Miley, you can (and should) stop.

By Coralie Clover

I will defend Miley Cyrus' right to wear whatever she likes until the end of my days. The two piece costume she donned on Sunday was essentially no different to the beige set Lady Gaga wore in a great deal of the video to Alejandro (or, in fact, the underwear Gaga ended up in at the VMAs at the end of her performance), and I don't think simply vilifying her for that is useful or constructive; a topic which this blog covered very nicely a few days ago. The entire performance was problematic in so many different ways that simply plucking out her clothes and designating them the root of all evil – but only commenting on that, too, without considering the wider issues – is a bit reductive.

The issue here is not really her clothes. Nor is it that she just chose to dance in them, that's all well and good – I dance in my pants on a regular basis and would heartily recommend it. The issue is the dance she chose. The decision to twerk, even if she did have black women on stage with her, was cultural appropriation at its most problematic. Cyrus wanted something 'that feels black' to sing when she picked the song out; apparently twerking and drugs are what she considers black culture.

I genuinely have no words.

This is not Cyrus' first brush with appropriation, unfortunately. Between her dream catcher tattoo, wearing a bindi and that dreadful photo of her friendship group pulling at the skin around their eyes and/or squinting to make themselves look Asian, her track record is in no way good. But, you may ask, how is wiggling her arse appropriation? Can you actually claim a dance step? The answer to that is 'yes, yes you can'. Twerking, as a dance move, probably originated in the hiphop scene of New Orleans in the 1980s, and has its roots and close relations in traditional sub-Saharan African dance. It, like the Harlem Shake, is a cultural product of its community – and the community which created it therefore has a certain hold over its use. Just as putting a silly mask on and gyrating about in a group is not really the Harlem Shake, but an appropriation of that dance, a white woman choosing to twerk is definitely appropriative. Interestingly, the album this song is on is called Bangerz, possibly an allusion to 'gang-bangers', an American term for gang members.  According to the American National Gang Centre, gangs are predominantly comprised of black and Hispanic or Latino members. Cyrus, it would seem, is attempting to claim that identity as her own, as a rejection of her Disney Channel and country music past. Ick.

While we're at it, let's talk about the black women Cyrus had in the background, which make things worse, not better. In the video for the song, she does twerk with black women in shot – but she's set in the middle of it, with them to the outside, and doesn't actually interact with them at all. In fact, they all make faces and laugh along together, surrounding her, but she's too busy wiggling to pay attention – in a later shot Cyrus is the only one of the group whose face is seen, sitting as the others stand and dance around her, their bodies cut off just above the hips. That seems to be a theme in the entire video; Cyrus slaps the thigh of one of her 'background dancers' and acts provocatively with another black woman she dances alongside (whose face is conveniently cast in shadow), but the friends she's partying with, the ones she embraces and interacts with, are all white. The black women in the video, especially, look like window-dressing for the sake of 'legitimacy'. Surprisingly, sticking a black person into frame doesn't make Cyrus' twerking attempts any better – who knew? In Sunday night's performance, the black singers in the background were, again, sexualised by Cyrus by way of arse-slapping but with the added caveat of having teddy bears on their back, and are presenting themselves as those bears for most of the time. I'm not sure I like the imagery of that, to be honest.

Earlier, I mentioned the video to Alejandro, and the similarities in costuming: more precisely, the skin-coloured bikini. There are, however, vital differences between Gaga's video and Sunday night's VMA performance or, indeed, the original video to We Can't Stop. In Lady Gaga's video, everyone is in their skivvies (I am a great believer in equal opportunity nudity), everyone is dancing to the same choreography and, furthermore, that choreography isn't stealing anything from another culture in a way which seems voyeuristic - rather than the imitation as flattery I'd like to hope they were aiming for. Miley Cyrus' costume itself was hardly the worst thing on stage during that performance; that it matched her skin tone made it awkwardly clear that she is a privileged white woman casually appropriating something she really shouldn't have considered going near, but to be objective it probably was intended to mirror the women in the Blurred Lines video, a completely different kettle of rotten fish.

Feel free to wear whatever you want, Miley – but for the love of god, stop appropriating black culture to reinvent yourself because you think it's cool. It's really not.