For non-dominant groups cultural markers can be a source of pride, something that they can rally and say “we may not have that, but we have this.” According to Lull even “traditional anchors of culture are represented symbolically in the Information and Communication Age” which is important because a lot of what believe about our culture is based on and reinforced by what we see on TV or see in the media. This isn't to say that some people don’t rebel against this sort of conditioning but it definitely recognizes how pervasive and powerful media are. So when public figures like Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber, Gwen Stefani, and Lady Gaga borrow from other cultures we need to understand why they do so, what it means for them and for people who share the culture from with they are borrowing, and what it says about our society as a whole.
Applying Theory to Practice
Framing Theory supports Lull’s statement of the media’s power for social conditioning a movement past traditional socialization processes in which we learn to act certain ways by examples set by our family, religious ideology, academic settings and other role models. According to Ingrid Volkmer the theory allows us to see the power that media have to influence audiences and “powerfully create world perceptions and political discourse” by challenging and renegotiating life experiences. Now this again, does not seem bad and in reality if representations are accurate and made with good intention (both are necessary) then perhaps framing and renegotiating life experiences can have positive outcomes but it can also lead to confusion and misperceptions about reality particularly when audiences are presented with misrepresentations of reality (distortions or inaccuracies). People learn to expect things that they learn from media to be true but once they encounter real life situations they are unsure of how to respond when they learn that things are not as they thought they were.
So What About Miley?
Let me clarify first that we're just looking at Miley as an example of just one of many artists culturally appropriating black hip-hop culture. Miley is particularly controversial becase in addition to the cultural appropriation her performance in the VMAs and the music video for "We Can't Stop" truly uses black people as props and in very few scenes does she actually have black people and white people hanging out together. As a celebrity that many teens may look to as a role model her actions and music send mixed signals. Looking particularly at Miley Cyrus’s appropriation of hip-hop culture it could be interpreted that wearing grills, smoking, and making certain kinds of facial expressions or flipping people off would be cool and clearly it is for some artists, Miley for one. It says hip-hop is cool, everyone should like it, good right? It makes hip-hop more acceptable and less stereotyped because white people are doing it right? Well here-in-lies another problem: It’s OK to do it now because white people (dominant group) are doing it but let's not forget the negative stereotypes associated with hip-hop music and the people who listen to and produce it. This article in Black People Confessions lays out the problem with this perfectly showing that while artists like Miley Cyrus and Justin Bieber are profiting from these newly adopted lifestyles, regular (not famous, and even some famous) black people are demonized for doing so.
As consumers of media we need to be more critical because representations of culture matter. According to Rebecca Tsosie, a professor of Native American Law and Ethics, for Native peoples, “culture is essential to the survival… as distinctive and political groups” (p. 300) and “Native groups should have the ability to control depictions of their distinctive cultures to avoid the harms caused by cultural appropriation." But cultural appropriation isn’t something new, according to Denise Cuthbert it can be argued that “the history of European colonisation of the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific is also a history of wholesale appropriation." Cuthbert also cites Perry A. Hall to explain how cultural appropriation has affected black musicians of different genres from jazz and blues to rock and roll and hip-hop, saying that appropriation of black music often included “instances of exploitation, with African- American musicians, their music, techniques and arrangements being ‘ripped off’ by white musicians greedy for ever-new sounds…”
Am I saying that only people who belong to a certain culture can like, listen to, or perform a particular type of music? No. People do and should have the liberty to perform what they like but they should be conscious to do so in a way that does not disrespect predecessors and avoids reproducing structural inequalities which results from cultural appropriation. It is easy to look at something and think hey that's cool I want to do that to without understanding a culture or the consequences of doing so (like Selena Gomez or Lady Gaga). Jason Rodriquez would say that people doing this (cultural appropriation) or arguing that it doesn't exist and people should be able to perform what ever they want are playing the colorblind card (when people pretend that they can't see the color of somone's skin and thereby also ignore the different experiences that result as a consequence of being a certain skin color). He'd say this is inappropriate and even ask: “How do individuals simultaneously insist on color-blindness and endorse a cultural form which is unambiguously and explicitly racial?” Hip-hop is a genre of music that originated within a particular culture but is now just seen as something to profit from which devalues its cultural worth.