White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation

There are no easy answers, there are no quick solutions. So sums up Lauren Michele Jackson’s forceful, nuanced, and timely essay collection White Negroes. Turning her critical back on kneejerk reactions to cultural appropriation claims stemming from (mostly) ‘white people … paranoid that people of colour see appropriation in everything’ (p. 2), Jackson recentres the discussion around questions of power from where it should have never strayed. Appropriation, according to Jackson, is both everywhere and inevitable, ‘so long as peoples interact with other peoples, by choice or by force, cultures will intersect and mingle and graft onto each other’ (pp. 2–3)....