Whether it’s Kim Kardashian referring to her cornrows as Bo Derek braids or Johnny Depp’s recent Dior campaign featuring a Sioux warrior performing a war dance, it’s undeniable that cultural appropriation has been hitting the headlines recently. While most of these highly publicised cases focus on appropriating a particular facet of a minority culture, xenocentrism is defined as an all-encompassing preference for the people, significant others, products, style, culture, and food of others, rather than of one’s own. People often try to frame xenocentrism as a compliment, but as an exclusive, sweeping preference for another culture, its people and products, then it’s firmly underpinned by stereotyping. A xenocentric mindset assumes that a group all have the same appearance, style and tastes etc, otherwise there would not be anything to prefer. This is dehumanising, because it fails to credit group members with their individuality. It’s particularly dangerous when applied to oppressed minority groups, because stereotyping has been used so viciously against them in the past.
From personal experience, the conduct of people who have a xenocentric relationship to my Caribbean culture has always left me feeling very uncomfortable at the least. There is a moment when it becomes evident that your blackness is more important to a person than your individuality, and an even scarier realisation that the person is confused by the fact that you are not grateful. I’ve had people who have a xenocentric mindset be so caught up in stereotypes that they have amongst many more things been baffled by the fact that hip hop is not my favourite music genre, tried to insist that I should go get my hair braided and regularly acquired a blaccent (black accent) mid conversation – while giving me knowing looks.
Beyond blatant stereotyping there have also been incidents that are simply bizarre, like someone asking to accompany me to my hairdressers while not wanting or needing a haircut (I’m assuming that this was to observe black people together like on some sort of ‘safari’). In the main, the most insulting behaviour comes from those who feel the need to try and prove their entitlement to appropriate my culture by trying to ‘one up’ me with facts about my own identity. Yes, this happens.
This behaviour may seem trivial and even amusing to some extent, but it is far from harmless, because there is a very serious side to the stereotyping in particular. Xenocentrism is really concerned with the romanticisation of peoples. Stereotypes that seem positive are often the focal point of the mindset, but even framing black people from a positive perspective can have negative consequences. While Jordan Peele’s widely celebrated film Get Out (2017), may seem extreme and fantastical, the notion of stealing black bodies to be “stronger, faster, cooler…”, as one of the members of the body snatching cult in the film exclaims, really is informed by clichés focusing on a romantic view of blackness.
On the surface, these do sound like compliments, and in the real-world black people are not in danger of being abducted by a body snatching cult, but this almost ‘superhuman’ conception of black people does have consequences. A study found that 50% of medical students have false beliefs about the biology of black people, including thinking that black people have a higher tolerance to pain. There was also a correlation between medical students holding these false beliefs and going on to under-treat black patients presenting with pain.
In the main, even if the stereotype seems positive, it’s detrimental because the act of denying people their individuality is so dehumanising. It’s the mindset of lumping members of a group all together that is the problem, because there is a suggestion that assumptions about people based on their race are valid. Stereotypes that seem positive promote racially based assumptions, so they also make room for assumptions/stereotypes that are negative. Degrading stereotypes about black people are centuries old, and very few are more disturbing than the myth of the black rapist.
The notion that black men are the oversexed rapists of white women has been a notable presence in popular culture since the abolition of slavery. Birth of a Nation (1915), the first feature length film made in the USA, visualised the myth of the black male rapist so vividly that the film is credited with having brought about the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. These stereotypical presentations are not confined to the past and resonate into the present, with a prime example being Liam Neeson’s recent comments, showing that the consequences of these portrayals are alive and well. After the rape of one of his white female friends by a black man, Liam Neeson admitted to the Independent that he roamed around with a weapon hoping for a situation where he could kill a “black bastard”. Neeson’s actions demonstrate the notion that as a black person we are all responsible for each others’ actions, and this comes directly from stereotyping, because it relies on the idea that we are all the same.
The Liam Neeson controversy is also a reflection of a wider-spread mentality and issue. Jennifer Wriggins of the University of Maine School of Law notes in her 1983 report, Rape, Racism and the Law, that “Black defendants received more severe punishment than white defendants when the victim was white.” There are also studies showing that the stereotype is no factual basis, since interracial rape is rare, and you are much more likely to be raped by someone of your own race.
The black male rapist stereotype is so atrocious that it is likely to be denounced by anyone with a xenocentric relationship to black cultures, but any type of stereotyping including seemingly positive romanticisations are a slippery slope to negative stereotypes. Beyond perilous consequences, stereotyping also reduces the possibilities in a persons’ mind of how and who they can be. I’m not strong, fast or cool, but I’m definitely black! A common counter to all forms of cultural appropriation is often that minorities borrow from the dominant culture, so why can it work the other way around? Maisha Z. Johnson’s article in Everyday Feminism explores how cultural appropriation does not work in the opposite direction because when minorities borrow from dominant cultures this is assimilation. She states that “marginalized people adopt elements of the dominant culture in order to survive conditions that make life more of a struggle if they don’t. Some say, for instance, that non-Western people who wear jeans and Indigenous people who speak English are taking from dominant cultures, too. But marginalized groups don’t have the power to decide if they’d prefer to stick with their customs or try on the dominant culture’s traditions just for fun.” In short, xenocentrism may be fun for some people, but it is still cultural appropriation founded on stereotyping, while conceiving of xenocentrism as a compliment is really just a disguise, which makes it all the more dangerous.
