‘Appreciating Native American headdresses is great. Wearing a headdress when you have not been authorised to wear one is not.’ Jessica Metcalfe on the appropriation of Native American fashion and design. Photograph: J Scott Applewhite/AP
Check out the comments.
A shedload of white people who just don’t get it.
How new and different.
Oh, and just in case you don’t feel like wading through hundreds of examples of white bullshit that hasn’t all been addressed here and elsewhere dozens of times, the examples are:
- The false equivalency (Ie: non-italian people shouldn’t wear an italian army jacket, the infamous “pants and shirts” argument) that fails to recognize the difference between commodities and cultural expressions
- The “citizens of the world” nonsense, eliding things like colonialism, genocide and neo-liberal exploitation by implying a universal human experience that just doesn’t exist
- The idea that these things are an ‘exchange’ which ignores the fact that exchange cannot come through coercion, that an exchange requires some kind of receipt and fails to recognize that there is a power dynamic expressed most obviously in the prominence of industrial mass-culture in comparison to the spiritual and cultural practices of Native people.
- The fact that we speak English (which was violently imposed on us) means that we are required to compensate our colonial masters for this ‘gift’ by allowing unfettered access to the remains of our culture.
- The inherent sexism, which again, betrays a complete lack of understanding of Plains cultures and again views these cultures in terms of liberal subjectivity which demands examination through eurocentric conceptions of universalism.
- The idea that in art, nothing is sacred and everything is ripe for theft. Art doesn’t exist on a separate plane of existence and is always subject to critical examination from outside a normative sphere. Full stop.
- The classic entitlement. The idea that people should be able to take and do what they please.
- “free speech” zzz
- “freedom of expression” zzz
Of course, this is The Guardian, which is an English newspaper, and as we all know, England is part of Europe. Europe is where the colonial ball started rolling in the first place.
so,
Fuck Europe.
Seriously. Fuck Europe.
(via sikssaapo-p)
