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Vox has a video with more on this topic featuring Jake Blount who is mentioned in the Variety piece:

https://www.vox.com/videos/2022/10/21/23416843/banjo-black-a...

Your comment reminded me of this scene from the fantastic Alan Lomax documentary The Land Where the Blues Began:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eMe54XsJUE&t=243s

What does reclaiming the banjo as an African instrument mean? I read the interview you linked and it’s really weird, bordering on neurotic. Like this:

“For bad, you look at how you take something that was rooted in Black culture, and that became a collaborative instrument, and then the narrative becomes: No, it’s actually a white instrument. Black people have nothing to do with it.”

Huh? What is a “white” instrument? They’re inanimate objects. The banjo in its modern form is well understood to be an American instrument and it’s well understood that its roots were in an instrument Africans brought over. That’s American - a netting lot of things.

Those are good questions! FWIW I think your comment comes off as quite combative ("the interview is weird, neurotic"; "[my position is] well understood"). That can set up a discussion to go down a less useful route. I think if you phrased your comments in a more open manner, you may get more interesting responses exploring perspectives other than your own. Just my two cents.
> What does reclaiming the banjo as an African instrument mean?

The contemporary objection from some circles to “cultural appropriation” isn’t generally that group X is taking some aspect of culture from group Y. Rather, it is that group X is doing so while enjoying social and economic privilege unavailable, or historically unavailable, to group Y. It is, like so much of what drives human behavior, ultimately a struggle over resources. So, “reclaiming the banjo” might mean ensuring that more attention and money in banjo playing flows to African-Americans.

Its a dumb take. We get a lot of them. I’m old enough to remember Martin Luther King’s assassination. I really felt like things were normalizing in the ‘90s. Alas we have devolved into something ugly where every comment includes mention of a certain New York real estate mogul and a joyful thread about banjos must include a specious claim to reclamation.
> Huh? What is a “white” instrument? They’re inanimate objects.

And inanimate objects can have common associations with racial identities.

> The banjo in its modern form is well understood to be an American instrument and it’s well understood that its roots were in an instrument Africans brought over. That’s American - a netting lot of things.

Giddens says as much immediately after the part you quoted.