(Sorry, I didn’t intend to write an essay here. It just sort of happened. This is a subject I have some amount of passion about.)

I can see where you’re coming from. I’m probably a little triggered by the word. I find the idea that any use of or participation in another culture is “appropriation” to be problematic.

Culture and language (which are largely inextricable from one another) are meant to be shared. That’s their entire purpose. If you participate in aspects of someone else’s culture in a respectful way, that isn’t appropriation. Appropriation, rather, is one part of the broad spectrum of behavior with regard to other cultures.

Humans do this innately. We adjust our manners of speech and behavior subconsciously to better reflect that of those around us. We are social creatures and by nature will act like those we interact with.

Societal views operate on pendulum swings, going from extreme to extreme around the nuanced truth. We went, as a society, from “acting however you want about other cultures is fine, even if it’s offensive,” an unhealthy extreme, to “participating in a culture not your own is not okay and is always offensive,” an equally unhealthy extreme. We like extremes because they are easy to categorize and require much less brainpower to contemplate. They are mental shortcuts our brains make.

But the world doesn’t operate on those extremes. The world is a nuanced place.

An example: a Nigerian-American opera singer was telling me about a time he was teaching a spiritual to a choir of white people. He corrected them when they said ‘they’ instead of ‘dey,’ saying, “The West African slaves who sang these didn’t use the ‘TH’ sound, it didn’t exist in the languages they had grown up with or the accents they had handed down. The proper way to approach this song is to sing it like they would. So you should say ‘dey’ instead of ‘they.’”

But this idea made many of the white singers uncomfortable, because we have shifted to seeing that type of cultural mimicry as offensive. I have seen white people even suggest that they shouldn’t sing spirituals at all, an idea that same Nigerian-American singer found silly. Singing is a way that humans connect with one another, and the best way to do it is to do it as genuinely as possible. It’s a shared experience. But where we are as a society these days, we find that uncomfortable.

And it’s understandable we do, because the extreme, blackface minstrel shows, is rightly seen as horribly offensive. But accurately performing a spiritual is so far removed from the horribly offensive and inaccurate mockery that were minstrel shows that the comparison isn’t a useful one.

We should strive to understand context, strive to be respectful, but also strive to share in the culture of others in constructive ways.

(Also, not that this matters at all on Lemmy, but for the record I wasn’t the one who downvoted you; I upvoted you. I like constructive conversation. 😅)

Edit: fixed a mistake