Cultural appropriation. A polarizing pair of words, saturating the intellectual discourse on the racial divide that has consumed the American thought process as we march toward the end of this decade. Put in the simplest of terms, the phrase defines the act of one culture absorbing attributes of another without giving the proper credit due the originator of those stolen characteristics. An example can be found in the wave of avocado dishes on the menu of a wide variety of restaurants, bars, and fast food chains.

This trend appeared at the beginning of the current decade. Subway introduced the option for customers to add avocado to their subs in early June 2011. A report from “USA Today” came out a week prior with the headline “Subway Jumps on the Avocado Bandwagon.”

Avocados are a large part of Hispanic cultural dishes, a fact known to almost any American. Yet the image of Spanish people is that of a freeloader, someone who is lazy, criminal, and uncivilized. Our current president reinforced this notion when he announced his candidacy for the Oval Office, calling Mexicans “drug dealers” and “rapists.” He told the nation that “some” were “good people.”

This same rhetoric of criminalizing the majority of a group of people has been applied to the Afro-American community. Popular slang created by black people in urban communities is casually adopted in all manner of white social settings. CNN anchors have been known to utter the phrase “throwing shade” while reporting the news. And although black culture may be in vogue, the black body is still seen as dangerous, deadly, and ignorant of all social grace. The black community is responsible for many cultural norms of today, especially those related to the youth scene of pop culture. Perhaps nothing, though, has been more socially impactful as the word “thick.”

The term “thick” appeared in rap songs at the dawn of the new millennium. Ludacris used it in his 2003 smash hit “Stand Up.” It is used to describe women with hourglass figures that flare out more at the base, giving them wide hips, thick thighs, and bigger butts. All of these physical traits are predominantly natural, genealogical traits of the darker races. About a decade ago, “thick” experienced a migration within the black community. Overweight black women, in an effort to boost their self-esteem in a world where being thin is synonymous with attraction, began applying it to themselves.

Around the same time, “thick” settled into the white community through rap music, which the white youth had indoctrinated into their range of genres. White women, feeling the same urgency as their darker counterparts, adopted the same strategy to deflect criticism of their bodies.

America, already in the grips of the big butt culture which it had appropriated from black music, was primed for social change. Over the years, being “thick” became normalized, as white women who fit the original definition of the word found liberation from the cages of socially conditioned self-conscious mindsets. With the approval of this final demographic, the way was paved for Ashley Graham to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated.

This is in no way a criticism of Ashley Graham. Nor is it an attempt to exclude white women from feeling good about their bodies. Everyone is entitled to feel comfortable in their own skin. The issue, however, is the lack of credit. In all of the media buzz surrounding Graham’s seductive cover photo, and as the nation celebrates this momentous occasion of social progress, the black women, and black people in general, were entirely absent from the praise.
A generation from now, Graham will be seen as a pioneer. And society, having absorbed “thickness” into normalcy, will forget black people were its inception.