Co-Opting: Somebody Loses

The idea of co-opting is very interesting to me, and honestly I never really realized how widespread it was. Co-opting seems like huge circle, it never ends; somebody is always borrowing symbols and ideas from other cultures and turning them into their own. In lecture when we discussed co-opting in depth, the idea that really caught my eye was the idea of co-opting in the music world, especially with “race music” and the “Bo Diddly Beat”. I always knew that themes, and beats, were so called “borrowed” but I never realized for how long this has been going on. It’s funny to me because now they call it “sampling”, yet in my opinion, it’s still something that takes away from the original, I see it more as stealing rather than borrowing.

The biggest issue that I see with co-opting is that it takes away from the original culture, I feel like it makes the creators lose credit, or even leads to them being forgotten. Co-opting is diminishing to many cultures in some ways. I remember learning a couple months ago about the origin of the piñata and the game double-dutch. Many people believe that the piñata came from Mexico, and many people believe that double-dutch is strictly part of the African American culture, or came from Africa, when in actuality, both assumptions are wrong. The piñata was essentially co-opted from the Chinese culture, and double-dutch from the Egyptian culture, and due to that co-optation it seems like parts of the original cultures have been diminished or forgotten, and they have definitely lost the credit for creation. Like we talked about in lecture, co-opting is fun or beneficial for some and condensing and negative for others, but the ones that it is fun for seems to only be the ones that are committing the co-optation. Co-optation is basically people gaining popularity at the expense of causing a culture to lose a part of itself.

Co-opting is really big when it comes to school mascots, and usually a lot of controversy comes with it. The majority of school mascots that are co-opted are based on stereotypes of Native American cultures, the Washington Redskins, Chief Illiniwek of University of Illinois, and the Kansas City Cheifs. These mascots not become representative of the teams but they also become representative of the tribes that they are borrowed from which takes away from the authenticity of the Native American culture. When co-opting is used in sports such as these, it makes these cultures subject to mockery as well. In my opinion co-opting is only positive when it comes to popularity, but it seems as though popularity is something that the American society is very preoccupied with. Yes, symbols are polysemic, so we can all see them in different ways, which is something that is natural, but when things like co-opting cause cultural symbols to be polysemic in a way that is diminishing to the culture it becomes an issue. Of course, co-opting will continue on, as I said before, it’s a never ending circle, but I believe that in the end, maybe nothing will really be authentic and original.