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.
To Amir Goldberg, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business and a sociologist by training, the most interesting question about this concept isn’t what constitutes cultural theft or whether the borrowing is objectively wrong. It’s why some people are perceived as appropriating cultural practices they have no right to.
For not everyone is. 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 Oshotse, PhD ’23, of Emory University and Yael Berda 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.
Borrowing privileges
To test this idea, the researchers made up 16 hypothetical scenarios of cultural borrowing. Each had two versions, where the only difference was the identity of the borrower or what was being borrowed. For example, a vignette about a white musician alternately described him performing country or blues music. In another, an Asian American man adopts the persona of a gangsta rapper or a New England preppy.
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.”
Abraham Oshotse
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.
Taxing cultural consumers
In the past, Oshotse notes, people with higher status enforced cultural borders to keep lower-status people at a distance. Yet recently, that script has been flipped. “Cultural appropriation seems to be characterized by the erection and maintenance of a boundary to exclude higher-status actors from lower-status culture,” he says.
Goldberg thinks the idea of cultural appropriation is a reaction to “cultural omnivorousness,” a new form of high-status consumption where elites adopt tastes from beyond their milieu. The reason it gives offense, he suggests, is that people are extracting cachet from another culture even as they devalue it.
“A well-off couple can buy African masks to display in their minimalist New York flat without knowing about the people who made them,” he says. “By signaling to dinner guests that they’re sophisticated and cosmopolitan, they elevate their own social standing while reducing ritual objects to exotic tchotchkes. They mean no harm, but it is, at the very least, oblivious.”
The idea of extracting value from culture portrays it as a kind of intangible property – cultural capital, if you will – that outsiders must pay to use. Not in cash, but perhaps through years of study and immersion or perhaps hardship. Extending the metaphor of social borders, the researchers call this “cultural tariffing.”
The need to “earn” access can be seen in the real-life reactions to white rappers Eminem and Macklemore, Goldberg says. “It was easier for Eminem to gain credibility because he had a tough childhood.” Macklemore came from the suburbs, and though he loved hip-hop, honored the OGs, and felt he could say something real, that wasn’t enough for some gatekeepers. (The artist has rapped about this tension in his song “White Privilege II”: “You’ve exploited and stolen the music, the moment… The culture was never yours to make better… You’re Elvis.”)
A crash of symbols
Accusations of theft don’t always come from members of the cultures drawn upon. In Goldberg’s study, the strongest disapproval came from educated white, Jewish, and Asian Americans. In general, Black, Native American, and Arab participants were not more disapproving than whites, and Latinos were the least bothered by the scenarios of cultural borrowing.
So what’s driving the criticism? “I think it’s liberals saying, in effect, ‘Our society is unfair and unequal, so we should at least let people keep their cultural capital,’” Goldberg says. Imposing cultural tariffs on borrowers who are perceived as more powerful or privileged provides a symbolic redistribution of power – without actually challenging the status quo.
“Symbolic redistribution is easy,” Goldberg says. “Affluent whites aren’t offering restitution for slavery. I don’t see anyone returning their land to Native Americans. Instead, the implicit deal is that we keep the land but we don’t let our children dress up as Indians for Halloween.”
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.”
“Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies 8,180 acres, among the largest in the United States, and enrols over 17,000 students.”
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