers Morgan rages at cultural appropriation mob over Adele controversy."

Happy what would be Notting Hill Carnival my beloved London 🇬🇧🇯🇲 A post shared by Adele (@adele) on Aug 30, 2020 at 3:17pm PDT Aug 30, 2020 at 3:17pm PDT

However, the words underneath Adele's photo tell a different story. Rather than an angry "mob," Caribbean people flooded the comments telling her to ignore the backlash because what she was really doing was appreciating Jamaican culture, not appropriating it.

"Tell the haters to step off!" one commenter wrote. "You are a product of Multicultural Britain, so it's not cultural appropriation."

Another fan said that "we Jamaicans love you" and there was "no cultural appropriation here."

"Thanks for honoring us and highlighting the powerful influence Jamaican culture has in the UK and around the world!" they said. "We have your back on this one all the way!!! 'Out Of Many One People' is our nation's motto and we live it! If you come with love and respect, Jamaica has love for you!"

Branding expert Carole Pyke, who works with companies to help build acceptance and normalize representation of people of color, said she didn't see Adele's photo through the eyes of cultural appropriation.

"At a time when the August tradition of carnival on the streets of Notting Hill was canceled, I saw it as a woman celebrating the carnival vibe with its freedom and vibrancy," she told Insider. "A reminder to us all that even though life, as we know it, has changed we can still choose how we navigate our way through it."

The appropriation vs. appreciation debate has been going on for years, but it is particularly prevalent right now amid the growing Black Lives Matter movement. People who have been oppressed are speaking out against racism and prejudice louder than ever, so it's particularly obvious when a predominantly white company, group, or individual enjoys or profits off other cultures without standing up for the lives of people of color.

Cultural appropriation or appreciation?

Saurav Dutt, the author of " The Butterfly Room, " which explores racism and interracial relationships within Indian society, told Insider that enjoying something and being fascinated by it doesn't mean you are appropriating it.

"Cultural appropriation arises when people, anyone, takes aspects of another culture specifically to mock or disrespect them," he said. "What seems to draw the ire of cultural appropriation activists are the less respectful instances where someone will use an item from another culture to ridicule or patronize the other group."

For cofounder of The Rum Kitchen Stevie Thomas, who was previously a "Shipwrecked" contestant, the cultural appropriation conversation hits home. He talked to Metro in 2019 about growing up around mostly white middle-class people in Notting Hill, and how he struggled to connect to his identity of having a heritage that's half Welsh, a quarter Jamaican, one-eighth Irish, and one-eighth Portuguese. Opening up The Rum Kitchen in London was his way of finally connecting to his roots.

#shipwrecked A post shared by Stevie Thomas (@steviexthomas) on Apr 17, 2018 at 11:30pm PDT Apr 17, 2018 at 11:30pm PDT

Thomas told Insider the difference between taking advantage and appreciating a culture ultimately comes down to where your heart sits.

"Adele appreciates and loves the culture. You can feel her heart has always been in the right place," he said. "Black culture has been used, abused, and rehashed for a white marketplace way before Adele's hair, Elvis's hip-shaking, and Eminem's lyrical flow."

The problem starts when greed gets in the way of giving back to certain communities and cultures, such as when restaurant investors who originally intended to appreciate and celebrate end up caring more about money.

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"The difference is what happens next," Thomas said. "You can appreciate the music, the lifestyle, the love of the people — but appropriating is where you take the influences you see and completely copy them for your own gain."

Kim Kardashian's 'Bo Derek braids'

Natalie Rita, the managing director of PR company NRPR, works with many POC influencers on a daily basis. She told Insider appropriation happens if you show love and appreciation for parts of a culture, such as clothing, hairstyles, or accessories, but remain prejudiced against its people. For example, wearing African braids or a Hindu bindi while spending no time educating yourself about their origins or the culture surrounding them is "picking and choosing which part of a culture you want to participate in," she said.

"In a nutshell, people need to know whether they're respecting a culture or ripping them off," Rita said. "People need to ask themselves: 'Do I understand the significance of what I'm doing here?,' 'Am I honoring this culture or just imitating it?,' and most importantly, 'Will I offend anyone who belongs to this culture?'"

The Kardashians are often criticized for wearing their hair in Black styles without really acknowledging where they came from. Kim Kardashian, for example, called her cornrows "Bo Derek braids" — a reference to the actresses' hairstyle when she played Jenny Hanley the 1979 film "10."

Bayo Adelaja, a diversity and inclusion expert, is the leader of Do it Now Now , an organization "committed to bringing social empowerment to Black communities across the globe." She told Insider Kardashian's comments made it sound like Black people hadn't been wearing braids for decades before Derek's character came along.

"[It] reminded people that despite profiting off of Black culture for all of her career, she doesn't care about it at all," she said. "When Zendaya wore Locks on the red carpet, she was denigrated by a style guru on the E! channel, but when Kendall Jenner wears Locks on a runway, the style is chic and fashion-forward."

In the real world, this can translate to a Black woman wearing her hair naturally, only for it to be called "unprofessional," "ghetto," or "too ethnic," Adelaja said, then when a white person does it, it's lauded as cool and edgy.

Natalie J Monty and her sister run an Instagram haircare page for Black and multiracial women and girls called @got.coils . The sisters, who are from London, set up the page in 2019 as a way to celebrate natural hair and give advice about how to style it.

Monty told Insider she has seen a great deal of cultural appropriation of African hairstyles from European brands and individuals since then, claiming many styles and looks as their own. She's also seen European women think they are being innovative for wearing wigs to grow out their hair, or silk wraps to protect it at night.

"That's actually something that many Black and Asian women have been doing for, I'd say, definitely over 100 years," she said. "It's something that's been taught from past generations ... So it makes women of color feel uncomfortable at times."

So the UK lockdown is finally starting to lift from this weekend onwards. Honestly, since both our careers can be hectic, we’ve enjoyed the slower pace and reflection it has brought about. Has lockdown affected your hair routine and/or maintenance for the better or worse?! Real talk; let us know below! Sav’s hair has been flourishing and mine.. well.. it’s doing ‘aight I guess 😅 Natalie & Savannah 💋 A post shared by Coily Haircare|Skincare|Style (@got.coils) on Jun 30, 2020 at 10:43am PDT Jun 30, 2020 at 10:43am PDT

Context and upbringing matters

Adelaja said the context also matters in how things are worn. Rita Ora, for example, received backlash for "Black-fishing" with her looks when people found out she is white Albanian/Estonian with no Black heritage. However, she was brought up in an area of London which had a high population of Black people and rose to fame when artists such as Beyonce, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, and Rihanna were dominating pop music.

Ora had grown up with Black culture, so it made sense it would become part of her style. Cultural appropriation, on the other hand, is like wearing someone else's heritage as a costume, "as if you were trying to tap into some alter ego or reverse some otherworldly version of yourself," Adelaja said.

"They are doing it to stand out from the crowd in their own context of life," she said. "That is when a culture becomes a trend or a fad. That is hurtful to those who come across the actions of those individuals because it devalues their culture and turns it into something that is only valuable as an accessory."

It's also important to match your intentions to your actions. Influencer and musician Kahlen Barry recently spoke out about how his ex-friend Tana Mongeau treated him when they worked together, accusing her of gaslighting and racist microaggressions .

He told Insider Mongeau doesn't address accusations of racism in her past, but then profits off Black culture by making rap and hip hop music. He said this is a huge problem within the music and entertainment industries.

"You're disrespecting our people, but then you're making music that comes from our community," he said. "If you're treating people in our community badly, or you're being microaggressive and racist towards us, and then you're trying to use our culture for capital gain, that's appropriation."

It's always good to be mindful

It's a good idea to speak to someone you know from a cultural group before you display something originally from their background on your person. You don't have to erase other cultures from your wardrobe altogether, but maybe question how they got there in the first place.

Ruby Aryiku, the cofounder of the Black social marketing agency VAMP, told Insider there has been a huge shift this year towards understanding cultural appropriation, and everyone should be mindfulof listening to those who do find offence.

"An understanding of the historical context of certain aspects of black culture will swiftly help brands and others from making these mistakes," she said. "If you're genuinely interested in showing appreciation, then do the work to understand it. If you don't have the time to learn, it's likely that said 'appreciation' will probably not be appreciated."

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Home / Essay Samples / Sociology / Sociological Theories / Cultural Appropriation

Cultural Appropriation Essay Examples

Cultural appropriation of the black female body.

Appropriation has been a key contributor to the development of the modern world, to which the role of appropriating land and resources is inescapable from our present. The role of appropriation has transgressed centuries amongst underdeveloped countries, but specifically black female bodies. Thus in this...

Analysis of Cultural Appropriation

Appropriation is a tricky subject to navigate because opinions on it’s morality, artistry and ethics are so widely varied. Many artists use appropriation in their work to appreciate a specific culture or to enhance and influence their creation. However when working with outside sources you...

Cultural Appropriation of Indigenous Art

Cultural appropriation is constantly hitting headlines. Every day: another story, another controversy, another issue. Cultural appreciation is where elements of a culture are used while honouring, respect and valuing the source. In contrast of this, cultural appropriation is where the culture is taken from people...

Cultural Appropriation as a Factor for Misrepresentation and the Spread of Stereotypes

Cultural Appropriation, by some it’s seen as an adoption culture being stolen away from a dominant group. Mostly, people view cultural appropriation as simply the adoption of some particular cultural aspects of another culture. Cultural appropriation is starting to become more evident in everyday life...

Cultural Appropriation of Japanese Culture by Global Celebrities

Globalisation as defined by G. Ritzer, “Is the worldwide diffusion of practices, expansion of relations across continents, the organizations of social life on a global scale, and the growth of a shared global consciousness”. Today guided by the instantaneous nature of media, which allows media...

Cultural Exploitation: a Problem-solution on the Ethics of Worldwide Cultural Misappropriation

A representation of a community’s tangible and intangible traditions and customs mold its own culture. Although some cultures share a few similarities, it is unique among various communities. It plays a significant role in the identity of each community - representing not just the cultural...

Depiction of Imperialism and Cultural Appropriation in Asian Literature

Imperialism and cultural appropriation are among the common themes in Asian literature. As a region where colonialism shapes some of the most significant aspects of the recent history, writers drawn from different orientations seek to portray how aspects of Asian culture have been depicted from...

Intersection of Fashion & Appropriation: the Exploitation of Hijab for Economic Purpose

While cultural appropriation has been a recurring topic in the last decade, religious appropriation has fallen by the wayside, none more relevant as Milan’s fashion week wraps. Fendi, Boss and Max Mara all give a nod to Muslim women, as fashion’s elite prepares to migrate...

The Issues and Aspects of Cultural Appropriationin North America

North America features a colorful history of oppression, as acceptance of race was split among society. White culture often impressed ideas of superiority, and took what they pleased from other cultures without taking regard to the broader issue of cultural appropriation. In the past, individuals...

The Negative Aspects of Cultural Appropriation

Culture is the customs, background or the lifestyle of a person which reflects the personality and nation of a particular person. In today’s modern era there are many people who were adopting other culture and forgetting their own culture and adopting other culture style is...

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About Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation is the unacknowledged or inappropriate adoption of the customs, practices, ideas, etc. of one people or society by members of another and typically more dominant people or society.

The term "cultural appropriation" has been used to describe everything from makeup and hairstyles to tattoos, clothing and even food and wellness practices. The phrase originated in the 1980s in academic discussions of colonialism and the treatment of non-white cultures. From there, it worked its way into the modern lexicon, but decoding what does and does not constitute cultural appropriation can be tricky.

Defined as the use of a culture's symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, cultural appropriation can be placed into 4 categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation.

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