It is our culture from dreads to cornrows to the language and even to the dances and it should not be misused. Reflecting on the meaning hip-hop holds for my family and how people can so easily take and misconstrue it made me curious to the extents of cultural appreciation and appropriation, and how they are displayed differently. When does a person stop appreciating the culture and begin to appropriate it and how is that defined? These questions and interest in cultural appropriation are more relevant than ever in today’s American society, as hip-hop culture is becoming a prevalent trend inside and outside the African American community.
Hip-hop is a culture that has been appreciated through cultural exchange but has also been appropriated for numerous years. James O. Young defines culture as the core values, religious beliefs, customs, activities, and language(s) of a specific group of people, which are required to be analyzed to differentiate the insiders of a …show more content…
By allowing a community’s history to be changed so easily, shows that the community is not important. If a community’s history has no value then by association the community has no value. Azealia Banks, a well-known black hip-hop artist, said it herself: “[Cultural appropriation teaches black kids that] you don’t have [anything]. You don’t own [anything], not even the [things] you created for yourself” (Rosen; Zushi 55). In other words, Banks is trying to say is that by allowing outsiders to claim a black and hip-hop culture, use it in a disrespectful way like to gain profit, and then allow them to be credited for creating something new tells the black community that they are nothing. Following in the idea of a chain reaction, if the black community is made to be inferior then all that the community has to say and all the issues they care about it portrayed as being equally
Hip-hop is a culture that has been appreciated through cultural exchange but has also been appropriated for numerous years. James O. Young defines culture as the core values, religious beliefs, customs, activities, and language(s) of a specific group of people, which are required to be analyzed to differentiate the insiders of a …show more content…
By allowing a community’s history to be changed so easily, shows that the community is not important. If a community’s history has no value then by association the community has no value. Azealia Banks, a well-known black hip-hop artist, said it herself: “[Cultural appropriation teaches black kids that] you don’t have [anything]. You don’t own [anything], not even the [things] you created for yourself” (Rosen; Zushi 55). In other words, Banks is trying to say is that by allowing outsiders to claim a black and hip-hop culture, use it in a disrespectful way like to gain profit, and then allow them to be credited for creating something new tells the black community that they are nothing. Following in the idea of a chain reaction, if the black community is made to be inferior then all that the community has to say and all the issues they care about it portrayed as being equally