Letter to the Editor:
I personally agree with what your main point
was in the article that you wrote. Which is that cultural appropriation should
not and cannot happen this cruelly when power is not distributed in a cruel way.
With culture comes a sense of identity by what we wear, the symbols we create
and it’s a sense of self, and
when our culture is stolen from us, there is this deep sense of loss, is the
thing I interpreted from what you were trying to put across in your article.
I concur with your point that not everything that is taken
from other cultures counts as cultural appropriation due to certain reasons.
For example: When ‘white’ people say “people of colour being able to speak English
because it is a form of cultural appropriation”, however they somehow don’t
take into account the fact that in many cases, COLONIZED countries were forced to adopt the culture of
the colonizer while their own culture was violently removed. This is NOT the
same situation as to when ‘white’ hipsters wear the Native American headdress because it is a commodification
of indigenous culture. It takes something from someone else’s culture without
any context or respect and turns it into something marketable and profitable. How
can something like this go unnoticed, but when people make a fuss about ‘black’
people wearing suits, or people of colour speaking English there’s a big
problem?
Then people have the audacity to say that they are being sensitive and
being overly dramatic, and just trying to cause drama. In my opinion they’re
not being dramatic enough! These are the people that came and slaughtered a lot
of their ancestors, diminished a lot of their privileges and basically
considered them outlaws on their own home land, and then come around and have
the discourtesy by wearing these headdresses. Lastly what I think about
sometimes is that, is power really divided equally? Let me rephrase my question
a bit better…is ‘white’ supremacy really over?
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