Essay On Cultural Appropriation

Cultural appropriation is one of the many controversial topics that is talked among one another even to this day. Just over these past few years, there have already been many discussions and arguments regarding many people changing something about a certain culture that is not theirs; for example, clothing companies, food entrepreneur's, models, and etc. Many people find this very offensive and rude towards their culture, but there are others that feel as if their success means more than the people and the culture that they are disrespecting. While enhancing and modifying things like clothing and dishes of a certain culture into someone else's own version is not necessarily a bad thing, but most of the cases are involved with enhancements to

In around March of last year, the Whitney Museum located in New York opened its biennial exhibition of contemporary American art. As it is full of diversity, it is said to be very exciting. One of the featured paintings in this exhibition is of a famous photograph of a dead black boy, known as Emmett Till, which was drawn by a woman named Dana Schutz. In the mid-1950s, Till was tortured and beaten to death by redneck bigots. To show the world could see what had happened to Till, his mother chose to display his ruined face, which is why Schutz’s painting is called ‘Open Casket’. When the original picture was published in a magazine before, it is said that it helped change America, but Schutz decided to recreate it into a painting to show that America still needs to change. While it sounds very praiseworthy, since the exhibitions doors opened, there has been many people who believe that the painting should be destroyed, as many feel as if Schutz is guilty of ‘cultural appropriation’ just because she is white and a member of the fortunate class. To culturally appropriate writers and artists does not make any sense, especially when these people would not seem to realize that the world they would want to live in would be one without art. These people that feel as if the painting should be destroyed would suggest to kill