On Wednesday, when you walk to the Pit, you’ll be greeted with the sight of people of all colors and races wearing turbans and enjoying some free food. What’s going on? Is it the premier of a new clothing line by Turban Outfitters? Nope, it’s Tie a Turban Day, run by Carolina Khalsa, a student organization focused on the Sikh faith.
The mere sight of non-Sikh folks putting on a turban would incline many to quickly yell “cultural appropriation.”
Similar to many cultural events at UNC, such as Holi Moli or UNC Hillel’s Israel Fest in the Pit, this event is geared toward sharing a minority culture to a broader audience. People will at best only get a very surface-level introduction to an aspect of these cultures. So could allowing people to adopt these cultural practices in such a niche fashion, such as wearing a turban or participating in Holi, actually end up tokenizing the same culture we are trying to promote?
Our point isn’t to admonish Carolina Khalsa or these other cultural organizations for creating an event meant to educate folks about their cultures, even if it might end up being culturally appropriative in some sense. Our point is to highlight how tricky a conversation cultural appropriation can be and how infinitely deep the issue really is.
Who has ownership of a culture? Do American-born Indians have ownership of Indian culture? Are black Americans “allowed” to wear dashikis or sport dreads? Culture is a mutable conception, and common rhetoric around cultural appropriation often stabilizes culture in a way that simplifies our reality. Do organizations like Carolina Khalsa or Holi Moli, despite being represented by their cultural constituencies, have ownership over the cultures they claim? In reality, culture is such a flexible concept that it’s impossible to attribute ownership to a particular group.
Also, when we attribute cultural practices to an entire identity-group (i.e. yoga to India or dashikis to Africa), how does that kind of thinking essentialize identity groups into a singular lump sum and ignore not only the diversity within a group, but also the ways in which these cultural practices have been appropriated and exchanged within our broad definitions of these cultures themselves? For example, yoga is a practice that has been exchanged across power dynamics within India itself. When we attribute cultural practices to a particular singular entity, what does that mean? Do all Indians have a claim over yoga?
We don’t mean to say that cultural appropriation isn’t a valid phenomenon. It certainly is. We must always be cognizant of the ways in which power inequities between cultures and individuals shape any type of cultural exchange that occurs.
Imperialism and racism aren’t simply vestiges from the past; they’re forces that are alive, well and thriving today. Despite this, we must understand how tricky and complex issues of cultural exchange are.
Talking about ethnicities, race and culture is stimulating and resonates with all of us because how we understand our own identity informs how we perceive these racial and ethnic politics, and everyone understands their identity, right? But culture’s malleability and contextual nature demands we approach it in a way that does not stabilize or flatten it.
