'Appreciation is just a kinder word for someone who appropriates, in a way that we find favourable.'
Appropriation, capitalism and race: a conversation from the archives with culture critic Lauren Michele Jackson
Today, I am sharing an extract of an archived Shade Podcast conversation from 2019, where Dr. Lauren Michele Jackson & I discuss her book, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue ... and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation.
Jackson is an American culture critic, an assistant Professor of English and African American studies at Northwestern University and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.
White Negroes exposes the new generation of whiteness, which thrives at the expense and borrowed ingenuity of Black culture and explores how this intensifies racial inequality. The book reveals why cultural appropriation, something that's become embedded in our daily lives, deserves serious attention. It's a blueprint for taking wealth and power and ultimately exacerbates the economic, political and social inequity that persists in America. She unravels the racial contradictions lurking behind American culture as we know it, from shapeshifting celebrities and memes gone viral to brazen poets, loveable potheads, and faulty political leaders.
White Negroes summons a re-interrogation of Norman Mailer's infamous 1957 essay of the same title.
You may have recently spied White Negroes in Cord Jefferson's directorial debut and Academy Award winning 2024 comedy drama film, American Fiction. Jackson is currently writing her second book.
lou
Lauren, for the listeners who are not familiar with the issues of appropriation, what is the difference between appreciation and appropriation?
lauren michel jackson
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