Cultural Appropriation: Not Ipso Facto Wrong
Considering arguments for the intrinsic, unique impermissibility of cultural appropriation.
In 2018, an 18-year-old high school senior from Utah shared photos of herself wearing a qipao to prom.[1] The high schooler, Keziah Daum, is Caucasian; the qipao is a traditional Chinese dress, which is typically worn on special occasions like weddings and parties (though not exclusively). After sharing the photo, one Chinese American student reposted it to Twitter with the caption, “My culture is NOT your goddamn [sic.] prom dress.” A debate ensued about the moral valence of Daum’s donning of the qipao. Was her act one of cultural appropriation and, if so, was it wrong?
This essay is divided in four parts: first, I explain why Daum’s wearing the qipao constitutes an unambiguous act of cultural appropriation; second, I contend that the strongest argument for the impermissibility of cultural appropriation lies in King’s objectification account; in this section, I explain why the cultural ownership, harm, objectionable symbolism, and intimacy accounts fail; third, I challenge King’s account on the grounds that his conception of objectification is overly concerned with the accidental consequences of cultural appropriation and pays too little attention to that which provides normative significance to acts thereof: individual intention; fourth, and finally, I argue that the case of Daum’s cultural appropriation is permissible because cultural appropriation, per se, is neither uniquely nor necessarily wrong, but contingently wrong if and only if the appropriator interacts with an element of a distinct culture with the intention of regarding a group of human beings as inferior.
Before we can determine whether Daum’s act of cultural appropriation is permissible, we must establish it as such. Though the definition is not universally agreed upon, for the purposes of this essay I will operate under the following one: Cultural appropriation refers to an action in which a person not belonging to group X participates in an aspect of group X’s culture. We turn back to the Daum example. Nobody, including Daum herself, disputes these matters of fact: the qipao is a Chinese garment dating back at least to the 17th century, Keziah Daum is a white American with no hereditary connection to China. Ergo, unlike an 18-year-old Chinese high schooler in Beijing wearing a qipao to a Lunar New Year celebration (for example), Daum’s donning of the qipao to her Utah high school’s prom, after stumbling upon it “as a vintage store downtown,” is clearly an act of appropriation. That much is agreed. What’s dispute is whether Daum was in the wrong and, if so, why?
An intuitive strategy to ground the wrongness of cultural appropriation is to assert that appropriators take something that wasn’t theirs without permission. If true, then cultural appropriation is wrong on the familiar grounds of commutative justice. In fact, this is one of the original objections issued to Daum’s qipao photos: “My culture is NOT your goddamn [sic.] prom dress” (emphasis added). The cultural ownership argument fails on several grounds. First, it makes a category error: cultures do not possess the power to own things; ownership is the ability to use, exclude, and transfer property. Only individuals and agential collectives—states, corporations, married people, &c.—can do this, given legal convention of private property. Second, this argument arguably, depending on one’s subscription to the idea of intellectual property, makes another category error: the concept of the qipao cannot be owned whatsoever—stipulating that a culture has the ability to own things—any more than other abstract ideas can be owned by anybody. Finally, even if a culture could own an idea, who is to decide whether an act of appropriation is unacceptable? Surely, one aggrieved Twitter user, for example, would not be a legitimate agent for all of China and the Chinese diaspora. Moreover, who is to decide whom is part of a culture? Does the Chinese-American possess the same kind of cultural property rights as the Chinese citizen in the People’s Republic? Is a Uighur Muslim less Chinese because the Han majority say so? If so, could the Han majority render it an impermissible act of appropriation for a Uighur Chinese citizen to don the qipao? Such a conclusion should strike the reader as deeply troubling and unpersuasive. So much for this account of cultural appropriation’s wrongness.
What about the harm account? Daum’s critics did not spend much time here, and neither will I. Daum purchased the qipao; she did not batter and burgle it from a Chinese store owner (or, for that matter, a store owner of any race). There was no injustice in transfer of the cultural artifact itself. Moreover, Daum did not harm the qipao itself, i.e., she did not purchase the cultural object to publicly destroy it in order to denigrate Chinese cultural achievement or to inflict psychological anguish in Chinese onlookers. These actions would be plainly unethical. Instead, Daum wore it to a social function and care for it such that she can continue wearing it, which she has stated she intends to do. Therefore, assuming the qipao has clean provenance, the harm theory fails in Daum’s case. More generally, if an act of cultural appropriation incidentally “harms” someone, i.e., it produces a negative psychological state in a member of the appropriated culture, ought this render appropriation impermissible? For example, does Daum’s action become wrong because a particularly sensitive Twitter user is outraged? If so, the harm account produces an unacceptable standard: If even one person from the appropriated culture objects to another’s appropriation, on the grounds that it causes her “harm” in some abstract sense, then the appropriator is acting impermissibly. One is at pains to accept this conclusion not just in the realm of cultural appropriation but ethics in general.
A more promising account is that of objectionable symbolism. Even if Daum’s act of appropriation causes no harm per se, perhaps a plausible interpretation thereof does. Another Twitter user articulates an objection grounded on this account: “For it to simply be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience is parallel to colonial ideology.” As a matter of fact, this is an odd claim to make; China’s “Century of Humiliation” was inflicted by English mercantilists, whereas its ascension to a developed, middle-income nation is thanks to globalization, free trade—much of it with Americans—and a consumer-driven economy post-Mao Zedong. But no matter; we will accept the conceit of the argument. Objectionable symbolism as general problems which render it an inadequate account of the wrongness of cultural appropriation. For example, if the unique wrong of cultural appropriation is its symbolism of American consumerism, then it would be wrong for a Chinese woman to purchase the qipao in America. That seems unlikely. If “cater[ing] to a white audience” makes the appropriation objectionable, then one would have to believe that Chinese business owners selling Chinese food, clothing, and other cultural products to white people are acting impermissibly. Again, this seems like a claim that moralizers of cultural appropriation would like to avoid. Finally, the objectionable symbolism account fails on grounds analogous to the harm account: Who gets to decide for the culture—a “sub-agential group,” to appropriate language from Nguyen and Strohl—what an act of cultural appropriation symbolizes? Even if such a judge is stipulated, this account completely deprives moral significance to the intention of the appropriator herself. Surely, all denouncers of cultural appropriation would assert that the bigot who appropriates in order to denigrate, belittle, and demean a group of individuals is morally worse than Daum, for example. We now turn to the final alternative argument to King’s.
Nguyen and Strohl’s intimacy account avoids the pitfalls of attempting to independently ground the wrongness of cultural appropriation.[2] The two philosophers draw an analogy between expressive claims of romantic couples, for example, and those issued by cultural groups. For example, if you learn of Nguyen and his wife’s pet names for each other that they reserve exclusively for one another and, against their jointly expressed wishes, you continue calling them “pookie-wookie bear” and “honey buns,” you should stop. They then claim that groups bonded by intimate cultural features share the prerogative to issue expressive claims (against cultural appropriation, for example). Nguyen and Strohl’s argument fails on the following grounds: It seems wrong to describe a group without collective representation (sub-agential) and whose members do not personally know each other to be “intimate,” so properly understood. Even accepting the conceit that everyone in a culture know each other and agree to morally enjoin cultural appropriation, or unanimously appoint a representative to do so, other problems abound. For example, how is it to be determined who belongs to the culture? Ethnically? If so, which and what percentage? Linguistically? If so, which dialect and accent? I imagine that those concerned with cultural appropriation are at least as concerned with eugenics. Perhaps the cultural group is comprised by individual participation in its associated customs. In this case, everyone is an appropriator! So, neither cultures nor their practices are intimate in the way Nguyen and Strohl’s argument depends upon.
King’s alternative is attractive because it avoids the metaphysical and epistemic problems in determining group membership that plague the previous arguments. King argues that cultural appropriation is wrong insofar as it involves objectifying subjects, i.e., rendering individuals properly regarded as equals as other, not fully human, not worthy of equal respect.[3] King’s objection to cultural appropriation, then, can be understood as an extension of Kant’s categorical imperative: to treat every person as an end in and of herself. In simpler terms: treat others the way you’d have them treat you. Namely, you have the duty of regarding and treating every human being as a subject—an individual—instead of a mere instantiation of a subpopulation of humanity from which you exclude yourself and otherize.[4] On this account, the wrongness of Daum’s action is twofold: first, the possibility that what attracted her to the qipao is an orientalist prejudice that regards East Asian cultures, artifacts, and people as exotic, as alien, as other; second, in wearing the qipao as a white woman in public, Daum not merely participates in this othering but perpetuates it, furthering inequality where equality ought to exist. To its credit, King’s argument does not demand a way to objectively define groups and membership therein. Instead, the objectification account recognizes the social reality that prejudice inspires certain individuals to treat others as others, i.e., part of some group apart from the one with which the individual identifies.
While promising and plausible, I believe King’s account still fails to prove the unique wrongness of culture appropriation per se. Notice, King’s account does not concern itself with the motivations of the individual appropriator; it is exclusively concerned with social matters of fact and consequences therefrom. In the case of Daum, the wrongness of her appropriation hinges on presuming improper motivations in her and the reactions of others. Specifically, King’s account assumes that Daum chose the qipao out of some orientalist impulse and that her wearing the qipao inspired other white people to fetishize Chinese people. However, it’s entirely plausible Daum chose the article purely for its formal aesthetic qualities and that non-Chinese onlookers do not respond in an othering way.
King’s account, then, faces two main problems: first, not all representations of a culture serve to otherize it and, second, this consequence is often antithetical or accidental to the motivations of the appropriator. Furthermore, by King’s own lights, it is wrong to judge the individual participating in aspects of a culture to which she does not belong as her accidental qualities instead of herself. For example, Daum was looking, per her report, for the most beautiful dress to wear to prom. The dress happened to be Chinese. Daum happens to be a white American. These facts do not entail that she chose the dress out of an orientalist impulse, that doing so will inspire orientalism in onlookers, nor that she is morally culpable for this unfortunate (possible) response.
The case study of Daum-and-the-qipao demonstrates that cultural appropriation is neither ipso facto nor uniquely wrong about cultural appropriation. Just because cultural appropriation is not necessarily wrong does not mean that it cannot be wrong, provided it is done in ways that make other actions wrong. For example, were Daum, to wear the qipao in such a way so as to intentionally denigrate Chinese culture, its products, and, in turn, not afford the equal dignity to which Chinese individuals (like all individuals) are entitled, this would be unethical. Trivially so. Moreover, had Daum worn the qipao in the privacy of her room and performed a mockery of Chinese speech, for example, this would still be wrong. Although nobody else would see this performance of bigotry and be inspired (potentially) to regard Chinese people as subhuman, it would be intrinsically wrong because it is an expression of an attitude that is ipso facto wrong: regarding people who are culturally different as metaphysically inferior. Not affording equals the respect to which they are entitled is unjust. Cultural appropriation qua deliberate-denigration-of-another-culture is wrong in this way; cultural appropriation simpliciter is morally neutral and is often an expression of appreciation. So it is in the case of Keziah Daum.
[1] Good Morning America, “Teen defends Chinese prom dress that sparked cultural appropriation debate: 'I would wear it again,'” 05/02/2018. https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/style/story/teen-defends-chinese-prom-dress-sparked-cultural-appropriation-54866211
[2] Nguyen, C. Thi, and Matthew Strohl. “Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups.” Philosophical studies 176, no. 4 (2019): 981–1002.
[3] King, Alex. “Cultural Appropriation and the Objectification of the Other.” Draft (November 2023).
[4] Ibid: 8.