Okay, this is something that’s been a long time coming. I’ve been thinking about it, and talking about it with my friends, and I feel like this is something that really needs to be addressed.
Miley Cyrus must be stopped.
This sounds like an extremely facetious statement, but it needs to be said.
My main issue with her is her blatant appropriation of black culture. How, do you ask, is she appropriating black culture? Twerking is part of it, for one. Twerking is a form of dance that has deep cultural ties within the black community, and while I personally don’t mind its pervasiveness in the cultural zeitgeist, because it takes a lot of skill to twerk really well, what I have a problem with is this glorification of a white woman doing this skill poorly. When a black woman twerks, it’s a sign of her body as a sexual object, it’s a sign of her inability to present a reasonable level of appropriateness. When Miley does it, on the other hand (and badly, at that, trust me, I’ve seen some SKILLFUL twerking), she’s praised for her ability and for “discovering” this and bringing it to the foreground of mainstream culture, when the black women who do it and have BEEN doing it for years are mocked and abused.
Then there’s the blatant theft of other styles that are particular to black culture: her wearing grills, her claiming she wanted an “urban sound” for her album, (PROTIP: when white people say the word “urban,” we know you really mean “black”), her use of black bodies as accessories in her music video and in her performances, to show off her new street cred. This is the problem. By taking these pieces of a culture that black people have built ourselves, in opposition to mainstream white culture, she’s stereotyping these pieces and therefore stereotyping the people with whom they are associated.
And what are most of the reactions to her lifting these things? She’s “degrading herself”, she’s “behaving inappropriately”. She’s turning parts of my culture into a costume. Because of her white privilege, she can toss off these things when she gets tired of them. She can get away from being “ratchet”. But because of what she’s putting out there, and what she’s saying by using these cultural accessories, and using black people as accessories, is that I, a black woman, am no more than a caricature.
That’s the real issue. When Miley Cyrus plays at being ratchet, her white privilege allows her to distance herself from it when she’s done with it. She’ll be allowed to say she was “experimenting”, “trying out something new”. When black children play at being ratchet, we get stereotyped, we get stopped and frisked. We are bashed and demonized and mocked and ultimately forgotten and swept under the rug.
I can go on and on about this, I really can, but here’s a quote from a Jezebel article that I think really hits the nail on the head: “In a white-centric world, putting white women quite literally in the center of the frame while women of color are off to the side is a powerful, disrespectful visual message, and it really must be said: Human beings are not accessories. These women might be her friends, but the general dynamic created is that she is in charge and they are in service to her. Not so far off from Paula Deen’s dream dinner party. Remember when Gwen Stefani surrounded herself with Harajuku girls? Margaret Cho, at the time, labeled it a minstrel show. A really on-the-nose choice of words, since white people have been mimicking black people for fun and profit from Al Jolson to Amos n’ Andy to Elvis. Now we have Ke$ha (seen below) and Miley dressing up like they live in the hood. (Do not forget that thanks to her father being a huge star and her time at Disney, Miley has been wealthy for her entire life.)”
This shit is not okay, and it’s been simmering since before that mess of a VMAs performance.
Don’t even get me started on Robin Thicke’s foolish ass.
Antoinette Kwadzogah