My Culture: A Short Story

Growing up with an african family was interesting to say the least, my mother and father always cooking, Liberian films, music, and stories. I loved the stories of my culture no matter how ridiculous they were. With stories ranging from snake holy water, to police refusing to work unless you bribed them, and my mother 's long running physic scam, I was always intrigued. My mother and i being the fabulous people that we are were watching, a fashion week live stream, when she yelled chofee ku, which if you don’t know means robber. And she was right, what we saw was horrifying. People dressed in our traditional liberian and nigerian clothes and headdresses, yet the people under the headdresses weren’t people like me yet, white women and men. And

It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it before, the problem was I’d seen it before, in memes and angry instagram post, and used as a joke in our daily lives to call someone over sensitive or just as a straight up joke. My mother often told me the story of the lack african firman. In her village the firman would come to the burning house to asses the fire, see how many buckets of water they needed. Then go back into station and get the buckets of water needed. The problem is when they returned they realized the house now needed twice the amount of water to be put out. This ideology has taken root in our society where, in our society we often times take words like cultural appropriation, once used to convey a serious point and through media convolute them so much through sites like urban dictionary so that there point is no there strengths are underestimated much like the fires in my mother villages. So let 's come up with a definition for this, that this isn’t on urban dictionary. In richard a rogers book titled, from Cultural Exchange to Transculturation Cultural appropriation is often mentioned but undertheorized in critical rhetorical and media studies. Defined as the use of a culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, cultural appropriation can be placed into 4 categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation. Or in english by activist

Cultural appropriation and the ideologies around them has lasting effects on all people of color. But in our society where we all we have stories to tell and bare, we need to realize that instead of hurting cultures through our actions we need honor them through our acknowledgement. Because this world we live in should not be one where a boy and his sister feel alienated from their own culture, nor a mother feel like her culture is being stripped away, on a