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The critical concept of cultural appropriation has profoundly changed public discourses on cultural exchange. Drawing attention to the colonialist dynamics which sometimes inform even ostensibly benign forms of intercultural contact, it has challenged the idea of cross-cultural borrowing as an unqualified positive. By bringing to the fore concerns and challenges experienced by cultural minorities, it has provided impulses for a multilateral renegotiation of intercultural relationships in the postcolonial era. But by rigidly settling on race as an epistemic category, the cultural appropriation debate has reached a conceptual impasse. This article traces the critical movement’s struggles to define cultural membership beyond biological ancestry, arguing that its inherently contradictory premises – the strategy of pursuing diversity through monocultural segmentation, racial equality through codifying of minority statuses, and political allyship through deprecation of outsiders’ involvement – limit its efficacy as a systematic decolonizing method. Especially by implicitly reaffirming symbolic Whiteness as the standard against which other cultural expressions are set, it breathes new life into the very same discriminatory constructs it seeks to overcome.

Keywords: cultural appropriation; social construction of race; postcolonial reconciliation; decolonialization; culture and globalization; US political culture; progressive movements in the US; US popular culture