When I went back to Cameroon last year for the Christmas holidays I noticed a lot of women wearing sarees and churidars. My immediate reaction (in my head of course) was “hmm na so Indian dem di cam take over pays, anyhow ie fine. Na wa own diversity be this”. Then one day I came across a group of women, still in Cameroon, gossiping about some Indian guy and “that their mop dem way di so so smell like garlic”. This really pissed me off and got me seriously thinking about cultural appropriation. So some of us Cameroonians think it is fashionable to wear sarees while stereotyping Indians for having bad breath.
I noticed that there are many examples in the west of white stars adopting certain aspects of black culture as cool and fashionable while failing to speak out on critical issues of white on black racism. Or everyday Britons wanting to go eat some authentic Caribbean food while making sure that the restaurant in question is not in a “shady” neighbourhood. Obviously there's nothing wrong with a white person wanting to enjoy proper jerk chicken or having their hair done in cornrows. But what does it say about that person if they don't want to go to or be seen in a neighbourhood which has predominantly black people in it; or if they go ahead and call black women “nappy headed hoes”?
Let's go ahead and consider these two examples: One, a teenage girl born to a Native American chief is kidnapped and forced to marry an Englishman. She is then taken to England and used as an icon to encourage the oppression of Native Americans by the English. Two, another teenage girl born to German Jews. Went into hiding with her family due to Hitler's oppression of Jews and wrote a diary that eventually became one of the most widely read books of our time.
Now these two young women have had deeply traumatic lives. However Walt Disney has warped and romanticised the story of pocahontas into a money making fairytale with a happy ending. Can we imagine what would happen if the same was done with Anne Frank's story, maybe depicting her as some Jewish girl who eloped and lived happily ever after with a Nazi officer?
Question is, where do we draw the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation? When does it become offensive for someone to adopt aspects of a culture that isn't theirs?
