"Cultural appropriation" criticism is a pet peeve of mine. I think it's deeply flawed for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are:
It promotes thinking in racial/tribal terms, where we're making just the same sorts of reasoning errors that fuel prejudices such as racism and sexism in the first place; it sees particular cultural tropes as "belonging" to some race, ethnicity, nationality, etc. merely by virtue of people being in that categorization, and it sees people as divorced from the cultural tropes, including artistic tropes, in question merely by not belonging to racial, ethnic, nationality etc. categorization in question.
For example,even though Paul Robeson's dad had been born into slavery (from which he escaped in his teens) Paul sure as hell didn't know what slavery was like. Paul's mom was part of a very prominent Quaker family. Paul's dad, when Paul was born, was a popular reverend in Princeton, New Jersey. Paul went to Rutgers on a full scholarship. He was a football star there. He was on the debate team. He was in the glee club. He was in a fraternity. He was a Cap and Skull. He graduated valedictorian and then he went to law school at Columbia.
Meanwhile Sinatra was born in a tenement to Italian immigrant parents, including a father who was illiterate, at a time in the U.S.when Italians were often seen as an undesirable minority. By some accounts Sinatra was physically (not sexually) abused as a kid. He got kicked out of high school (for "rowdiness") and didn't finish, then he dropped out of a business vocational school. Sinatra didn't know what slavery was like either, of course, but he certainly had a harder, far less charmed upbringing than Robeson had.
Or take examples in the vein of Talking Heads or Paul Simon "appropriating" AfroBeat, South African music and the like. It could easily be the case that a white kid growing up in Iowa, say, is obsessed with Fela Kuti, Ebo Taylor, Hugh Masekela, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and so on, while a black kid growing up in Nigeria or South Africa never listens to that music at all, but instead exclusively listens to Beethoven, Mozart and so on. Yet people would have a problem with the white kid doing music heavily influenced by Kuti etc. while having no problem with the black kid doing music like that, even though the latter only listened to Kuti etc. two weeks prior to creating the music in question. The reasoning behind this sort of thing isn't merely ridiculous, it's nonexistent.
But I'm also giving too much credence to the notion of "authenticity," which is itself very misconceived. The arts, including music, are very often fictional in a broad sense, where artists are essentially acting/playing characters, where people who don't know the artist personally would never know this, and where there is nothing wrong with this fact. The whole gist of acting is that you're playing something that you're not in real life. The more you're simply being yourself, the less you're acting at all.
The problem with Warner Oland playing Charlie Chan wasn't that Oland was playing Charlie Chan, it was that Chinese actors weren't playing Sherlock Holmes. Chinese actors weren't getting work--at least not starring roles. That was the problem, not that anyone was "playing something they weren't," because that's what acting is.
This is just scratching the surface of some of the issues with "cultural appropriation" criticism, but we've got to start somewhere.
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