the feminist librarian reads

Cultural appropriation isn’t just the misuse of a group’s art and culture—anybody can do that; it’s just called shitty art. Cultural appropriation is the misuse of a group’s art and culture by someone with the power to redefine that art and, in the process, divorce it from the people who originally created it. To use the ever-tired example of hip-hop here, a shitty black rapper is just a shitty rapper who fades away into obscurity, leaving behind nothing more than a trail of never-played mixtapes dispersed outside of nightclubs. A shitty white rapper wins Grammys and is held up as an example of what good rap is.