If it's not yours, don't use it

I think, like everyone, that Miley Cyrus has become my new favorite form of entertainment.

She’s like the bag of potato chips you eat at 3 a.m. when you know you shouldn’t.
However, some of her behavior has begun to throw me off.

The usual attention-grabbing stuff like grinding on a foam hand and Robin Thicke or lighting a blunt onstage doesn’t have me up in arms.

Those are the kind of stupid stunts I expect from any starlet trying to get attention because they work.

For her, they’ve worked especially well.

It’s her appropriation of African-American culture that has made me less of a Miley fan.

Now, she may not totally understand what she’s doing.

But for me, it’s starting to get old fast.

Cultural appropriation is a difficult concept to grasp because the line between appropriation and exchange is thin.

Appropriation means taking aspects of someone else’s culture out of context and using them to satisfy a personal need or as a tool for personal expression.

One example is white people wearing Native American headdresses.

The headdress has significant and important symbolism that many a Coachella attendee does not understand, nor cares to.

This person takes the headdress and wears it because it “looks cool.”

He or she demeans its significance and decontextualizes it.

People do not appreciate the history of the object or why it was originally used.

And there is nothing the appropriator gives in exchange. They simply take it, use it and throw it away.

It’s selfish and highly offensive to the original culture.

Last year was a big year for cultural appropriation, specifically African-American cultural appropriation.

No one was a bigger perpetrator than Cyrus.

She (badly) twerked her way into the public sphere — a dance move we’ve seen 1,001 times from Rihanna and Nicki Minaj.

She told the writers of “We Can’t Stop” that she wanted something that “feels black.”

She used the iconic image of a “big booty” black female stripper — again, pretty sure Beyonce’s covered this already — in her music videos and onstage performances.
Cyrus didn’t attempt to understand and appreciate African-American culture.

She took the parts she thought were the coolest — or, according to her, the “dopest” — and used them for shock value.

It completely demeaned African-American women, whose feminist struggles already suffer heavily from racism and prejudice.

And she looked like an idiot.

So for now, I think I’m hopping off the Miley train.

At least until she figures out what her image really is.

­— ewenning@indiana.edu
­Follow columnist Emma Wenninger on Twitter at
@EmmaWenninger.