Twerk Miley Twerk

Miley Cyrus appropriates black culture for profit & as a woman of color, I find it extremely offensive. Like, I'm entirely fine with people learning culture & observing behaviors that exist outside of their set of experiences; however, when you exploit that culture to reshape your image, it becomes problematic. Her fixation with being "ratchet" & twerking marginalizes & undermines an entire community. twerking has existed upwards of a decade & has been sensationalized on YouTube for quite some time. it's ridiculous that it took a little white girl to add validity to the movement & deem the style of dance worthy for mainstream culture (so much so that it's now even defined in the dictionary.) Miley is a privileged white woman who's dressing up & trying to embody an oppressed minority culture without being burdened by the same struggles & consequence. all the "ratchet" she's trying to portray is apart of someone's lived experience. she literally told mike will made it "I just want something that just feels Black." blackness isn't an accessory & her representation & perception of "blackness" is demeaning & upsetting on so many levels. even though Black music/culture is so popular, African Americans, the originators of the culture, are still suffering from institutionalized racism & this context is important in considering what Miley's doing. Miley can perpetuate this image & go home & live her privileged life & eventually escape the image & dismiss it as "young & dumb" or "growing up," but do we afford the same luxury to Rihanna & "ratchet" women of color? white performers like Miley (or even dating as far back as Elvis Presley) feel like they can assume culture without paying their dues to the genre, showing respect to the history or the music, or having the support of the originators of the culture itself. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that Miley cease to enjoy hip-hop and that white artists are all disdainful.There are artist who experiment successfully with elements of another culture and in good taste. Justin Timberlake reaches across cultural demographics & with his collaboration with the Neptunes on his JT album was able to flourish within black culture. The key in avoiding appropriation is respecting the history that helped cultivate the culture, acknowledging your privilege, and knowing your place within the cultural community. Miley's shameless displays of insensitive, obnoxious & obtuse gestures in the spirit of "publicity" only confirms her lack of understanding. I'm thinking at some point she wore a grill & twerked in the presence of like Juicy J or Usher and no one said anything so she figured that black people must love my antics. Her father sang country music. She's rich, white, & was on Disney. She even once claimed to have never heard a Jay-Z song (despite the fact that it was a lyric in her "Party in the USA" single.) How does one go from not knowing one of the godfather's of hip-hop to attempting to embody black culture? more importantly, how the fuck does Rihanna feel though?

& because I cannot let anyone think that the fuckery that MTV let ensue was twerking, i leave you with some actual twerking to a Juicy J song:

******i'd also like to note, after the VMA's i was entirely disappointed that Robin Thicke's roll in that tom foolery was entirely negated & dismissed. shame on him as well.