Sharon's Muse.... Let's chat over coffee while I ponder some things
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Sharon's Muse.... Let's chat over coffee while I ponder some things |
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Name::Sharon Cullars
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Monday, August 14, 2006 Why I wish for the ducktail  Gotcha with that title, didn't I? Seems left-field but let me tie it in with what I'm about to expound on. I just read a Slate article which has me thinking. And I'm not sure anyone else thinks along this line, but I have had it up to here (pointing to above my head) with the appropriation (or should I say 'misappropriation') of black culture that has been going on for so long that it's hardly unexpected anymore.In the article, Benoit Denizet-Lewis elaborates about how the newly coined term "down low" has gone from the subculture of black men who are secretly gay to the mainstream where everybody and his momma is claiming to be on the down low. My beef isn't regarding the gay community, but simply the appropriation of the term. Now, let me stretch this out. It seems that being "black" is a fashion statement of sorts, where the mainstream community garner some sort of "coolness" by appropriating blackspeak, blackdress and anything else that happens to derive from mostly inner city communities. Today it's not out of the ordinary to hear a suburban mom say, "Oops, my bad" when before it would have been, "oops, I made a mistake." A few years ago, I discovered a subculture in Japan that had taken the appropriation of "black" to a fetish level, where Asians tanned themselves and applied creams to "blacken" their skin, and contorted their hair in fashions that mimicked dreads and fros. And all while their prime minister derided African Americans as a people. Here's the thing, and again this may be way out in left field - but the avid salivating over what's newly "cool" in the black community, without the love for the creators of that "cool," is a freaking slap in the face. The street slang of a young black man on the urban streets may be his hard won tools, his mark, in a place where he is living hard and dangerously. Not so the suburbanite who seeks to derive an easily-gained "cool" that doesn't cost him or her anything. And the same mom who giggles as she say's "my bad" and the same closeted white gay appropriating the "down low" phrase would hasten their steps if a strange black man were to approach them. There's such a hypocrisy going on here. Black music and culture has always been a source to plunder by mainstream society. Black slang has added many words to the Webster dictionary and let's face it, where would Tommy Hilfiger be without black styling? Nowadays, you can't hardly tell a teenage boy apart, whether suburban or urban, because they are all wearing pants hanging off their asses. And guess where they got that from? So I think back to the fifties (and no, I'm not of that era), the fifties that I've seen in movies and books. Yeah, Elvis took a lot from black music, but you know what, he did something with it and made it his own (to the fury of Ray Charles and others from whom he liberally "borrowed"). Even so, Elvis did his own styling as did many of the "cool" white guys back in the day. Yes, white folks listened to black music in that era. But they also had their own styles too, and the misappropriation of black culture wasn't en masse, across the board. I mean, they still had that ducktail thing going on. As a matter of fact, some of the black acts of the day tried to appropriate that style, so there was copping on both sides. But nowadays, any black phrase, any new black style is totally taken over and subsumed into the mainstream without any appreciation for the style blazers themselves. And it's making millions of dollars for the ones copping them. My take on this: You don't like the folks, don't steal the culture. And as Jimmy Hester, a white former music executive and supposed expert on the "down low" says in the article when asked by Denizet-Lewis about this new appropriation: "What haven't white people stolen from black culture?" So, yes I pine for the days of ducktails when the appropriators just copped a little, and left a little something for the ones they stole from.
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