Elvis Presley may have been the king of rock ’n’ roll, but he didn’t invent it. His influences included country music and pop crooners as well as Black artists like Arthur Crudup, B.B. King, Fats Domino, and Little Richard, and the gospel music he loved as a kid in rural Mississippi.
Years later, critics would lambaste Presley for “stealing” Black music and profiting from it in ways not open to the pioneers of R&B. But when he waggled onto the scene in the late ’50s, few people spoke of cultural theft. In the eyes of segregationists, Elvis’ sin was corrupting white youths with vulgar “race music.”
The history of humanity is one of adopting, borrowing, and straight-up lifting languages, cuisines, music, religions, and innovations from other cultures. Yet the notion of cultural appropriation is fairly recent: The term emerged in the 1990s to describe the idea that people from one culture should not take something from another without permission.
Hilaria (née Hillary) Baldwin, the wife of actor Alec Baldwin, was pilloried on social media for giving her children Spanish names and sometimes affecting a Spanish accent, though she has no Hispanic heritage. Comedian Whoopi Goldberg, on the other hand, never faced much backlash for adopting a Jewish surname, despite her lack of Jewish ancestry.
Amir Goldberg (no relation), along with Abraham Oshotseopen in new window, PhD ’23, of Emory University and Yael Berdaopen in new window of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, thought the differences might be related to the status of the people involved. While social status usually confers greater privileges, it seemed to have the opposite effect here. “Crossing cultural boundaries seemed to be viewed as more transgressive when the borrower belonged to a more powerful group than the one they drew from,” Oshotse says.
These scenarios were presented to test subjects, who were asked whether they disapproved of the cultural borrowing and, if so, how much. The results, published in the American Sociological Review, were as predicted: People were more offended when the taker was wealthier or belonged to an advantaged social group. Since the action itself was the same, this ruled out the possibility that people were simply unsettled by the blurring of cultural categories. Clearly, the particulars mattered.
“Race was a big divider,” Goldberg says, “which isn’t surprising in America. A white guy who became a rapper got far more hate than a Black guy who became a country musician.” And for borrowers of any ethnicity, the outrage was greater when they were wealthy. In a scenario where a white man donned a kaffiyeh as a fashion accessory, participants were less upset if he was described as working-class rather than affluent.
It also mattered whether the borrowers had immersed themselves in the culture they were borrowing from. In the case of a non-Jewish couple who used Jewish rituals in their wedding, respondents were more indulgent when told that the couple had often attended weddings of Jewish friends as opposed to gaining their inspiration from videos.
That charges of appropriation are a relatively recent phenomenon doesn’t mean earlier generations were not bothered by seeing elements of their cultures adopted by more privileged groups. “I don’t know what people felt,” Goldberg says, “but they didn’t have the nomenclature of cultural appropriation to legitimize their anger and translate it into political rhetoric.”
By Lee Simmons / Stanford Insights
