The Noble Or Ignoble Savage: A Cultural Appropriation Of American Culture

Throughout American history, the population of the country has become more and more diverse, and with this growth in diversity comes the growth of the diversity of cultures in this society. However, cultural appropriation has become a problem as the American society became more and more diverse throughout the course of the years. Cultural appropriation is the theft of one culture’s intellectual property or key beliefs, generally by a larger culture, and then this larger culture using what is taken from a minority culture incorrectly or inappropriately. Cultural appropriation perpetuates many of the stereotypes found within American society, and it also is a main contributor to the misinterpretations of minority cultures within the country.

Even though America has become quite the diverse place with diverse cultures, the cultural appropriation found within the American society contributes to the loss of multiple minority culture’s identity.

Native Americans are one of the minority groups most heavily impacted by cultural appropriation. From offensive sports, many American Indians feel as though their cultural identities are lost in the mass of stereotypes and false representations of them in popular culture. In literature and film, Indians are too often portrayed as some variation of “the Noble or Ignoble Savage” (Gordon, 30), violent and uneducated, and it is easy to imagine how this negative representation inspires resentment in the Native American community, who have no interest in having their cultures and peoples being reduced to mere savages,

The cultural appropriation in which Americans take pieces of African culture without even acknowledging where it came from greatly reduces the identity of this culture, and it makes the African American culture seem less unique and special than it is. One of the best examples is with an African cloth called kente, and this cloth represents royalty and each square of the kente “tells a part of the story or represents a character of the weaver” (Hinton), and it once was made in great quality. However, only Ghanan families today have a kente made of good quality that is sacred because through cultural appropriation, it became common in the American society. Kente is a sacred cloth to Africans, but the cultural appropriation of African culture lead to this cloth being mass produced in America and with a poorer quality than once was. Kente, a part of African and African American culture, is taken and turned into this common cloth of poorer quality, and this diminishes the cultural identity of African Americans because now a key part of their culture is common and normal due to cultural appropriation. Then, there are the blues, a type of song developed by African American originally that many white American tried to appropriate from African American to only increase their wealth and fame while at the same diminishing the culture of African