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Cultural Appropriation Quotes

Browse 56 quotes about Cultural Appropriation.

Cultural Appropriation Quotes

“For me the question is not: Should we abandon fiction? (Readers will decide that—are in the process of already deciding. Many decided some time ago.) The question is: Do we know what fiction was? We think we know. In the process of turning from it, we’ve accused it of appropriation, colonization, delusion, vanity, naiveté, political and moral irresponsibility. We have found fiction wanting in myriad ways but rarely paused to wonder, or recall, what we once wanted from it—what theories of self-and-other it offered us, or why, for so long, those theories felt meaningful to so many. Embarrassed by the novel—and its mortifying habit of putting words into the mouths of others—many have moved swiftly on to what they perceive to be safer ground, namely, the supposedly unquestionable authenticity of personal experience.”

ImaginationFictionEmpathyAuthenticityNovelsCultural Appropriation
Author:Zadie Smith
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“The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane. This principle permits the category of fiction, but really only to the extent that we acknowledge and confess that personal experience is inviolate and nontransferable. It concedes that personal experience may be displayed, very carefully, to the unlike-us, to the stranger, even to the enemy—but insists it can never truly be shared by them. This rule also pertains in the opposite direction: the experience of the unlike-us can never be co-opted, ventriloquized, or otherwise “stolen” by us. (As the philosopher Anthony Appiah has noted, these ideas of cultural ownership share some DNA with the late-capitalist concept of brand integrity.) Only those who are like us are like us. Only those who are like us can understand us—or should even try. Which entire philosophical edifice depends on visibility and legibility, that is, on the sense that we can be certain of who is and isn’t “like us” simply by looking at them and/or listening to what they have to say. Fiction didn’t believe any of that. Fiction suspected that there is far more to people than what they choose to make manifest. Fiction wondered what likeness between selves might even mean, given the profound mystery of consciousness itself, which so many other disciplines—most notably philosophy—have probed for millennia without reaching any definitive conclusions. Fiction was suspicious of any theory of the self that appeared to be largely founded on what can be seen with the human eye, that is, those parts of our selves that are material, manifest, and clearly visible in a crowd. Fiction—at least the kind that was any good—was full of doubt, self-doubt above all. It had grave doubts about the nature of the self.”

ImaginationFictionEmpathyNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures." "That's an oversimplification of the issue." "The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”

ArtCreativeCreative ProcessAppropriationCultural Appropriation
Book:Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
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“Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker....As viewers we readily experience the power of ground on which we cannot stand — yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor-bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion — to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place...they may begin to fill their canvasses and monitors with charged particles “appropriated” from other places and times. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a difference between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced.”

ArtAuthenticityCreative ProcessCultural Appropriation
Book:Art and Fear
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“Re-examine all you have been told,' Whitman tells us, 'and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.' Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally 'like' us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. But I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy. It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of 'likeness.' It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism 'impactful' or mourning the loss of the modal verb 'shall.' As it is with language, so it goes with culture: what is not used or wanted dies. What is needed blooms and spreads.”

StoriesLiteratureFictionBooksEmpathyAuthenticityNovelsCultural AppropriationOwn VoicesFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“It’s natural that we should fear and be suspicious of representations of us by those who are not like us. Equally rational is the assumption that those who are like us will at least take care with their depictions, and will be motivated by love and intimate knowledge instead of prejudice and phobia. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writing by women, and by oppressed minorities of all kinds, has wondrously expanded the literary landscape, ennobling griefs that had, historically, either passed unnoticed or been brutally suppressed and caricatured. We’re eager to speak for ourselves. But in our justified desire to level or even obliterate the old power structures—to reclaim our agency when it comes to the representation of selves—we can, sometimes, forget the mystery that lies at the heart of all selfhood. Of what a self may contain that is both unseen and ultimately unknowable. Of what invisible griefs we might share, over and above our many manifest and significant differences. We also forget what writers are: people with voices in our heads and a great deal of inappropriate curiosity about the lives of others.”

FictionEmpathyCuriosityRepresentationNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“I, along with generations of women readers, have wondered: How could a man know so much of us? But the mystery is not so mysterious. Husbands know a great deal about wives, after all, and wives about husbands. Lovers know each other. Brothers know a lot about sisters and vice versa. Muslims and Christians and Jews know one another, or think they do. Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalization, as we internalize the other-we-are-not, dramatize them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalization is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all. One of the things fiction did is make this process explicit—visible. All storytelling is the invitation to enter a parallel space, a hypothetical arena, in which you have imagined access to whatever is not you. And if fiction had a belief about itself, it was that fiction had empathy in its DNA, that it was the product of compassion.”

FictionEmpathyRepresentationNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“Autopsy of The West (Naskaristana 2754-2757) Food just tastes better when you eat with hands, sitting on the floor, together with family - which goes against the artificial, life-wrecking lifestyle invented by the west - in western narrative, isolation is liberation, the elderly is inconvenient, apathy is aesthetic - invasion is ambition, exploitation is exploration, indifference is etiquette, appropriation is innovation - this is the autopsy of the west, not biopsy, because we do biopsy of the living, not the dead. We cannot establish proper, healthy human integration, without first decolonizing the world, which is why it is imperative, that the world outgrows the west, no matter the country - in short, whether you're born in a first world civilization of the global south or a third world country of the north, like England or America, you must outgrow the west, if you want to be civilized, if you want to be human. The American must stop being american, you must outgrow everything that the pilgrims held near and dear, because the pilgrims were among apekind's most grotesque offenders, second only to their own forefathers, the british empire and other euro imperials. You cannot end dehumanization while abiding by the narrative established by the dehumanizers, you cannot end a pandemic while playing by the rules of the virus - you cannot heal a war-inflicted planet while studying from the rulebook of colonialism, that planted the germs of most of those wars in the first place - colonial history is not heritage, it's a crimescene. Civilization is care over conquest, civilization is integration over isolation, civilization is belonging - to burn the bridges with dehumanizers is the first requirement of civilization.”

ImperialismGeopoliticsDecolonizationEthnic CleansingWestern CultureColonial HistoryCultural StudiesCultural AppropriationGlobal SouthCivlization
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“History of the world written by colonizers is no different from map of the world made by flat earthers - just like flat earthers flatten the globe to fit their delusion, colonizers flatten civilizations into savages, philosophies into myths, cosmologies into coincidences, lived holiness into paganism, erasure into expansion, trafficking into trade, native resistance into terrorism, and colonial terrorism into civilizing.”

ColonialismBritish EmpireDecolonizationEthnic CleansingColonial HistoryCultural AppropriationErasureColonizersPilgrims
Book:Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
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“Decolonization Anthem - Song of The Global South (Sonnet 2616-2619) Humanity is mightier than empires of apes, life is braver than borders of the dead. No one's undocumented on a planet built on loot, champions of freedom are champions of truth. We are children of the Global South, not a lost cause or subjects of pity, not tax breaks in a donor's ledger, nor footnotes in whitewashed history. Our lands are rich with brains, our soil is rich with minerals, our veins pulse with creation, hearts bright with civilization. They looted our gold, then sold us "aid" - they burnt our libraries, then sold us "education." Colonizers were the real cannibals of history, out to civilize humans with far advanced society - suffering of the South was not bad luck or destiny, just the grand design of Manifest Atrocity. Rise, O Peoples of Earth - Rise till the looters fall. Roar like Sonnets of Naskar - Fire the fascists, free the world! In every culture we carry the cosmos, in every tongue we carry our home. Our names are not doormats of empire, our dust is larger than Greece and Rome. Own your color, your accent, own your stories, your theologies, be proud of your sweat, your stubborn dignity - for the North wrote itself as civilized, but we, the Global South, authored humanity. They told us, history is white, holiness is western, progress is european - but the hands that built the world, with science, medicine, poetry, philosophy, astronomy and mathematics, were black, brown and indigenous. Stand and burn the colonial syllabus, disown the doctrines built on erasure - rise and write like blood on fire - write your anthem, write your future. Rise, O Children of Earth, no matter the color or culture, you have more heart than ape empires, more soul than parasites and vultures! Burn the cartels, fire the fascists - I lived my duty, now you be the Naskar. Let the cosmos stand witness, to the spark of human nature.”

PhilosophyColonialismDecolonizationEthnic CleansingAncient CivilizationsCultural AppropriationEurocentrismErasureGlobal SouthEurocentric
Book:With Love From A Blue Rock
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“I did it again, Robert Childan informed himself. Impossible to avoid the topic. Because it's everywhere, in a book I happen to pick up or a record collection, in these bone napkin rings -- loot piled up by the conquerors. Pillage from my people. Face facts. I'm trying to pretend that the Japanese and I are alike. But observe: even when I burst out as to my gratification that they won the war, that my nation is lost -- there's still no common ground. What words mean to me is a sharp contrast vis-à-vis them. Their brains are different. Souls likewise. Witness them drinking from English bone china cups, eating with U.S. silver, listening to Negro style of music. It's all on the surface. Advantage of wealth and power makes this available to them, but it's ersatz as the day is long. Even the I Ching, which they've forced down our throats; it's Chinese. Borrowed from way back when. Whom are they fooling? Themselves? Pilfer customs right and left, wear, eat, talk, walk, as for instance consuming with gusto baked potato served with sour cream and chives, old-fashioned American dish added to their haul. But nobody fooled, I can tell you; me least of all.”

Cultural AppropriationConquered
Book:The Man in the High Castle
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“And the majority of the world is hypnotized the majority of the time. This is why education is so important. If we are programming children anyway, we might as well keep our ideals high and instill charity, curiosity, generosity, creativity and joy. Just imagine!”

ConditioningCultural AppropriationHypnotized
Book:Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook
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“In a world where every society and every civilization has borrowed heavily from the cultures of other societies and other civilizations, everyone does not have to go back to square one and discover fire and the wheel for himself, when someone else has already discovered it. Europeans did not have to continue copying scrolls by hand after the Chinese invented paper and printing. Malaysia could become the world’s leading rubber-producing nation after planting seeds taken from Brazil. Yet the equal-respect “identity” promoters would have each group paint itself into its own little corner, with its own insular culture, thus presenting over all a static tableau of “diversity,” rather than the dynamic process of competition on which the progress of the human race has been based for thousands of years.”

CultureProgressTradeCooperationCultural Appropriation
Book:The Quest for Cosmic Justice
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“The people of Earth cannot progress in isolation from each other. The family unit, community spirit, and society as a whole are fragmenting at alarming rates as we sit inert behind our devices and social media. Fear of cultural appropriation inhibits the inspiration necessary for others to create new things. We must build on the towering achievements of all those who have gone before us. Then, by pooling our resources, regardless of race, colour, creed, gender, sexuality, or physical ability, we ensure that our legacy is a rich inheritance for all those yet to be born.”

CommunityHuman RaceIsolationInheritanceSociety HumanityFuture GenerationsCultural AppropriationLegacy Life LessonsPooling Resources
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“Now, let me preface this story with the following: If you think that I am in any way endorsing cultural appropriation by writing this, you should just stop reading. I swear to Goddess,* if I hear about any one of you reading this passage and deciding, “Okay, yeah, great, the moral of this story is that Jacob thinks it’s awesome for white people to dress up as Native Americans for Halloween, so I’m gonna go do that,” I will use the power of the internet to find out where you live and throw so many eggs at your house that it becomes a giant omelet. Or if you’re vegan, I will throw so much tofu at your house that it becomes a giant tofu scramble. The point of this passage is not that white people should dress their children as Native Americans for Halloween. That’s basically the opposite of the point here. Capisce? All that being said, it was 1997. I was six years old and hadn’t quite developed my political consciousness about cultural appropriation or the colonization of the Americas and subsequent genocide of Native American people at the hands of white settlers yet. I also didn’t know multiplication, so I had some stuff to work on. What I did know was that Pocahontas was, by far, the most badass Disney princess. Keep in mind that Disney’s transgender-butch-lesbian masterpiece Mulan wasn’t released until a year later, or else I would’ve obviously gone with that (equally problematic) costume.”

Cultural DiversityWhite PrivilegeCultural AppropriationNative American Genocide
Book:Sissy: A Coming-of-Gender Story
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“...Sabina [was] onto something about mehendi not being tantamount to temporary tattoo, and how it's been appropriated by Western capitalist culture. But the mehendi originated in Africa, and so India appropriated it from a people of color as well, according to Upma, and thus we shouldn't wear jeans or listen to Queen, then. But Freddie Mercury was Indian, Sabina pointed out, Parsi, and plus, half of these things are made in India anyways if you check the tags. Somehow eventually arriving at: Whatever it was, why did a white girl have to wear it before it was regarded as cool?”

Cultural Appropriation
Book:Born Confused
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“What would our debates about fiction look like, I sometimes wonder, if our preferred verbal container for the phenomenon of writing about others was not 'cultural appropriation' but rather 'interpersonal voyeurism' or 'profound-other-fascination' or even 'cross-epidermal reanimation'? Our discussions would still be vibrant, perhaps even still furious—but I’m certain they would not be the same. Aren’t we a little too passive in the face of inherited concepts? We allow them to think for us, and to stand as place markers when we can’t be bothered to think. What she said. But surely the task of a writer is to think for herself! And immediately, within that bumptious exclamation mark, an internal voice notes the telltale whiff of baby boomer triumphalism, of Generation X moral irresponsibility …. I do believe a writer’s task is to think for herself, although this task, to me, signifies not a fixed state but a continual process: thinking things afresh, each time, in each new situation. This requires not a little mental flexibility. No piety of the culture—whether it be 'I think therefore I am,' 'To be or not to be,' 'You do you,' or 'I contain multitudes'—should or ever can be entirely fixed in place or protected from the currents of history. There is always the potential for radical change.”

FictionNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“Reading seems to be easier to defend than writing. Writing is a far larger act of presumption. Sensing this, we seek to shore up the act of writing with false defenses, like the dubious idea that one could ever be absolutely “correct” when it comes to representing fictional human behavior. I understand the desire—I have it myself—but what I don’t get is how anyone can possibly hope to achieve it. What does it mean, after all, to say “A Bengali woman would never say that!” or “A gay man would never feel that!” or “A black woman would never do that!”? How can such things possibly be claimed absolutely, unless we already have some form of fixed caricature in our minds? (It is to be noted that the argument “A white man would never say that!” is rarely heard and is almost structurally unimaginable. Why? Because to be such a self is to be afforded all possible human potentialities, not only a circumscribed few.)”

FictionNovelsCultural AppropriationFascinated To Presume
Author:Zadie Smith
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“But on one occasion he was lost for words. 'If it's all as bad as you describe,' asked an inconspicuous young man at the end of one of the lectures, 'then why did you choose to become a Gypsy?' His image of Gypsies had marked them as a mere lifestyle, a fashion, a brand.”

CultureEducationRacismSocial JusticeGypsyCultural AppropriationStereotypingRomaniRomani Gypsies
Book:I Met Lucky People: The Story of the Romani Gypsies
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“Music is like spoken language, inextricable from its culture. If you don't learn a language early in life, its words will forever come out wrinkled and accented by another world, no matter how well you memorize or love the vocabulary, grammar, and cadences of a new language. This is why foreign "belly dancers" have always bothered me. The use of our music as a prop to wiggle and shimmy and jump around offends me. Eastern music is the soundtrack of me..”

CultureCultural Appropriation
Book:Against the Loveless World
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“As a practitioner of Witchcraft, my drive is to learn as much magic as I can from whatever sources resonate with me. In those instances in which a practice, symbol, or deity speaks to me and demands my devotion, I make a commitment to honor the cultures from which they originated by pledging to study their histories, to listen to the voices of those who identify as part of those cultures, and, where possible, to support the living people who belong to that cultural group.”

WitchcraftCultural Appropriation
Book:Betwixt & Between: Exploring the Faery Tradition of Witchcraft
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“In college I was an editorial cartoonist for my school paper, The Daily Aztec...I did straight, news-oriented editorial cartoons. Occasionally, my Chicano background snuck in to the toons simply because I might do a César Chavez toon about how the School Student Board was too stupidly racist to allow him to speak on campus or other anti-frat toons on how they were so racist in doing fund-raisers for Tijuana kid charities--dressed in sombreros and begging with tin cups (from an interview in the book Attitude, 2002)”

RacismLatinoCartoonistCultural AppropriationLatinxPolitical CartoonsCesar ChavezFraternitiesSan Diego State University
Author:Lalo Alcaraz
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“Do you know what surprised me most when I came to this country? The way witches are glorified. People here dress up as us for Halloween. They fill their TV shows and social media profiles with our aesthetics. It's like they've forgotten that, for most of human history, witches were something to mutilate, not emulate. Women who were seen as outcasts—too queer, too brown, too unwell...Any one of us on the margins was a target. To me, a pointy hat and a broomstick are not a cute costume; they are a reminder that, for centuries, people were brutalized under the mere assumption they might be what we actually are.”

WitchesHuman HistoryCultural Appropriation
Book:Serwa Boateng's Guide to Witchcraft and Mayhem
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“Virtually every fact used in business, political life and every day human relations is derived from other 'facts' or assumptions that have been shaped, deliberately or not, by the preexisting power structure. Every fact thus has a power history and what may be called a power future.”

Knowledge Is PowerCultural AppropriationDecolonisation
Book:Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
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“Gandhi today is up for grabs. He has become abstract. ahistorical, postmodern, no longer a man in and of his time but a free-floating concept, a part of the available stock of cultural symbols, an image that can be borrowed, used, distorted, reinvented, to fit many different purposes, and to the devil with historicity or truth. Richard Attenborough's Gandhi stuck me, when it was first released, as an example of this type of unhistorical Western saint-making. Here was Gandhi-as-guru, purveying the fashionable product, the Wisdom of the East, and Gandhi-as-Christ, dying and frequently going on hunger strike) so that others may live.”

Cultural AppropriationMyth Making
Book:Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002
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“South Earth Summon (Naskaristana 2800) I am the Son of South Earth, my spice-tolerance is superhuman, but lies-tolerance is nonexistent - my resilience knows no mortal limit, but I have zero tolerance for intolerance. I speak more languages than most northerners, I've devoured more scriptures than most northerners, I have assimilated more cultures and disciplines, which is why I say, there is no north, no south, when it comes to virtues and vices of human nature. So I'm not saying South is better than the North, but reparations are foundational to civilization; enlightenment was born in the South of Earth - math, medicine, poetry, philosophy, theology, almost everything was invented in the South, then the Northerners barged in, and pretended they invented astrophysics. I come from the other half of the world that has been systematically reduced to footnotes of northernized history normalized as world history, now I am a bigger giant than all your white giants combined, now I speak, and you listen.”

ColonialismImperialismWorld HistoryDecolonizationReparationsCultural AppropriationWhitewashGlobal SouthAncient CivilizationScientific History
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
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“Only Backward Minority of Earth (Naskaristana 2543) Eurocentrism is the biggest fraud in education, eurocentrism is the antithesis of education. The only minority that has historically caused irreparable damage to the world are the white people, yet you confuse every little mediocre literature from such backward population as default knowledge - and by act of conscience if a braveheart white defies the status quo, you declare them as woke infected. First sign of an educated mind - you don't start a conversation on philosophy mentioning greeks, you don't start a conversation on poetry mentioning the english. White people discovered nothing but other people's land, other people's science, other people's philosophy - Europe is the real footnote in the history of knowledge, till you understand what this means in your bones, your philosophy is just as fictional as your theology.”

PhilosophyEducationKnowledgeDecolonizationCultural AppropriationEurocentrismErasureHumanitiesAncient CivilizationIndigenous Knowledge
Book:Hazrat-e Humanity: The Uncultured Polyglot
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