Cultural appropriation hurts; cultural appreciation heals.
Learning
Cultural appropriation hurts; but cultural appreciation heals.
The story I am going to share may be a difficult one for some—especially for siblings who may find themselves in this story in a way that feels uncomfortable. If that turns out to be you, please be gentle with yourself.
As I share this story I know that I, too, have been part of cultural appropriation, and surely still am. In our own path, there is pain that each of us has to must go through as we heal from colonization and racism.
And my story has some very good parts.
I came to the United Church in my early 30s, and singing from Voices United helped me honour who I am by connecting with worship music from Black, African, and African-American sources. As a light-skinned Black person born and raised in mainstream White dominant society in the Canadian prairies, I had few opportunities to engage with Black people outside my family, and the internalized racism passed on through mixed-race generations of my family of origin made it hard for me to reach out and make the connections for which I hungered for.
But now in church these hymns spoke to me—hymns like “Siyahamba,” “I’m Gonna Live So God Can Use Me,” and “I’ve Got Peace Like a River.” Their rhythmic cadence and straightforward spirituality spoke to me and strengthened me as they sang hope in the face of adversity, love in the face of fear, life in the face of death. And they connected me to the religion and the resistance of ancestors who held the flame of faith glowing in the oppression, and the oppression did not overcome it.
When we sang these hymns in church, I felt acknowledged and inspired. I and my people were being honoured.
And to think that some of the White people around me thought these songs were important enough to include them in their hymnal and their worship…in our hymnal and our worship.
And then, one day, something different happened.
I was a student in theological education, and we sang “I’ve Got Peace like a River.” I don’t know if my classmates knew it was an African American spiritual. But they had actions. The actions seemed to give them joy, but they also seemed to take away from the deep spiritual meaning of the music.
I felt like the music was being trivialized—but it was not just the music. The people, and the struggle, and the faith were also being trivialized.
My people. Our struggle. Our faith.
And then it quickly went from bad to worse. On the word “soul,” they made a pun and pointed to the bottom of their foot.
I think the hardest thing about it was that these actions seemed to bring my siblings in Christ such joy, and at the time. I couldn’t begin to imagine how to tell them that the actions brought me such pain. I began to wonder if it was just me. Was I being oversensitive?
No.
Many years later I finally have words to name what I had encountered: cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation happens when members of a dominant group take something from another culture without properly recognizing or respecting that culture.
Cultural appropriation hurts. But cultural appreciation heals. Appreciation was what I found when I first sang these songs in worship.
And that’s what I invite you to share in now.
Faith Reflection
Read, sing, or listen to “Peace Like a River” (Trad. African American Spiritual, Voices United 577) with a prayerfulness, holding in your mind an awareness of the presence of God. As you sing or speak these words, let them infuse your awareness of whatever struggles you are facing now in your life: the pain, the fear, the anger, the grief, the worries, or whatever else might seem to shake your sense of God’s peace, joy, and love. As you pray these words, invite the presence of God into the midst of the storms of your life.
Living It Out
If you encounter a song that comes out of a community that has been colonized, racialized, and trivialized by dominant society, whether you identify as part of that community or not, please take time to acknowledge the source of the song.
If you don’t know it, take time to learn. And when you sing, hold in your being the lived experience of the cloud of witnesses who, with pain and joy, and struggle and celebration, gave birth to the song.
—Thérèse Samuel (she/her) is an ordained minister in The United Church of Canada. She currently works as the Minister for Right Relations and Social Justice across three regional councils: Antler River Watershed, Western Ontario Waterways, and Horseshoe Falls.
This reflection originally appeared in 40 Days on Anti-Racism 2022.