When is lexical innovation cultural appropriation?
In early April, Pepsi ran a controversial advertisement featuring Kendall Jenner, a woman in a hijab, and vaguely positive protest imagery. The ad was criticized in a number of mainstream venues for using a Kardashian alongside the social issues of the day to sell soda, but some black activists were especially upset with the ad, as they saw it as yet another example of cultural appropriation.
Over at Ravishly, Aja Barber succinctly summarizes her frustration with the ad:
“Had my Civil Rights organizing grandfather known to hand out Pepsi to the police he could have saved himself many years of exhausting work! Perhaps the most offensive part is how the advertisement clearly manipulates imagery of the award-winning photograph of mother and nurse, Ieshia Evans, to SELL A SOFT DRINK. Oh, the shade you deserve right now Pepsi.”
Barber’s main issue with the Pepsi ad is that it decontextualizes protests and images that have long had deep significance within the black community, and even worse, uses them for commercial ends.
The ad is just one clear example that gets at the heart of issues that the larger culture has been struggling with for a long time. Who gets to use images and words that originally entered the public consciousness via a marginalized community? Is it ok for white folks to say “shade”? How about “yaaassss”? At what point does the use of these lexical items cross into uncomfortable territory, or even cultural appropriation?
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: ‘his dreadlocks were widely criticized as another example of cultural appropriation’
Crucially, this definition indicates that cultural appropriation hinges on the use of word or practice being “unacknowledged” or “inappropriate”. Cultural appropriation is not just the mainstream use of words that came from marginalized communities; it’s using these words without respect for their provenance and the people who invented them and constructed their meaning.
As a result of the long and dark history of racism in the United States, cultural appropriation can be especially upsetting to folks from marginalized groups. From gospel music to words like “woke”, many black customs and words that were born out of the difficult living conditions of our communities have now been co-opted by the mainstream. Over time, these customs and words often become so commonplace that they become detached from their original communities and original meaning (see, for example, “cool”). Importantly, though, at an intermediate stage, where the provenance of the word is still clear, and where it still means something to the folks in the community that it came from, individuals would do well to proceed with acknowledgement and respect for the word’s social context.
Every year in January, the American Dialect Society (ADS), a professional organization for linguists who work on language varieties in the US, gets together to vote on the Word of the Year. Several hundred linguists assemble in a room, and passionately duke it out over which word was the most important of the previous year. As a member of the ADS, and usually one of the few people of color in that room, I’ve always been uncomfortable with the tension between choosing a word that is timely, but also one that is not directly reappropriated from African American Language, Chicano English, or another stigmatized ethnic variety. Last year, many of the Word of the Year voters supported “woke” without any acknowledgement of its roots in African American Language, which I found to be a troubling example of cultural appropriation. People in my community had been saying “woke” for years, and I didn’t want the word to become tokenized because it had recently been popularized among folks in the dominant culture. It felt like a betrayal of everything that “woke”, with its original meaning of social resistance and black awareness, stood for. In the end, the ADS chose “dumpster fire”, which as far as I know, doesn’t have that sting of cultural appropriation, and in my opinion, was more fitting for 2016 anyway.
But if even professional linguists struggle to avoid linguistic cultural appropriation, what are the rest of us to do? The key seems to be to acknowledge where words and customs came from, and to employ them with a consideration of that knowledge. It requires listening to folks from marginalized groups when they tell you that something makes them uncomfortable, and not becoming defensive when someone calls you out on cultural appropriation. When words from marginalized communities enter the mainstream, we should elevate the voices of their creators, instead of just taking their words.