Suzanne Harrington: Is cultural appropriation love or stealing?
Adele performing at Glastonbury Festival in 2016.
What’s the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation? Adele, apparently.
The same Adele, trounced online for wearing a Jamaican flag bikini top, and Bantu knots (a hairstyle also worn by Rhianna, Halle Berry, Uzo Aduba’s Crazy Eyes character in , Mel B in her Scary Spice days – and Bjork, but nobody seemed to mind because she was wearing them years before online outrage became so tiresomely fashionable).
Adele, from ethnically diverse Tottenham, had dressed for the cancelled Notting Hill Carnival, that enormous annual celebration of Afro Caribbean culture. The Bantu knots caused a Twitter kerfuffle — almost as though she were a member of the Royal Family in a fancy dress Nazi uniform, rather than a pop star in her back garden.
Americans seemed especially irked by Adele’s hairdo, even as Tottenham’s MP David Lammy advised her to 'forget the haters', 'Queenie' author Candice Carty-Williams tweeted 'Adele is an honorary Jamaican, she always has been', and model Naomi Campbell sent love emojis. Everyone from Stormzy to your nan loves Adele, because she’s real, but howls of cultural appropriation still managed to echo across the pond. Really?
Isn’t cultural appropriation when Marc Jacob’s used Bantu knots on his models in his 2015 show but called them ‘mini buns’, rather than a Tottenham native wearing them in appreciation of a culture in which she grew up?
Respect and admiration is different from using and not crediting. This seems fairly basic, but then I’m white, which unfortunately aligns me with — um — Piers Morgan.
It’s a tonsorial minefield. Are dreadlocks on white people cultural appropriation, or just a terrible white hippie mistake that should be banned on aesthetic grounds? Yet black women straightening their hair to make it look more European is not cultural appropriation as much as continuing evidence of a power imbalance and dominant white beauty standards.
And tattoos — oh God, tattoos. Is Ariana Grande getting a tattoo in Japanese which was meant to say '7 Rings', the title of one of her tracks, but read 'BBQ Grill' instead, cultural appropriation? Or just funny? I have a Hindu goddess tattooed on my arm — should I chop it off? I’d rather not. What about bindis on Caucasian foreheads?
The list is unending. Is it cultural appropriation every March 17 when non-Irish people don giant green velour leprechaun hats and fall off bar stools clutching pints of Guinness? Or is it just the commodification of a knackered old stereotype, outsourced to anyone who enjoys binge drinking?
Cultural appropriation is Elvis Presley presenting black music as his own. It’s rich Western museums full of treasure looted from distant countries. It may even be the filleting of yoga down to a series of bum sculpting postures, rather than ancient spiritual practice.
Or the mindless reductionism of Buddhist teachings to ‘mindfulness’, commodified for the Western corporatocracy.
What cultural appropriation is not is Adele and her Bantu knots — any more than Amy Winehouse appropriated black music by being in love with it. Seriously. Can we not differentiate between loving and stealing?
