Let’s start by building a scenario. You are in college, and the football player down the block is throwing a costume party. So, you go out and buy a bunch of “trendy” clothes from Forever 21 in an attempt to throw together your best Nicki Minaj.

...that is called cultural appropriation.

But cultural appropriation is negative and you didn’t mean anything by the costume and you’re certainly not racist, so what did you do wrong?

Well, cultural appropriation happens when someone adopts aspects of a culture that is not their own.

The issue is that because you are wearing a costume, you can take it off at the end of the night. It doesn’t define you. While on the other hand, people of that culture are criticized every day for exactly what you are trying to exemplify.

Let me give you a real-life example. Nicki Minaj dropped her music video for “Anaconda” in August of 2014 and it smashed records. She even beat out Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” for the most views in 24 hours. She got 19.6 million.

This summer, when it came to The Video Music Awards, MTV left out Anaconda for video of the year. She wasn't even nominated and her video was considered "too vulgar." In fact, her video was scooted to best hip-hop video. Figures. While on the other hand, Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake it Off’ - that broke NO SUCH RECORD - was nominated (and she won, too). Let’s recap that video.

Ok, so Taylor decided to surround herself with girls of many different ethnic backgrounds twerking and drowned herself in gold jewelry. Cultural appropriation all over the place. But don't get me wrong - Taylor didn’t mean anything racist or negative by her video. In fact, it seemed as if she was celebrating the culture. According to many interviews, she was just trying to emulate different styles of dance (that she couldn’t do). So no harm no foul right?

Nope.

The real problem here is that Taylor Swift was rewarded for the same exact cultural behavior that dismissed Nicki Minaj’s video from winning video of the year - and it wasn’t her culture to be rewarded for.

This is just one simple example, but cultural appropriation is all around us, and it's important to be aware of that.