Toronto Urban Culture, -- Culture Appreciation or Culture Appropriation?

By Daiem Mohammad
(Daiem is a journalist with the FOCUS Media Arts Centre)

4GetAboutITV is a talk show hosted and produced by youth involved with Regent Park TV and the Focus Media Arts Centre. In this episode of 4GetAboutIt TV, our hosts, Daiem Mohammad, Samir Abdella, Jamelia Parnell, and Saima Islam discuss the urban culture of Toronto.
    
In analyzing urban culture in Toronto, it could be said it is indicative of the demographics of the city itself. Then again it could be argued that there is no Toronto culture as it is really just a near comprehensive mishmash of cultures from across the Caribbean, East Africa, South Asia, and tons of other ethnic groups.

A city as diverse as Toronto creates a vernacular so varied, that it borrows words, terms, and phrases from languages and dialects that include (but are not limited to) Jamaican Patois and Arabic.

This creates for an environment where people of all races from all corners of the world are much more in tune with the sensibilities present in other cultures. Host Daiem recollects his friend, who is Japanese, regularly using Arabic words in his everyday speech.

The group discusses this amalgamation of culture, and understands that there is an inherent balancing of a tightrope, in which the lines between cultural appropriation and appreciation begin to blur. This creates the necessity to distinguish a difference between the two, and the group ultimately comes down to the nature of poverty, an agreement over the fact that the single unifying factor, across all of the cultures present in Toronto, is that of poverty, or hardship, and of overcoming said hardship and sharing cultures despite said difficulty. As such, the group takes a particularly judgemental stance when the average, middle class Canadian starts to take up the vernacular. While it isn’t an indicator of personal difficulty, it seems as though the group agrees that it is less about the individual and more about a particular place in the social, political, or economic hierarchies that make up our society.