Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation names the adoption of elements of one culture — dress, music, cuisine, symbols — by members of another, usually a dominant culture borrowing from a minority. Conservatives regard the concept with deep scepticism: borrowing is not theft but the ordinary mechanism by which civilisations grow.

The dispute is at bottom about whether culture is property. If a people can own a hairstyle or a melody, then borrowing requires permission and policing. If culture is an inheritance that lives by transmission, as conservatives hold, then the policing itself is the offence against culture.

Key Takeaways

• The term emerged from post-colonial academic criticism in the late twentieth century and entered mass discourse through social media in the 2010s.
• Conservatives argue that every civilisation worth the name is a record of borrowing, and that an ownership model of culture cannot be stated coherently.
• The serious wrongs gathered under the label — mockery, desecration of sacred objects, profiting from artists denied fair payment — are better named and judged directly.
• The strongest opposing case concerns power asymmetry: borrowing while the originating community was barred from profit or recognition.

History And Context

The intellectual lineage runs through post-colonial criticism. Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) argued that Western depictions of the East served domination rather than understanding, and later scholars extended the suspicion of cross-cultural representation to cross-cultural borrowing itself.¹ By the 1990s “cultural appropriation” was established in academic cultural studies; legal scholar Susan Scafidi’s Who Owns Culture? (2005) attempted to give the idea doctrinal shape.²

The concept’s history is inseparable from American popular music. Jazz, blues, and rock and roll all crossed racial lines in both directions, and the career of Elvis Presley became the canonical case: a white Mississippian singing rhythm and blues to audiences that segregated radio had kept from Black originators such as Arthur Crudup, whose “That’s All Right” Presley recorded in 1954.³ The grievance was real — Crudup spent years fighting for royalties — yet the music itself was a fusion that no race invented alone.

Social media turned an academic term into a disciplinary practice. The 2015 protests against the Museum of Fine Arts Boston’s “Kimono Wednesdays”, where visitors tried on a kimono beside Monet’s La Japonaise, marked the new phase: the museum curtailed the event even as Japanese commentators, including the Japanese consul in Boston, expressed bafflement at the objection. Similar controversies over Halloween costumes, pop-star imagery, and restaurant menus followed on an almost seasonal schedule through the decade.

The Conservative Position

Conservatives make three arguments. First, borrowing is how culture works. The English language, Gothic architecture, the pasta of Italy and the chilli of Sichuan are all artefacts of exchange; a rule against adopting the practices of others, applied consistently, would have strangled every tradition it claims to protect. Roger Scruton described Western culture itself as a long act of curatorship over borrowed Greek, Hebrew, and Roman inheritances.⁴

Second, the ownership model fails on its own terms. Cultures are not corporations with membership lists and licensing departments. Who speaks for “a culture” — the offended activist, the flattered artisan selling the garment, the consul who sees homage? Since no answer exists, enforcement defaults to whoever complains loudest, which rewards grievance rather than protecting heritage.

Third, the doctrine chills art. Fiction requires writing across difference; cuisine requires fusion; music dies in quarantine. A norm that makes cross-cultural creation presumptively suspect taxes exactly the curiosity that conservatives, following Burke’s account of sympathy and the moral imagination, regard as the foundation of a common world.

Conservatives concede the real wrongs. Mockery is contemptible, desecration of sacred objects is sacrilege, and cheating artists of royalties is theft. But each of these has a name already. Folding them into a property claim over culture adds nothing except a censor.

Differing Positions

The steelman of the appropriation critique rests on asymmetry. When dominant-culture performers profited from Black music while the originators were excluded from airplay, venues, and royalties, the borrowing compounded an injustice rather than honouring a tradition; Scafidi’s framework targets precisely this taking-without-attribution under conditions of unequal power.² Indigenous critics add that some objects, such as Plains war bonnets, are earned regalia with religious meaning, so casual use is closer to wearing an unearned military decoration than to trying a cuisine. On this view the demand is not censorship but respect: ask, credit, and share the gains. Conservatives accept the courtesy while rejecting the codification — manners enforced as law cease to be manners.

References

1. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978).
2. Susan Scafidi, Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law (Rutgers University Press, 2005).
3. Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (Little, Brown, 1994).
4. Roger Scruton, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged (Encounter Books, 2007).