What is cultural appropriation?

Cultural appropriation is a form of erasure

Question: What is cultural appropriation?
Position‹4 of 5›: Racism through aesthetic
Argument1 of 3›: Cultural appropriation is a form of erasure

Cultural appropriation popularizes an action but fails to educate people on the action’s cultural significance, thus erasing it entirely. Without the cultural significance attached to the action, appropriation occurs and the majority remains ignorant of an action’s cultural significance.

The argument

The 'Harlem Shake' is a good example of cultural appropriation as a form of erasure. The viral sensation saw netizens across the world go from a motionless stance to suddenly extravagant and over the top dancing in seconds — a single format repeated in an enormous number of videos, none of which referred to anything beyond the joke. Prior to the viral trend, the term 'Harlem Shake' was originally a dance from the historically black Harlem district of New York City. That name is the one thing the trend carried forward, and it carried nothing else with it. In borrowing the name of the dance, those that started the viral craze believed they were paying homage and honouring an element of African American culture. In reality, they were erasing the cultural roots and with it, the people that started the dance — because taking the name while discarding the movement, the setting and the community that produced it leaves the label attached to something else entirely. The result is visible in what the phrase now calls to mind. Now, when people hear the term 'Harlem Shake', they don't think of the African American dance scene, or the original Harlem Shake dance that originated in the dance halls of Harlem; they think of a viral sensation that has nothing to do with African Americans or African American culture. The original has not merely been copied. It has been displaced in the one place where recognition is actually granted, which is public memory. In this way, cultural appropriation erases the people and the culture that produced the design or style, taking the recognisable surface of a thing and leaving its makers unrecognised. This is a particularly dangerous form of racism, and part of the danger lies in how it presents itself — as appreciation rather than as harm.

Context

Cultural appropriation is a form of valuing a culture above the humans that produced it.

Premises

[P1]When a cultural element's name or form is adopted by a wider audience in ways disconnected from its origins, the original creators and meaning are pushed out of public memory. [P2] The viral 'Harlem Shake' overwrote the original African American Harlem dance, so most people now associate the term with the meme rather than its black cultural roots. [C] Therefore, cultural appropriation functions as a form of erasure, making it a particularly dangerous expression of racism.

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that the Harlem Shake case shows cultural drift and the coining of a homonym, not racism. Names and forms migrate and change meaning constantly — this is how living culture works — and a viral meme accidentally sharing a name with an older dance is closer to linguistic coincidence than to a deliberate act of erasure, still less to 'a particularly dangerous form of racism.' Sibling positions note that treating aesthetic borrowing as racism risks flattening the distinction between genuine exploitation and ordinary cross-cultural exchange, and that cultures have always adopted and reworked one another's forms to mutual benefit. Labelling every misremembered origin 'erasure,' they argue, overextends a serious concept and can chill the exchange that enriches culture.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] A viral video sharing a name with an older Harlem dance is cultural drift or coincidence, not a deliberate act that erases a people, so the example does not establish erasure. [Rejecting P2] Even granting that origins get forgotten, equating aesthetic borrowing with 'a particularly dangerous form of racism' conflates ordinary cross-cultural exchange with exploitation and overextends the concept.