Can Black Creatives Exploit the Poor? 🤔

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After he tweeted about Bertrand Cooper's viral Current Affairs article "Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?," we invited Very Smart Brothas co-founder Damon Young to dialogue with Cooper about his piece. The two pop culture commentators debate whether it's a problem that so few poor Black Americans are able to create art about poor Black folk -- even though that version of "the Black experience" is increasingly marketable as an avenue for White catharsis in the age of Black Lives Matter. As tragedies like George Floyd's death open the door for "Black content," how concerned should we be that creative opportunities flow to elite, often Ivy League Black folks rather than members of communities like the one George Floyd came from? Do affluent Black creators have an obligation to disclose the gap between their own life experiences and the cultural products they produce? Is it "right" for Dave Chapelle or Donald Glover allow their audiences to assume they're "from the streets", or is it appropriative for them to profit off of assumed "authenticity?" Must a creator share the class identity of the characters they produce? Is the Black middle class sufficiently precarious that it's "entitled" to tell all Black stories? We tackle these questions and more on this week's episode of Bad Faith.

Read Cooper’s article here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/07/who-actually-gets-to-create-black-pop-culture

Find Brie’s cultural appropriation article here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/the-question-of-cultural-appropriation