Blurring the Lines of Cultural Appropriation in American Pop Culture

The 2013 MTV Video Music Awards took place on August 25. A couple of months later, this relatively unimportant event continues to be debated, argued and analyzed by the media and general public, all in part to a raunchy mash-up performance by Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke. Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” and Cryus’s “We Can’t Stop” have been named two of the hottest songs of the summer, and the two artists cranked up the heat at the VMAs in an over-the-top, hypersexual performance that left critics and fans reeling and tossing around allegations of sexism, over-sexualization and racism.

The media initially harped on Cyrus, calling her performance disgusting, while putting less blame on 36-year-old Thicke for his equally troubling performance. An article in The New York Times went so far as to describe Cyrus’s performance as containing “plenty of lewdness and a molesting of Robin Thicke,” placing all of the accountability on the 20-year-old woman. Given the argument that “Blurred Lines” sounds a bit “rapey” to some listeners, it’s interesting that this particular New York Times writer chose to accuse Miley of “molesting” Thicke, as if he wasn’t part of the spectacle himself.

While much debate has occurred around the over-sexualization of both stars’ music videos and their VMA performance, less, though some, has been discussed about the potentially racist undertones of each artist’s actions and lyrics. Both Cyrus and Thicke, in separate attempts to express sexuality, have managed to appropriate black culture in such a way as to perpetuate stereotypes of the hyper-sexualized black woman: the Jezebel. Cyrus’s VMA performance is packed with allusions to black female stereotypes and Robin Thicke’s music video, though featuring two white women, prominently features a hypersexualized black female dancer — both telling examples of how deeply rooted racism is in our society, particularly in the entertainment industry.

The image of the hypersexual black female stems from a long history of the white male gaze. According to scholar Jennifer Morgan, when European settlers first arrived in the Americas, they interacted with black women for the first time, and struggled with how to categorize people who appeared wildly different from the pale, delicate figure of the white European female. As is common in history, a binary developed when English writers “conventionally set the black female figure against one that was white — and thus beautiful.” Despite deciding that black women should be less beautiful than white women based on this socially constructed binary, white men still recognized that these black females were desirable; a new image evolved that placed the black woman as “the beautiful woman who is also the monstrous laboring beast.” Black women’s roles were then seen as twofold in the colonization of America: as productive and reproductive bodies, as a labor force and as baby makers. They were dehumanized, and their sole utility became “their ability to produce both crops and other laborers.” Eventually, this dehumanization and hypersexualization of black women led to white men’s justification for enslaving and raping them.

In her VMA performance, Miley Cyrus treats her black dancers as objects, harkening back to the time when black women were treated as less than human — beasts, as an article by Morgan explains. According to an article from the Huffington Post by Anne Theriault, “Miley was, at one point, slapping a faceless black woman on the ass as if she was nothing more than a thing for Miley to dominate and humiliate…[with] barely anyone discussing the fact that Miley’s sexual empowerment…should not come at the cost of degrading black women.” After Cyrus’s performance, many white feminists took to the Internet to defend the “slut-shaming” that came Cyrus’s way, but many of them ignored the obvious racist aspects of the star’s performance. These black female dancers, though they were back-up for Miley Cyrus, were treated as faceless props for the singer to use to demonstrate her twerking abilities. These “black cultural signifiers like twerking [were] used as a means of connoting that Miley’s now wild and dangerous,” said Kia Makarechi for an article in the Huffington Post. Cyrus, who claimed in an interview that she wanted a “black” sound and style to her music, associates “black” with “sexual,” thus directly playing into this racist Jezebel stereotype.

Thicke, while not necessarily performing race in the same way, still ends up negatively appropriating black culture. Dubbed by the New York Times as “White Soul’s Leader,” Thicke has been criticized for “Blurred Lines,” as some people claim it sounds too much like “Got to Give It Up,” a popular Marvin Gaye tune. There’s no arguing that Thicke’s sound is based very much off soul music, an originally black genre, but it’s his oversexualization of both himself and of his female dancers that has critics calling foul; Thicke, like Cyrus, associates this hypersexuality with black culture, thus feeding into the stereotypes generated long ago by white European males. Not to mention Thicke’s dehumanization of these women and his controversial lyrics about sexual consent come off as incredibly sexist and chauvinistic.

Cyrus and Thickes’s act at the VMAs was so out of hand that one critic for Vulture called it “a minstrel show routine whose ghoulishness was heightened by Cyrus’s madcap charisma.” Minstrel shows — performances in which whites would put on blackface and imitate blacks often in over exaggerated and derogatory ways — were popular in nineteenth and early twentieth century America. These shows constituted a new, albeit still racist and offensive, way of representing the black body. According to Robert Nowatki in Representing African Americans in Transatlantic Abolitionism and Blackface Minstrelsy, minstrel performers and audiences “often showed a nearly pornographic fascination with black bodies” and “claimed or implied that their representations of African Americans were genuine…constructed through conventionalized performative rituals.” Cyrus and Thicke’s performances were bordering on the pornographic, were extremely fascinated with the representation of black bodies, and in a way can be considered modern day versions of blackface.

Rather than being literal like minstrel shows of the past, the “blackface” in Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke’s performances is figurative. The two artists attempt to act “black” in their singing and performances by creating hypersexual versions of themselves and by perpetuating the stereotypes of overly sexualized black bodies, in particular those of women. Cyrus appropriates urban black culture of our time, trying to incorporate the stylings of contemporary hip hop artists, but rather than do anyone justice, she just offends an entire population. While the lines between cultural appropriation and institutional racism are very blurred in the music industry today, rather than saying “we can’t stop,” we should be saying, “this needs to stop.” •