Loving everything black until it's people.

Cultural Appreciation Vs Appropriation.

I have had this idea for a couple of weeks now: loving everything Black until it’s people.

It was supposed to become a poem.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realised the idea was too heavy for my usual short poetry style. So, naturally, it ended up here on Substack.

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There are some things people seem to love without hesitation.

Music. Fashion. Language. Hairstyles. Humour. Rhythm.

And if you look closely enough, many of the things that shape what we call mainstream culture today carry fingerprints of Black people somewhere in their making. But there is a question that lingers beneath all this admiration:

At what point does loving a culture stop being appreciation and become appropriation?

Because cultural exchange is not inherently bad. Human beings have always borrowed from one another. Food travels. Music evolves. Language slips across borders.

Appreciation can look like curiosity, learning and participation.

Appropriation feels different.

Cultural Appreciation vs Cultural Appropriation.

Cultural appreciation means taking the time to genuinely learn, understand, and respect the traditions, beliefs, and history of a culture different from your own.

Cultural appreciation is engaging with another culture with curiosity, respect and acknowledgement. It understands that culture belongs to people before it becomes aesthetics.

It asks questions, learns context, and makes room for the voices of the people it came from.

Cultural appropriation is the adoption of elements of a marginalized culture by members of a more dominant culture.

Cultural appropriation is taking parts of a culture while disconnecting them from the people, history or meaning attached to them.

Often there is imbalance involved—where something is celebrated once someone else wears it, but the people who created it are still mocked, excluded or punished for the same thing.

The line between the two is not always obvious. The issue is not appreciation. The issue is that appreciation sometimes quietly becomes extraction. And Black culture is an interesting place to look at this. Because people often seem very comfortable loving things associated with Blackness while remaining uncomfortable with Black people themselves.

The music becomes universal.

The slang becomes internet language.

The fashion becomes edgy.

The features become trendy.

Yet somehow the people remain too loud.

Too political.

Too much.

So maybe the question is not: Are people allowed to enjoy cultures outside their own? Maybe the better question is:

What does it mean when people love everything Black until they meet Black people?

Aesthetics are easier to love than people.

People are complicated. They come with context and history and opinions and pain. People ask things of us in ways that are often inconvenient, and sometimes uncomfortable. Aesthetics, on the other hand, ask for almost nothing.

You can enjoy the music without asking where it came from. You can wear the fashion without understanding what it meant. You can borrow the language without listening to the people speaking it. And because of that, it becomes easy to separate the thing from the human being behind it.

But there is something unsettling about how often certain things only seem to become beautiful once distance has been placed between them and the people who created them.

Hair once called distracting becomes editorial. Features once mocked become desirable. Music once dismissed becomes culture. Language once considered improper becomes internet personality. And it makes me wonder what exactly changed, because the things themselves did not.

Nothing changed except who was carrying them.

Which raises a difficult question about what is actually being appreciated. Because it sometimes feels like what is being embraced is not Black culture in its fullness, but carefully selected pieces of it—stripped of context, softened for consumption, and detached from the people they came from.

And maybe that is where appreciation starts to feel less like admiration and more like extraction. Not because culture should never be shared, or because influence does not travel. It always has.

But because it is difficult to call it appreciation when the thing is welcomed while the people remain unwelcome.

It becomes easier to see this pattern when you start paying attention to the details.

Hair is one of the clearest examples. Styles like braids, locs, cornrows, and twists have existed for generations across African and Black diasporic communities. They are not just aesthetic choices; they carry history, practicality, identity, and often protection. Yet in many spaces, the same styles that have been criticized, restricted, or labelled unprofessional on Black people suddenly become fashion-forward when worn by others. The context disappears, but the style remains.

Language moves in a similar way. What is often dismissed as slang when spoken in Black communities slowly finds its way into mainstream speech, music, marketing, and internet culture. It gets rebranded, softened, made palatable. And somewhere along the line, the origin becomes harder to trace, even though the source never really changed.

Music might be the most global example. Entire genres that now dominate global charts are rooted in Black innovation and expression. Yet the further they travel from their origins, the more they are sometimes separated from the communities that built them. The sound remains, but the story behind it becomes optional.

Fashion follows the same rhythm. What begins as street expression or cultural styling is often absorbed into high fashion and rebranded as new, edgy, or avant-garde. It is celebrated most loudly once it has been removed from the spaces it came from.

And none of this exists in isolation. It is not just about borrowing. It is about what happens when the borrowing does not always extend to the people themselves.

Because alongside this admiration, there is often a discomfort that does not disappear.

The same features that become trends can still be met with bias when attached to Black people. The same voices that are sampled, remixed, and imitated can still be dismissed in their original form. The same bodies that shape global culture can still be treated as if they are interruptions to it.

And that contradiction is hard to ignore.

It makes you start to wonder what exactly is being loved.

And maybe that is where the question turns personal.

Because it is easy to talk about culture in the abstract. It is harder to sit with what it means when admiration does not always translate into recognition of the people behind it.

It raises an uncomfortable thought: that sometimes people are not responding to Black culture as something whole and human, but as something fragmented and consumable. Something that can be taken in pieces without having to engage with the fullness of the people those pieces belong to.

And if that is true, then the question is no longer just about culture.

It becomes about perception.

About what it means to see parts of someone clearly, and still not fully see them at all.

And maybe that is the most uncomfortable part of all.

That it is possible to admire what people create, imitate what they do, consume what they produce, and still not fully extend that same regard to them as people.

Because culture is not separate from its creators. It is shaped by their histories, their struggles, their joy, their survival. It carries them, whether we acknowledge it or not.

So when we say we love a culture, it is worth asking what that love actually includes.

Does it extend to the people it came from?

Or does it stop at the parts that are easiest to enjoy, easiest to wear, easiest to share?

Maybe there is no neat resolution to that question. Maybe there does not need to be.

But it is still worth sitting with.