Cultural Appropriation

1976Internet discourse / catchphrase / social media debateactive

Also known as: cultural theft · cultural erasure

Cultural Appropriation is a 2010s social media discourse about dominant groups adopting marginalized cultures, defined by the 2018 viral phrase "my culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress.

Cultural appropriation is a long-running internet discourse and recurring source of viral debates, memes, and culture war flashpoints. The term originated in 1970s academia to describe the adoption of marginalized cultural elements by dominant groups, but it exploded into mainstream internet vocabulary in the 2010s through Twitter arguments, Tumblr callouts, and high-profile celebrity controversies involving figures like Iggy Azalea, Katy Perry, and Gwen Stefani18. The phrase "my culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress" became one of the most recognizable catchphrases of the discourse when it went mega-viral in 201812.

TL;DR

Cultural appropriation is a long-running internet discourse and recurring source of viral debates, memes, and culture war flashpoints.

Overview

Cultural appropriation refers to when members of a dominant cultural group adopt elements from a marginalized culture in ways considered exploitative, disrespectful, or reductive1. Online, the term functions less as a fixed meme template and more as a perpetual debate engine. It generates viral moments whenever a celebrity wears something, a brand launches a product, or a random person posts a photo that triggers the "appreciation vs. appropriation" argument cycle. The discourse follows a predictable pattern: someone shares an image or video of a perceived offense, outrage spreads, defenders push back, think pieces pile up, and the whole thing repeats weeks later with a new target.

The concept sits at the intersection of race, identity politics, postcolonialism, and pop culture, making it one of the internet's most reliably combustible topics3.

The academic roots of cultural appropriation trace to 1976, when British historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith introduced the concept of "cultural colonialism" in a paper examining how dominant Western cultures exploit the creative output of marginalized groups1. Three years later, British sociologist Dick Hebdige expanded on the idea in his 1979 work "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," analyzing how white Britons borrowed cultural symbols from marginalized communities to construct subcultural identities2. By 1980, scholars had given the practice a formal name: cultural appropriation2.

The term stayed mostly within academic circles for decades. It didn't receive a dictionary definition until 2017, despite the concept being discussed for over forty years3. The jump from lecture halls to social media happened gradually, accelerating through the blog era of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

One early online landmark was Adrienne Keene's blog Native Appropriations, launched when she was a 23-year-old doctoral student. Standing in an Urban Outfitters surrounded by products featuring decontextualized Native American imagery, Keene decided to start cataloguing examples of appropriation online11. The blog became a go-to resource and helped establish the template for how appropriation callouts would function on social media.

Origin & Background

Platform
Academic journals (concept), Twitter / Tumblr / blogs (online discourse)
Key People
Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Dick Hebdige, Adrienne Keene, Jeremy Lam, Sierra Mannie
Date
1976 (academic coinage), 2013-2014 (online explosion)
Year
1976

The academic roots of cultural appropriation trace to 1976, when British historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith introduced the concept of "cultural colonialism" in a paper examining how dominant Western cultures exploit the creative output of marginalized groups. Three years later, British sociologist Dick Hebdige expanded on the idea in his 1979 work "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," analyzing how white Britons borrowed cultural symbols from marginalized communities to construct subcultural identities. By 1980, scholars had given the practice a formal name: cultural appropriation.

The term stayed mostly within academic circles for decades. It didn't receive a dictionary definition until 2017, despite the concept being discussed for over forty years. The jump from lecture halls to social media happened gradually, accelerating through the blog era of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

One early online landmark was Adrienne Keene's blog Native Appropriations, launched when she was a 23-year-old doctoral student. Standing in an Urban Outfitters surrounded by products featuring decontextualized Native American imagery, Keene decided to start cataloguing examples of appropriation online. The blog became a go-to resource and helped establish the template for how appropriation callouts would function on social media.

How It Spread

The cultural appropriation discourse moved through several distinct waves online.

Mid-2000s: Blog Wars

Early online debates played out on platforms like LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. A 2007 WisCon panel on cultural appropriation sparked extensive blog commentary, with writers debating whether fiction authors could ethically write about cultures not their own. These conversations laid groundwork for the more explosive social media debates that followed. In 2005, comedian Margaret Cho wrote a widely-shared blog post comparing Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls backup dancers to a "minstrel show," calling Japanese schoolgirl uniforms "kind of like blackface".

2013-2014: The Twitter Explosion

The Harlem Shake meme in February 2013 marked a turning point. The viral dance craze, which bore no resemblance to the actual Harlem Shake dance originating from the late 1980s, provoked backlash from Harlem residents who saw their cultural artifact being erased. A video by Schlepp Films showed Harlem pedestrians reacting with confusion and frustration, with one stating: "It's a mockery to what it was!". The incident triggered widespread debate about whether internet memes could function as a form of cultural appropriation.

In 2014, the discourse hit peak velocity. Sierra Mannie's TIME op-ed "Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture" argued that white gay men imitating Black women's mannerisms amounted to appropriation without consequences. The piece drew fierce responses and counter-arguments, including John McWhorter's Daily Beast essay arguing that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and that cultural cross-pollination is an inevitable, even positive, feature of human civilization.

That same year, Iggy Azalea became ground zero for appropriation debates. The Australian rapper's adoption of a Southern Black vocal style while rapping drew fire from artists like Azealia Banks, who went on Hot 97 and declared that "Iggy Azalea shit isn't better than any fucking black girl that's rapping today". Katy Perry also drew repeated criticism for wearing cornrows, using a "blaccent," and incorporating stereotypical imagery in music videos.

2018: "My Culture Is NOT Your Prom Dress"

The discourse's single biggest viral moment came in April 2018, when a Utah teenager named Keziah Daum posted prom photos wearing a Chinese-style dress. Twitter user Jeremy Lam quote-tweeted the images with "My culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress," and the post exploded. The tweet triggered a massive counter-reaction, with people of all backgrounds mocking Lam's outrage and calling him "a uniter, not a divider". The incident became a meme in itself, with parodies like "my culture is NOT your lunch utensil" applied to increasingly absurd scenarios.

How to Use This Meme

Cultural appropriation discourse operates online through several common formats:

The callout post. Someone shares an image or video of a perceived instance and labels it cultural appropriation, often tagging the person or brand involved. The most effective ones pair visuals with a punchy caption.

The appreciation vs. appropriation debate. Users typically present two contrasting examples, one framed as acceptable cultural exchange and the other as harmful appropriation, then ask where the line falls.

The parody format. After the 2018 prom dress incident, users began creating jokes using the template "my culture is NOT your goddamn [mundane object]" applied to absurd situations.

The whataboutism response. Defenders commonly point to examples of non-Western cultures adopting Western elements, asking why that doesn't count as appropriation. This pattern is predictable enough to be memed itself.

The celebrity callout cycle. When a public figure is photographed wearing something from another culture, the internet follows a near-scripted sequence: initial outrage, defenses, think pieces, counter-think pieces, and eventual exhaustion until the next incident.

Cultural Impact

The cultural appropriation discourse moved well beyond social media into institutional and commercial spaces. Brands took note after incidents like Urban Outfitters' "Navajo Hipster" product line, which landed the retailer in legal trouble for misusing tribal imagery. Victoria's Secret pulled Native American-inspired designs after public backlash, and No Doubt removed a Western-themed music video under pressure.

The Washington NFL team's decades-long name controversy became one of the highest-profile appropriation debates in American sports. Native American organizations argued the team name was a derogatory slur that erased their history, while the team's owner defended it as representing "honor, respect and pride". A 2016 Washington Post poll claiming 9 in 10 Native Americans weren't offended sparked its own backlash from those same communities.

In academia, professors like Daniel Heath Justice of the University of British Columbia framed appropriation in terms of survival: "We're talking about continuity in spite of traumatic, sustained and systemic multi-generational assaults on every aspect of our beings, including our artistic practice". Meanwhile, Harvard's Martin Puchner noted that the term "cultural appropriation" now appeared more frequently in Google searches than "culture" itself, reflecting how contentious the topic had become.

The relationship between memes and appropriation also drew scholarly attention. The Meme Manifesto project argued that deep fried memes, born from Black Twitter's practice of degrading images through repeated screenshotting, represented a form of digital resistance. As memes moved between communities, they lost information about their original meaning and history, enabling the very kind of cultural theft the format was created to resist.

Full History

The cultural appropriation discourse online didn't emerge from nowhere. It built on decades of academic theory and real-world controversies before social media gave it rocket fuel.

The foundational academic framework came from postcolonial studies. As Britannica notes, cultural appropriation "often is viewed as a problem of the postcolonial world," with the term commonly applied to Western or white populations adopting aspects of non-Western cultures. The key condition scholars identified was an imbalance of power between the appropriator and the appropriated. This power-dynamic framing would become central to every online argument that followed.

Tufts University researchers traced how the definition shifted as it moved from academia to social media. In scholarly contexts, cultural appropriation emphasized systemic power structures and institutional exploitation. But publicly accessible definitions, like those in major dictionaries, tended to frame it as an individual failing, using phrases like "without showing that you understand or respect the culture". This gap between structural and individual framing became a constant source of miscommunication in online debates.

The blog era of the late 2000s saw the first sustained online discourse communities form around the topic. Writers on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth engaged in sprawling multi-thread debates about whether writers from dominant cultures could ethically depict marginalized ones. One blogger noted the frustrating pattern: discussions about cultural appropriation by dominant groups kept getting redirected to questions about minorities assimilating into majority culture, mirroring how feminist discussions often get derailed to center men's concerns.

Harvard professor Martin Puchner, in his 2023 book "Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop," argued for a longer historical view. He traced cultural borrowing back to ancient civilizations, noting that "almost all episodes in the book have to do with one form of borrowing or another". Puchner emphasized that cultural transmission requires active effort, that objects and traditions don't pass between groups automatically, and that the emphasis on originality and cultural ownership is relatively modern.

The music industry became the primary battlefield. Beyond Iggy Azalea, critics pointed to a long pattern: ragtime, blues, jazz, soul, and rock and roll were all pioneered by Black artists, yet white performers like Elvis Presley often reaped the commercial rewards. The Daily Dot argued that this pattern extended to modern pop, with artists like Katy Perry profiting from Black cultural aesthetics while facing none of the discrimination associated with those same aesthetics. The concept of "blackfishing," where white celebrities adopted Black hairstyles and mannerisms, became a specific sub-category of appropriation discourse.

The Harlem Shake meme controversy in 2013 brought an interesting wrinkle: the question of whether memes themselves could be tools of cultural erasure. The viral dance replaced the original Harlem Shake in search results and popular consciousness, making it difficult to find references to the authentic dance on YouTube. Producer Diplo's label Mad Decent, which released Baauer's "Harlem Shake" track, had already faced scrutiny from artists like Venus X for incorporating underground artists of color's sounds into EDM without proper credit.

The meme studies community also weighed in on the relationship between cultural appropriation and internet culture. U.S. artist Aria Dean argued that Black communities' contribution to contemporary meme culture had been "culpably ignored by most scholars," calling the siphoning of symbolic and financial capital "just the latest episode in a long history of cultural appropriation". Dean connected this to the origins of deep fried memes on Black Twitter, where the practice of repeatedly screenshotting and re-filtering images until they degrade originated as a distinctly Black online aesthetic.

Polling data revealed stark racial divides in how people perceived appropriation. According to survey data cited by the Encyclopedia of Opinion, white adults in America were twice as likely as Black Americans to say that a blackface Halloween costume is acceptable. While 53% of Black respondents said blackface is never acceptable, only 35% of white respondents agreed.

The "appreciation vs. appropriation" framework emerged as a common attempt to find middle ground. Britannica noted that "cultural appreciation" appeared as a counter-concept, suggesting that wearing a traditional lehenga to an Indian wedding might be appreciation, while wearing it as a Halloween costume would be appropriation. Critics on both sides found this distinction unsatisfying: some argued it was too subjective, while others argued it still centered the feelings of the appropriator rather than the appropriated.

Fun Facts

The term "cultural appropriation" didn't get a formal dictionary definition until 2017, despite being used in academia since the 1980s.

Margaret Cho compared Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls to "blackface" in 2005, writing "racial stereotypes are really cute sometimes, and I don't want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel show".

The 2013 Harlem Shake meme craze generated an estimated 4,000 new videos uploaded to YouTube per day at its peak, effectively burying the original Harlem Shake dance in search results.

Harvard's Martin Puchner found that only 7% of incoming first-year students expressed interest in any humanities subject, a decline from the low 20s just a decade earlier, which partly motivated his book on cultural borrowing throughout history.

Jeremy Lam's "prom dress" tweet generated such universal mockery that one observer called him "a uniter, not a divider" for bringing people of all backgrounds together in agreement that he was wrong.

Derivatives & Variations

"My culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress"

The 2018 tweet by Jeremy Lam became a standalone meme template, with users replacing "prom dress" with absurd objects for comedic effect[12].

"Appreciation vs. Appropriation" debate format

A recurring discussion template where users present paired examples and argue about where the line falls, often cycling through the same arguments[1].

Blackfishing callouts

A specific sub-genre focused on white celebrities or influencers adopting Black physical features through makeup, tanning, and hairstyles[1].

Spirit animal discourse

The casual use of "spirit animal" as internet slang (e.g., "pizza is my spirit animal") drew pushback from Indigenous communities who consider the concept sacred, spawning its own appropriation sub-debate[3].

Deep fried memes connection

Scholar Aria Dean and others drew explicit connections between the aesthetics of deep fried memes, their Black Twitter origins, and broader patterns of cultural appropriation in meme culture[9].

Frequently Asked Questions

Cultural Appropriation

1976Internet discourse / catchphrase / social media debateactive

Also known as: cultural theft · cultural erasure

Cultural Appropriation is a 2010s social media discourse about dominant groups adopting marginalized cultures, defined by the 2018 viral phrase "my culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress.

Cultural appropriation is a long-running internet discourse and recurring source of viral debates, memes, and culture war flashpoints. The term originated in 1970s academia to describe the adoption of marginalized cultural elements by dominant groups, but it exploded into mainstream internet vocabulary in the 2010s through Twitter arguments, Tumblr callouts, and high-profile celebrity controversies involving figures like Iggy Azalea, Katy Perry, and Gwen Stefani. The phrase "my culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress" became one of the most recognizable catchphrases of the discourse when it went mega-viral in 2018.

TL;DR

Cultural appropriation is a long-running internet discourse and recurring source of viral debates, memes, and culture war flashpoints.

Overview

Cultural appropriation refers to when members of a dominant cultural group adopt elements from a marginalized culture in ways considered exploitative, disrespectful, or reductive. Online, the term functions less as a fixed meme template and more as a perpetual debate engine. It generates viral moments whenever a celebrity wears something, a brand launches a product, or a random person posts a photo that triggers the "appreciation vs. appropriation" argument cycle. The discourse follows a predictable pattern: someone shares an image or video of a perceived offense, outrage spreads, defenders push back, think pieces pile up, and the whole thing repeats weeks later with a new target.

The concept sits at the intersection of race, identity politics, postcolonialism, and pop culture, making it one of the internet's most reliably combustible topics.

The academic roots of cultural appropriation trace to 1976, when British historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith introduced the concept of "cultural colonialism" in a paper examining how dominant Western cultures exploit the creative output of marginalized groups. Three years later, British sociologist Dick Hebdige expanded on the idea in his 1979 work "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," analyzing how white Britons borrowed cultural symbols from marginalized communities to construct subcultural identities. By 1980, scholars had given the practice a formal name: cultural appropriation.

The term stayed mostly within academic circles for decades. It didn't receive a dictionary definition until 2017, despite the concept being discussed for over forty years. The jump from lecture halls to social media happened gradually, accelerating through the blog era of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

One early online landmark was Adrienne Keene's blog Native Appropriations, launched when she was a 23-year-old doctoral student. Standing in an Urban Outfitters surrounded by products featuring decontextualized Native American imagery, Keene decided to start cataloguing examples of appropriation online. The blog became a go-to resource and helped establish the template for how appropriation callouts would function on social media.

Origin & Background

Platform
Academic journals (concept), Twitter / Tumblr / blogs (online discourse)
Key People
Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Dick Hebdige, Adrienne Keene, Jeremy Lam, Sierra Mannie
Date
1976 (academic coinage), 2013-2014 (online explosion)
Year
1976

The academic roots of cultural appropriation trace to 1976, when British historian Kenneth Coutts-Smith introduced the concept of "cultural colonialism" in a paper examining how dominant Western cultures exploit the creative output of marginalized groups. Three years later, British sociologist Dick Hebdige expanded on the idea in his 1979 work "Subculture: The Meaning of Style," analyzing how white Britons borrowed cultural symbols from marginalized communities to construct subcultural identities. By 1980, scholars had given the practice a formal name: cultural appropriation.

The term stayed mostly within academic circles for decades. It didn't receive a dictionary definition until 2017, despite the concept being discussed for over forty years. The jump from lecture halls to social media happened gradually, accelerating through the blog era of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

One early online landmark was Adrienne Keene's blog Native Appropriations, launched when she was a 23-year-old doctoral student. Standing in an Urban Outfitters surrounded by products featuring decontextualized Native American imagery, Keene decided to start cataloguing examples of appropriation online. The blog became a go-to resource and helped establish the template for how appropriation callouts would function on social media.

How It Spread

The cultural appropriation discourse moved through several distinct waves online.

Mid-2000s: Blog Wars

Early online debates played out on platforms like LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. A 2007 WisCon panel on cultural appropriation sparked extensive blog commentary, with writers debating whether fiction authors could ethically write about cultures not their own. These conversations laid groundwork for the more explosive social media debates that followed. In 2005, comedian Margaret Cho wrote a widely-shared blog post comparing Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls backup dancers to a "minstrel show," calling Japanese schoolgirl uniforms "kind of like blackface".

2013-2014: The Twitter Explosion

The Harlem Shake meme in February 2013 marked a turning point. The viral dance craze, which bore no resemblance to the actual Harlem Shake dance originating from the late 1980s, provoked backlash from Harlem residents who saw their cultural artifact being erased. A video by Schlepp Films showed Harlem pedestrians reacting with confusion and frustration, with one stating: "It's a mockery to what it was!". The incident triggered widespread debate about whether internet memes could function as a form of cultural appropriation.

In 2014, the discourse hit peak velocity. Sierra Mannie's TIME op-ed "Dear White Gays: Stop Stealing Black Female Culture" argued that white gay men imitating Black women's mannerisms amounted to appropriation without consequences. The piece drew fierce responses and counter-arguments, including John McWhorter's Daily Beast essay arguing that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" and that cultural cross-pollination is an inevitable, even positive, feature of human civilization.

That same year, Iggy Azalea became ground zero for appropriation debates. The Australian rapper's adoption of a Southern Black vocal style while rapping drew fire from artists like Azealia Banks, who went on Hot 97 and declared that "Iggy Azalea shit isn't better than any fucking black girl that's rapping today". Katy Perry also drew repeated criticism for wearing cornrows, using a "blaccent," and incorporating stereotypical imagery in music videos.

2018: "My Culture Is NOT Your Prom Dress"

The discourse's single biggest viral moment came in April 2018, when a Utah teenager named Keziah Daum posted prom photos wearing a Chinese-style dress. Twitter user Jeremy Lam quote-tweeted the images with "My culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress," and the post exploded. The tweet triggered a massive counter-reaction, with people of all backgrounds mocking Lam's outrage and calling him "a uniter, not a divider". The incident became a meme in itself, with parodies like "my culture is NOT your lunch utensil" applied to increasingly absurd scenarios.

How to Use This Meme

Cultural appropriation discourse operates online through several common formats:

The callout post. Someone shares an image or video of a perceived instance and labels it cultural appropriation, often tagging the person or brand involved. The most effective ones pair visuals with a punchy caption.

The appreciation vs. appropriation debate. Users typically present two contrasting examples, one framed as acceptable cultural exchange and the other as harmful appropriation, then ask where the line falls.

The parody format. After the 2018 prom dress incident, users began creating jokes using the template "my culture is NOT your goddamn [mundane object]" applied to absurd situations.

The whataboutism response. Defenders commonly point to examples of non-Western cultures adopting Western elements, asking why that doesn't count as appropriation. This pattern is predictable enough to be memed itself.

The celebrity callout cycle. When a public figure is photographed wearing something from another culture, the internet follows a near-scripted sequence: initial outrage, defenses, think pieces, counter-think pieces, and eventual exhaustion until the next incident.

Cultural Impact

The cultural appropriation discourse moved well beyond social media into institutional and commercial spaces. Brands took note after incidents like Urban Outfitters' "Navajo Hipster" product line, which landed the retailer in legal trouble for misusing tribal imagery. Victoria's Secret pulled Native American-inspired designs after public backlash, and No Doubt removed a Western-themed music video under pressure.

The Washington NFL team's decades-long name controversy became one of the highest-profile appropriation debates in American sports. Native American organizations argued the team name was a derogatory slur that erased their history, while the team's owner defended it as representing "honor, respect and pride". A 2016 Washington Post poll claiming 9 in 10 Native Americans weren't offended sparked its own backlash from those same communities.

In academia, professors like Daniel Heath Justice of the University of British Columbia framed appropriation in terms of survival: "We're talking about continuity in spite of traumatic, sustained and systemic multi-generational assaults on every aspect of our beings, including our artistic practice". Meanwhile, Harvard's Martin Puchner noted that the term "cultural appropriation" now appeared more frequently in Google searches than "culture" itself, reflecting how contentious the topic had become.

The relationship between memes and appropriation also drew scholarly attention. The Meme Manifesto project argued that deep fried memes, born from Black Twitter's practice of degrading images through repeated screenshotting, represented a form of digital resistance. As memes moved between communities, they lost information about their original meaning and history, enabling the very kind of cultural theft the format was created to resist.

Full History

The cultural appropriation discourse online didn't emerge from nowhere. It built on decades of academic theory and real-world controversies before social media gave it rocket fuel.

The foundational academic framework came from postcolonial studies. As Britannica notes, cultural appropriation "often is viewed as a problem of the postcolonial world," with the term commonly applied to Western or white populations adopting aspects of non-Western cultures. The key condition scholars identified was an imbalance of power between the appropriator and the appropriated. This power-dynamic framing would become central to every online argument that followed.

Tufts University researchers traced how the definition shifted as it moved from academia to social media. In scholarly contexts, cultural appropriation emphasized systemic power structures and institutional exploitation. But publicly accessible definitions, like those in major dictionaries, tended to frame it as an individual failing, using phrases like "without showing that you understand or respect the culture". This gap between structural and individual framing became a constant source of miscommunication in online debates.

The blog era of the late 2000s saw the first sustained online discourse communities form around the topic. Writers on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth engaged in sprawling multi-thread debates about whether writers from dominant cultures could ethically depict marginalized ones. One blogger noted the frustrating pattern: discussions about cultural appropriation by dominant groups kept getting redirected to questions about minorities assimilating into majority culture, mirroring how feminist discussions often get derailed to center men's concerns.

Harvard professor Martin Puchner, in his 2023 book "Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop," argued for a longer historical view. He traced cultural borrowing back to ancient civilizations, noting that "almost all episodes in the book have to do with one form of borrowing or another". Puchner emphasized that cultural transmission requires active effort, that objects and traditions don't pass between groups automatically, and that the emphasis on originality and cultural ownership is relatively modern.

The music industry became the primary battlefield. Beyond Iggy Azalea, critics pointed to a long pattern: ragtime, blues, jazz, soul, and rock and roll were all pioneered by Black artists, yet white performers like Elvis Presley often reaped the commercial rewards. The Daily Dot argued that this pattern extended to modern pop, with artists like Katy Perry profiting from Black cultural aesthetics while facing none of the discrimination associated with those same aesthetics. The concept of "blackfishing," where white celebrities adopted Black hairstyles and mannerisms, became a specific sub-category of appropriation discourse.

The Harlem Shake meme controversy in 2013 brought an interesting wrinkle: the question of whether memes themselves could be tools of cultural erasure. The viral dance replaced the original Harlem Shake in search results and popular consciousness, making it difficult to find references to the authentic dance on YouTube. Producer Diplo's label Mad Decent, which released Baauer's "Harlem Shake" track, had already faced scrutiny from artists like Venus X for incorporating underground artists of color's sounds into EDM without proper credit.

The meme studies community also weighed in on the relationship between cultural appropriation and internet culture. U.S. artist Aria Dean argued that Black communities' contribution to contemporary meme culture had been "culpably ignored by most scholars," calling the siphoning of symbolic and financial capital "just the latest episode in a long history of cultural appropriation". Dean connected this to the origins of deep fried memes on Black Twitter, where the practice of repeatedly screenshotting and re-filtering images until they degrade originated as a distinctly Black online aesthetic.

Polling data revealed stark racial divides in how people perceived appropriation. According to survey data cited by the Encyclopedia of Opinion, white adults in America were twice as likely as Black Americans to say that a blackface Halloween costume is acceptable. While 53% of Black respondents said blackface is never acceptable, only 35% of white respondents agreed.

The "appreciation vs. appropriation" framework emerged as a common attempt to find middle ground. Britannica noted that "cultural appreciation" appeared as a counter-concept, suggesting that wearing a traditional lehenga to an Indian wedding might be appreciation, while wearing it as a Halloween costume would be appropriation. Critics on both sides found this distinction unsatisfying: some argued it was too subjective, while others argued it still centered the feelings of the appropriator rather than the appropriated.

Fun Facts

The term "cultural appropriation" didn't get a formal dictionary definition until 2017, despite being used in academia since the 1980s.

Margaret Cho compared Gwen Stefani's Harajuku Girls to "blackface" in 2005, writing "racial stereotypes are really cute sometimes, and I don't want to bum everyone out by pointing out the minstrel show".

The 2013 Harlem Shake meme craze generated an estimated 4,000 new videos uploaded to YouTube per day at its peak, effectively burying the original Harlem Shake dance in search results.

Harvard's Martin Puchner found that only 7% of incoming first-year students expressed interest in any humanities subject, a decline from the low 20s just a decade earlier, which partly motivated his book on cultural borrowing throughout history.

Jeremy Lam's "prom dress" tweet generated such universal mockery that one observer called him "a uniter, not a divider" for bringing people of all backgrounds together in agreement that he was wrong.

Derivatives & Variations

"My culture is NOT your goddamn prom dress"

The 2018 tweet by Jeremy Lam became a standalone meme template, with users replacing "prom dress" with absurd objects for comedic effect[12].

"Appreciation vs. Appropriation" debate format

A recurring discussion template where users present paired examples and argue about where the line falls, often cycling through the same arguments[1].

Blackfishing callouts

A specific sub-genre focused on white celebrities or influencers adopting Black physical features through makeup, tanning, and hairstyles[1].

Spirit animal discourse

The casual use of "spirit animal" as internet slang (e.g., "pizza is my spirit animal") drew pushback from Indigenous communities who consider the concept sacred, spawning its own appropriation sub-debate[3].

Deep fried memes connection

Scholar Aria Dean and others drew explicit connections between the aesthetics of deep fried memes, their Black Twitter origins, and broader patterns of cultural appropriation in meme culture[9].

Frequently Asked Questions