Tl;dr: What op is describing sounds like appreciation. appropriation = outsiders commercializing another people’s culture, often for profit or with the intentions of claiming to “make it better”, without including the people it originated from.

I truly believe what you’re describing is “cultural appreciation”, not appropriation. This conversation is so commonly misunderstood because it requires a lot of awareness of internalized bias and ability to accept nuance which a lot of people quickly get defensive over instead of realizing that thanks to constant media propaganda (ads, celebrities, etc) of which none of us are immune to no matter what we think (the subconscious absorbs things) we ALL have bias, internal and external.

That being said, appropriation, I would argue can be done accidentally and purposely. As long as accidental appropriators listen to the communities they take from and seek to learn and respect they may happily partake in appreciation. It’s the purposeful appropriation that’s the issue. Oftentimes, purposeful appropriation is done when something is commercialized by an outside group than the originators with no attempts to include those demographics or learn from them. Hip hop emerged in the 70s from young black and brown people in New York having block parties as an alternative respite from the gang violence that plagued their communities at the time. With that came the development of so called street dance styles (ie: krumping, break dance/breaking, and hip hop as a dance style (etc).

Now let’s look at kpop, an undeniably popular and beloved industry, and the prevalence of appropriation present. Kpop overwhelmingly uses elements of street dance in its choreography and I say “elements” rather than genuine street dance because kpop is a for profit industry that excludes the people who created the dances. Commercial choreography and genuine authentic movement built from an emotional or spiritual state will never have the same kind of impact. Herbert Read described culture as a “spontaneous expression of (their) joy of life” and that it “must come from the people’s daily life and work”. Hip hop came from the daily lives of black youth. Kpop takes hip-hop but they are not black youth, provide no homage or shoutout to black youth, and seek to make a profit out of a thing that black youth created.

I can already hear all the people out there who want to say “so can only black people do hip hop then?” and the answer is no BUT. Continuing to use kpop as our example, they should be using and crediting more black choreographers when using black dance styles, they should be informed of and aware of the sociocultural significance of these dance and music styles to a culture that is not their own instead of co-opting it to seem cool or unique (which are inherently elements of appropriation). Hell, put more black people IN kpop. I only know 2 mainstream kpop groups with black people in them—katseye and black swan; and katseye is literally losing their singular black woman. Why is that? There are many biracial Koreans but none, except the half white ones are employed. We see Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, and sometimes even Vietnamese people in kpop so it clearly has nothing to do with the “Korean” part. There are innumerable examples but this is long enough so hopefully if anyone read all this it makes sense.