[youtube M4Do1v5m32g]
For my next post, I was hoping to find a scholarly article that I find particularly interesting. However, I came across a post yesterday about the viral video of Miley Cyrus doing the WOP. In this video, she happens to twerk… I have to admit, when i saw the video a few days before, I did not think much of it. I thought it was cute. She just looks like she’s having fun. Out of curiosity, I opened up the article and after a day on Tumblr, I realized that there were many more just like it and not many WOC took the video as lightly as I did. After reading a bunch of blog posts, I realized that the anger stems from the way it is interpreted when a WOC(Woman of Color) twerks. It is considered overtly sexual, backwards, and this person is usually viewed as the uneducated person who is fine with putting such a video of themselves online. These articles all have the same thing in common, which is the notion that when a white girl outs up a video of herself twerking, it goes viral, it’s cute, and she’s subjected to anything but what a WOC would be subjected to if they did the same.This is interpreted as a double standard based on race and one that seems hurtful to some. This occurrence, for just painted a more practical image of the anger that stems from cultural appropriation. It is the notion that when a black woman does it, she is viewed in a negative light. It all goes back to the discourse about people of color, it is about finding evidence to justify stereotypes. But this is not my point here, my point is that now, I understand even better why the topic of cultural appropriation is such a heated one. Personally, I don’t quite know what to think. However, in this situation, I believe it is not so black and white. Remove the bunny costume and the wop as a whole and would it still be considered cute that Miley twerked for a few minutes? This shows just how difficult it is to classify something as cultural appropriation. Although I am still forming my opinion on this, it is safe to say that I think I understand the discourse around cultural appropriation just a little better.