Cultural appropriation

First it was not appropriate for that stranger to yell at your child. The hairstyle you describe doesn’t sound like it is a traditionally black hair style like cornrows.

Reading a lot of these responses … yikes. I assume the people writing how it doesn’t matter, culture is to be consumed by everyone, melting pot, blah blah blah are white.

Cultural appropriation is about POWER DYNAMICS. It’s the dominant culture (white, Eurocentric, COLONIAL) taking and using parts of a culture that has less power.

On this topic it’s NOT OK to wear head-dresses to coachella, it’s not ok to wear to dress up as Pocahontas for Halloween, it’s not ok to Build a teepee in your backyard and throw a birthday party for your white, NON-NATIVE toddler Etc. Etc.

Let me see if I understand this correctly. If you are non white, anything from your culture if off limits. But anything from white, Eurocentric culture is far game. As an example, a white child should not be able to learn an Indian dance, but a hispanic, asian or black child should be able to lean ballet. And if they are good enough make a living from dancing. This is just racist and oh so double standard. No one better yell at some child for “cultural appropriation” in front of me.

Much Madonna’s epic Ray Of Light era is something she would be ripped to shreds for today…
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Exhibit A) Nothing Really Matters Video.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cAVx9RKaLPU
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Exhibit B) The whole fabulous Far East Goddess look.
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Call me old school. But I don’t get it. Madonna never clsimed to have invented any of this — it was all part of get everchanging image.

And what makes this total b.s. is the disproportion of outrage for wearing a native American costume for Halloween — a horrendous collegiate crime in relation to what the real crime was.

The United States as a nation committed genocide against the native Americans. The native Americans weren’t harmed by white men wearing replica head dresses. They were murdered — men, women, and children. They were deliberately exposed to plagues. They were cheated in treaties, which our nation then failed to uphold. They were dispossessed of their land and marched a thousand miles to new reservations. Sometimes, when Americans of European descent wanted the new land of the reservation, they were relocated again.

We didn’t hang our heads in sorrowful repentence. I’m in my 70s. When I was a child and when my father was a child, Westerns were among the most popular entertainment on TV and at the movies. It often featured cowboys and Indians. The Indians were always the villains. They would have raped and scalped every white woman west of the Ohio river if the valiant cowboys and cavalry handed stepped in to kill them and save the virtuous pioneer women. The Indians savagely attacked settlers’ wagon trains, intent on slaughter. That was how repentant America was. Bad enough in the time of my father’s childhood. By the time of my childhood, we had defeated the Nazis, liberated their Concentration camps, learned that 6 million Jews had been slaughtered in the genocide of the Holocaust. And yet Hollywood still celebrated our own holocaust.

It didn’t end there. The money for oil and gas leases on the land we ultimately allowed the Native Americans to keep (previously regarded as pretty much worthless) wasn’t managed by the Native American tribes. It was held in trust by the U.S. Treasury and the Dept. of the Interior. They cheated the Native Americans. They destroyed enough records that the total amount of the cheating couldn’t be determined. A lawsuit Cobell vs Kempthorne dragged on for over a decade. When it was finally settled in 2009, the Native Americans received $3.4 billion. I think most observers thought that was a small fraction of what was owed, but it was probably as much $ as Congress would cough up.

This, not a birthday party featuring a wigwam or a Pocahontas Halloween costume is the real crime. So, if, as a white person, you want to atone for something, atone for something real and important, not the collegiate shibboleth of cultural appropriation. We never atoned for this genocide, just as we never atoned for slavery. Even long after slavery was over, black farmers did not receive the federal aid during and after the New Deal, which white farmers received — especially in the South. This allowed white farmers to buy out black farmers at a pittance. Push your government for just compensation. There are real, big issues involved in the history of white America and its relation to minorities.

I enjoyed your response, Ron.

Ron, I skimmed, but I think that’s the point of cultural appropriation – that white people perpetrated these unspeakable crimes on Native Americans and Africans in the past. And now, today, we obliviously steal their culture for gain, like Karlie Kloss wearing a chief’s headdress in the VS fashion show. Even as we continue to fuck over Native Americans. It really is kind of gross. It’s also gross to me that white people are telling the people whose culture they’re appropriating that they’re wrong and stupid and crazy to feel that way.