High and low culture are socially constructed terms. What does this mean for cultural appropriation? Oftentimes, something that is widely regarded as low culture is co-opted by white people and turned into high culture – but only when used in an appropriated context. It becomes redefined when it is appropriated, and often has it’s cultural significance completely ignored as it becomes commodified and used to make money. Take hip hop – no one is saying that white people cannot enjoy, consume or even participate in hip-hop culture. But it becomes a problem when white people are the ones benefiting from it, without acknowledging its history. For example, Kim Kardashian routinely appropriates from Black culture and POC culture, and has been accused of ‘blackfishing,’ or using makeup to appear as if she was a woman of color online for personal benefit. Cornrows are high culture and couture when Kim Kardashian wears them, but low culture or even unprofessional when a Black woman wears them. But the important thing here is not actually the hairstyle Kardashian is wearing – though it is not insignificant – it’s that Kardashian gets compensated, monetary and socially, for appropriating Black culture, while Black women are passed over. It is possible to enjoy other people’s culture without appropriation: do it respectfully, do your research, and don’t make money off of it when it is not yours to capitalize on. Most people are happy to share parts of their culture with you, and even educate you on its significance or history. It is important to not isolate yourself within an echo-chamber and to diversify your experiences beyond what you grew up surrounded by, but always engage with respect.

We make snap judgments about people, using heuristics and bias. This lets our brain make decisions quickly, but they can also be wrong. Often, we recognize patterns and have a hunch before we even start thinking about a problem. I thought this was an interesting connection to the Implicit Association Test and the self-defeating stereotype with women in math. Not only do snap judgments come from others about you or from you about others, but they can also come from you about yourself. However, you can utilize these stereotypes to change your implicit bias test results – I read about a man who took the race implicit bias test and found he had a slightly unfavorable association with Black people, but took the test again after reading about really skilled Black athletes and found that the association shifted to favorable, however, this effect was temporary. Just like the self-defeating stereotype, this is an act of priming.

I took the gender association with Science or Liberal Arts Implicit Bias Test, and had no correlation for either. I wonder if this is due to the fact that I was initially planning to go into engineering, and eventually switched to Liberal Arts. I participated on my school’s robotics team and routinely heard ‘Women in STEM’ as a buzzword, and so I thought I might have positive associations with women and science. This was not necessarily the case, as I just had a hard time matching things in general. Most of my best friends are all engineers or work in some form of science, and there is a pretty even distribution across gender there as well, so that might have also contributed to my neutral results.

I also completed the Gay-Straight Implicit Bias Test and found a moderate automatic bias in favor of gay people. I was a little surprised that it was moderate, as I had expected no distinction or slightly favorable bias towards gay people. I wonder to what extent Pride in the media has impacted my immediate associations, as many of the ‘good words’ I associated with celebration – something that has become more and more prominent in media over the years. I was particularly surprised by the introduction question that asked if I knew a gay person. It hadn’t even crossed my mind that you could get to college without ever meeting a gay person – though I suppose you might have not known that someone was gay. I was also curious about the lack of bisexual representation in the survey, though it might be difficult to account for, I think there should be an implicit bias test for monosexuality vs bisexuality. Biphobia is a huge problem coming from both straight people and LGBTQ+ communities, and I think it would be interesting to be able to map out that implicit bias.

I found the comparative of normative ethics to religion to be very interesting. I was raised with a lot of Unitarian Universalist principles in my family. Although we often did not attend sermons, it was still something my parents used to explain the world to me as a kid. I always had a hard time understanding how someone could be so confident that their religion was the right one when there were so many choices. I wonder if that somehow affected my tendency to be willing to hear out ideas in their entirety, even when I don’t agree with them. I also had a difficult time understanding why people relied on religious reasons to be ethical, and I wondered if the goal to get into heaven corrupted the moral action. The TV show The Good Place had a really interesting response to this question and exploring the relationship between intention and consequence in ethics. 

On an unrelated note, I think the relationship of normative ethics and relational ethics to imperialism to be particularly interesting. A lot of feminists rely on normative ethics in a neo-liberal frame-work to justify excluding multiculturalism and condemning cultural practices that they perceive oppress women regardless of what women in those countries think (ex. the veil in Muslim countries). Meanwhile, relational ethics can also be used to justify actual oppression of women. I think this just goes to show how any ethics code could be used to justify actions that I would consider morally abject, and that neither is universally applicable.