Diaspora Wars Reactivated: No, Adele does not Get a Pass for Cultural Appropriation

Grammy-award winning singer Adele stirred social media into a frenzy over a recent Instagram post during Carnival week in the UK. Pictured in a bikini top of the Jamaican flag, tie-dyed pants and golden feathers, the British entertainer completed her backline costume with Bantu-knots, a traditional, yet popular African hairstyle.

“Happy what would be Notting Hill Carnival my beloved London,” she wrote in the caption, signed with British & Jamaican flag emojis.

Social media feverishly responded to Adele’s ensemble. What started with jokes, such as some of her famous song lyrics recapitulated into Jamaican patois or comparisons to Chet Hanks and the retweets of a Tik-tok video of a white woman flagrantly attempting to buss ah wine, sharply veered to in-fighting among the Black diaspora.

Virtual shouting matches ensued for most of the day, as Jamaican Twitter made light of Adele’s costume, citing Carnival and UK culture as context and expressing their pride and approval of Adele reppin’ their flag.

Black Twitter (primarily African American Twitter) had a different take, still providing jokes but noting Adele’s look as cultural appropriation.    

Pop culture happenings and events such as these have ignited exasperating feuds over Black identity, culture, history, and ownership. Frankly, it’s bullshit.

Adele’s half-assed fashion statement was silly, inappropriate and wrong, regardless of her “tip of the hat” intent. It was more kindling for the long-stay conversations held around cultural theft, and the appropriation that Adele decided to participate in. 

Whiteness can cosplay and limbo its rass from one culture to the next, one ethnicity, and hairstyle to the next, without real repercussions. White women can access profit, opportunities and accolades while they role-play and try-on the “character” of Blackness, and West Indian culture, without claiming any responsibility to it.

This becomes one of many entry points for the commodification of our Caribbean cultural products, sounds, and imagery. 

In the context of Notting Hill Carnival, initiated by Afro-Trinidadian activist and organizer Claudia Jones and founded by British community activist Rhaune Laslett, some will posit Adele as merely showing appreciation and love for a Caribbean cultural event that is available to all. Besides, she grew up in Tottenham. A significant percentage of the community are African and Afro-Caribbean. But Adele’s proximity to Black-British/Afro-Caribbean people and our cultural aesthetics is not a permission slip for impersonation.

Notting Hill Carnival and the other UK-born Caribbean Carnivals that preceded it, akin to the very first Caribbean Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago, was birthed out of resistance. The Notting Hill Race Riots during the late 1950s sparked unrest and division, as Caribbean communities experienced racial hostility, harassment, discrimination and violence from the white working class across London. Under a far-right movement, British politician and fascist Oswald Mosley sought to keep Caribbean immigrants out of Britain, pushing for forced expatriation.

Over 50 years later, those same violent, anti-immigrant sentiments (and policies) erupted into the Windrush scandal, where swaths of Caribbean nationals have been denied their British citizenship and deported. How easily we overlook the evolving mistreatment and disregard of the Windrush Generation and their descendants in the midst of celebration.

As complex and nuanced as our Black stories are, colonization and global white supremacy always seems to hold a narrative as uninvited storytellers. And some of us gladly gives the pen and paper.

Selective justification for appropriation of both Caribbean and African cultures, gives license for whiteness to further indulge, partake, exploit, steal, memeify and garner social capital and credit for our Black-owned things (i.e. Bantu-knots hairstyle, and a Jamaican flag, established on the day of independence from Britain in 1962).  

We can big up and uplift Adele for looking foolish on Zuckberg-owned IG, given her status of success, money, power, visibility, and whiteness, while Jamaicans are literally banned from wearing dreadlocks in public school. We can laugh at Chet Hanks for making a mockery of Jamaican patois. But let it be someone of a deemed “lower” social or racial stratum and their validation, and our respect for it, is null.

And for those giving Adele a “free pass”, it screams “pick me” energy. Screams.