now i definitely understand where you're coming from by saying people shouldn't use religious items in everyday fashion if they don't belong to the religion in question. i was kind of unclear originally about that, but yeah. don't wear bindis unless you're hindu, don't wear rosaries unless you're christian, etc. it leads people on about your beliefs and trivializes religious imagery.whatwut wrote:I definitely don't know how I feel about the picture in this thread, but there are different kinds of cultural appropriation.passionkiller wrote:what bugs me the most about a lot of the "cultural appropriation" crusaders is that all they care about is fashion. and most of the time, they confuse culture and religion because they're america-centric. bindis, for example, are actually religious adornments. same goes with hijabs. anyone can join a religion regardless of their race, last i checked.
and i know this is an anecdote, but my stepfather is black, and when i asked him about dreadlocks, he said he didn't care when white people wore them. obviously, he doesn't represent an entire minority, but it raises a good point. if someone isn't using it to harm you emotionally/physically, why is it your business to tell them how to wear their hair?
it's just people looking for an excuse to harass other people, and it sickens me that they're using racial equality as a false pretense for it.
and no, the girl in the first post is not appropriating. that's how literally 80% of girls wore their hair in the eighties.
There's the cultural appropriation that's pretty clear cut...when you take religious symbols and wear it as fashion.
There's also cultural appropriation where you take a fashion element that a culture has done for ages and ages, and incorporate it into white fashion and then call it trendy. For example, the whole thing with dreads, lots of minority cultures have worn them throughout the ages. But they only began to be considered mainstream, trendy and fashionable when white people started wearing them. So the people that object to stuff like this I think are more objecting to the system that considers it trendy when someone whose white starts doing it, rather than the individual person whose doing it.
I don't know if I agree with that, but that is the rational behind people who object to cultural appropriation of things that are seen as items of fashion.
well, the first people to wear dreadlocks were egyptian, but they wore wigs over the dreadlocks, so dreads weren't exactly culturally sacred, that's just how their hair happened to grow. most modern black americans don't have lineage that traces back to egyptians, anyway.
and no, white people did not popularize dreadlocks. that assumption is probably more racist than a white person wearing them. dreadlocks were reintroduced into modern american fashion by black musicians during the seventies and eighties when bob marley and rastafarian culture got big. a lot of the white people i've met who wear dreadlocks (and i live in boulder, where they're everywhere) wear them more to pay homage to rastafarian culture than to discredit it (although these people, again, do not represent all white dread-wearers)
i think i might be biased about this, though. i've seen people get doxxed and threatened with violence for having dreadlocks, and that's pretty extreme for something that's only debatably racist from the perspective of the minority the style belongs to. headdresses are for native americans; it's objectively racist when little white girls wear them because they're basically like a general's medals. but dreads aren't sacred like headdresses are.
idk, i guess i only support getting angry when the item in question is sacred in some way. i'm not exactly an expert on this sort of thing, lol.