Miley Cyrus is typical of just about every Disney child star who decided to break free from their pop-perfect image. She is stereotyped as the the good girl, gone bad- and we could not agree more.

In contrast to her fellow child Disney stars, Cyrus is continuously praised for her creativity and rebellion to societal standards. While she has created positive outcomes by challenging gender-norms, like not shaving her armpit hair and subsequently dying them bright colors, Cyrus’ “creativity” became problematic when she began to appropriate culture that does not belong to her.

After Cyrus’ drastic 180 in her musical career, reminiscent of a 2007 Britney Spears, she decided to change her style. This new “style” consisted of grills, a futile fascination with twerking and most recently, as host of the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards, dreadlocks.

These components of Cyrus’ new style are all aspects “borrowed” from black culture.

While popular culture mainly ridicules these components of black culture and labels them as “urban”, “ghetto” or “improper”, Cyrus is praised for finding a style that is very unique to her own. See a problem here?

Because Cyrus is white, there is a comical novelty in seeing her shake her skinny butt in an attempt to twerk.

All of this fueled the fire for Nicki Minaj’s crucial call out against Cyrus Cyrus on national television after accepting her award for best Hip-Hop video and said, “Now back to this b**** that had a lot to say about me the other day in the press; Miley, what’s good?”

Minaj is of course referring to Cyrus’ comments regarding Nicki Minaj’s outrage with MTV’s racist selection of the nominees for Music Video of the Year.

Cyrus told the New York Times that Minaj’s comments on race and privilege in America in reference to the awards show were “very Nicki Minaj”. Whatever that means.
Sounds like what Miley was trying to say was that she doesn’t care much of what Minaj has to say about black lives.By ignoring the significance of Minaj’s statement and outrage, it implies that Miley doesnt care about the issue.

This, coming from a white girl wearing dreadlocks, along with a huge background of cultural appropriation, is unacceptable. Miley wants to be black without wanting to deal with issues that come along with it. If Miley wants to wear dreadlocks and twerk as a way to be “the real her”, the LEAST she could do, is appreciate the culture from which she stole her “originality.”