Skip to content Skip to footer

What’s more American than the ongoing saga of cultural appropriation?

Bruh May 24, 2019
43Views

When you ask someone to walk a mile in your shoes, you usually don’t mean for them to literally wear your shoes. The idea is to experience another person’s culture to better understand them. That is the constant argument for appreciation over appropriation.

Still, despite the buffet of explanations on why appropriation is bad, disrespectful and in some cases violent, “white people” continue to do it. Why? It’s for personal gain of course not because they care about the culture itself.

When senior students at Memorial High School in Texas created “Thug Day,” it wasn’t for irony or introspection about the word ‘thug’. They were having fun. They were making fun and they were feeling cool about embodying a caricature of what the word meant to them.

The word ‘thug’ is code for POC criminal. Using the word ‘thug’ in this way is violent. It promotes a justification for brutality against those who may or may not fit the physical description of what white people think is a ‘thug’. Apparently, these white kids think a ‘thug’ looks like Lil Bow Wow circa 2001.

When called out by one of their white classmates on Twitter, they decided to threaten her with violence.

According to a Buzzfeed interview, she has not felt safe enough to return to school since the tweet went viral and death threats ensued.

One of the commentators on the post defended the students claiming that if a high-end fashion brand had done it, it would’ve been acceptable and praised.

But Gucci was called out several times for it’s inappropriate and disrespectful racist clothing.

But they’ve learned their lesson, unlike these kids. Oh no wait, they didn’t.

Only three months after Gucci’s blackface sweater, they’ve released a $790 Turban. After outrage from the Sikh community, Nordstrom pulled the Turban from its website and apologized for their racial insensitivity.

Gucci has yet to apologize though.

We’ve discussed time and again why wearing another person’s culture can be a bad idea. From disrespect to the outright promotion of violence.

Headdresses at Coachella is offensive but people still don’t get it. Attendees still show up with them despite Coachella banning Native headdresses.

Gucci keeps disrespecting cultures and using racism as a fashion statement. The designer makes money off of clothing that dehumanizes some races and ignores the violence against them.

Artists like Madonna keep mixing fragments of distinct cultures to create an outfit for events like the VMAs and uses tribal elements from various parts of an entire continent without regard to their significance.

Morning show anchors still wear sombreros and fake mustaches on Cinco de Mayo while actual Latinx men, women, and children get detained and tortured.

Additionally, white kids still wear cornrows and du-rags for fun at the same schools’ black kids are persecuted for the same thing.

Like Angela Davis said,

“In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be antiracist.”

And America is racist as hell.

Tags: