I came across this video on SNL last week and I feel it
somewhat ties into our discussions throughout the semester about cultural
appropriation. It is definitely a funny
video, but is that humor justified? The
video carries a variety of implications and raises several questions. What does it mean for a white person to study
African Americans in academia? What does
it mean to be black in the 21st century? Is
there another civil rights movement looming for African-Americans in the near
future?
First, what
does it mean for a white person to study African Americans in academia? There has been an incredibly insightful set
of resources that have emerged over the last half-century about
African-American history, culture, and politics. Some of these scholars have been white and
some have been black and some have been of other races and ethnicities. Academic literature is raceless much in the
same what that the airwaves of the 1950s were raceless. Until you look up a picture of the writer or
the singer, who is to say what color their skin is. For example, of the six professors that make
up the core of the Rhodes Africana Studies Department, Kendra Hotz,
Luther Ivory, Leigh Johnson,
Susan Kus,
Charles
McKinney, Robert Saxe, Katheryn
Wright, only two are black. What does it mean for someone to be an
expert in a field outside their cultural, racial or ethnic background? What does it mean for a white student at
Rhodes to be an African-American studies minor/major? I remember seeing a skit between a black
student and white student over whether or not the black student was an
African-American studies major. To what
extent should African-American studies become its own entity and to what extent
should it be assimilated into “mainstream” curriculum?
On a second
note, the video seems to ridicule an underclass African American culture and
the idea that blacks are social people, gossipy, and skeptical of white people. Jeopardy topics range from “pssssh!” to “White
People” to “That Girl” with no acknowledgement to “African-American history”
like the white contestant desires. Yet,
3 of the 4 characters are black. Furthermore,
what does being “black” really entail?
Why does the host suggest that the topics are “all we have to work with?” Similarly as above, the clip raises the question
of who has the right to black culture.
Are whites allowed to laugh at jokes made by people of a particular
sub-group knowing full well that making the same them joke themselves would
have led to a CNN scandal? Aside from
whites being the majority, I think this ambiguity of cultural ownership is what
lead to cultural appropriation. The
mainstream would rather incorporate the “popular” things of a sub-culture in
order to be politically correct, in other words, that which makes the
mainstream most comfortable.
