I’m so tired of this shit. It’s basically just “I’m cool.because I can think.of some way to be out of the mainstream”. It can be poor, black, Asian, Jewish, Latino (or don’t call me Latino i’m Hispanic), queer, bi, trans, non-binary, differently-abled, old, young, Antifa, Romany, anarchist, or whatever. It’s a get-out-of-jail-free card. I can’t be sexist, racist, ableist, homophobic because I’m XYZ. Just STFU.
The only thing I know about the Fashion Police is they found that suspenders were holding things up.
That’s just you responding to the specifically American cultural norm of the 21st century, though. In other decades nobody would have thought anything of it, and I would argue that it’s abnormal and unusual for people from a non-dominant culture to perceive ‘somebody used a thing from my culture’ as an insult.
The much more normal thing is for people from a culture to go out with their cultural thing - clothes, food, customs, whatever it is - and try to interest other people in it. Yoga is a perfect example of this. Indian people came out to the West, made an effort to get people interested in yoga, they were phenomanally successful, and now it’s a normal accepted part of Western culture. Same sort of thing with a lot of foodstuffs - spaghetti or tacos or stir-fry aren’t “funny foreign food” as they were in the 50’s, they’re just food, and normal.
Nobody thinks a Chinese or Indian person, or a Nigerian or a Brazillian, wearing jeans and T-shirt is in any way denigrating to America, and Americans don’t find it hurtful, so why *should *people assume that the reverse of the situation is Not Okay? That is in itself a subtle insult to all these other cultures … as if it’s perfectly natural and normal for people from everywhere else to adopt American clothing because it proves that American things are Just That Good, but it’s somehow nefarious for Americans to adopt Chinese or Indian clothing. It couldn’t possibly be that the Chinese or Indian things are Just That Good - there must be some other explanation!
Well, while I’m all in favor of adopting good things from other cultures, I suspect that there is a somewhat more complex explanation, which has to do with the fact that Chinese and Indian and other non-white people in America were not always treated as socially equal to white people.
Next year, perhaps the school could just have an international theme for the prom. Or, since there seems to be no shortage of stupidity surrounding proms every year, the schools can simply get out of the prom business.
How about instead of limiting what straight, white people are allowed to do we concentrate on making sure everyone else has equal opportunity. If no white girl ever wore a Chinese dress to prom again would it make one lick of difference? I swear to God, I want to grab the SJWs majoring in queer studies or post modern deconstructive feminist theory and tell them to get an MBA or a STEM major and start a fucking business where they can make a difference.
:dubious: Well, if it takes “SJWs” allegedly “limiting what straight, white people are allowed to do” to get straight white people to care about “making sure everyone else has equal opportunity”, then ISTM that that is making a difference.
Like I said, I’d rather this prom-dress choice didn’t bother anybody—it doesn’t really bother me in the least—and I’d like to get to a world where everybody can share all their cultural heritage in a positive and respectful way. But we won’t get there faster by imperiously demanding that everything that doesn’t bother straight white people shouldn’t bother anybody else.
QFT. I’ve always thought that paying tribute to another culture’s fashion or food is much better for breaking down those stupid “stay in your own group” walls than playing wailing SJW about “appropriation”. The young lady did not claim an ethnicity not her own, she simply bought and wore a lovely dress for a special evening.
Thought it was Japanese, based on my experience at a Japanese Buddhist funeral I attended. I am not Buddhist and am practically glow-in-the-dark white, but still watched those around me and performed such gestures at the appropriate times. Seemed the polite thing to do.
And we won’t get there by whining about how unfair the world is. Complaining about cultural appropriation is a pretty first world problem. It beats being gang raped and burned to death in India.
I think that I fundamentally disagree with an assumption here which is that if all the white people avoid Chinese/Indian/whatever-ethnicity stuff (clothes, cultural practises, food, and so on), then this is more likely to help people of those ethnicities than harm them. I actually think that the people harmed most by cultural separatism are minority community members themselves. And certainly among the Chinese people I know, I’ve heard “I wish white folks would keep their mitts off our Chinese things” approximately never, I hear “your kids are studying Chinese even though they don’t have a background? That’s fantastic” a lot, and I hear “bloody PC, SJW rubbish eyeroll” just about general left-wingy kids-these-days stuff pretty often also.
Essentially, my experience is that showing interest of whatever sort in Chinese things is a really good way of making Chinese people happy (and, in fact, that showing interest in Indian things makes Indian people happy and showing interest in any country makes people form that country happy … but my local area skews somewhat more Chinese than any other particular group). Wearing a dress is a pretty trivial way of showing interest, but better than nothing.
I don’t think the main benefit of white high school girls in cheongsams is so that the white high school girls can be happy being allowed to do what they like. I think that it’s so that all the Chinese people who aren’t Jeremy Lam and don’t go for his shtick can have pleasant lives in a world where stuff from their birth culture is seen as normal, pleasant, and not a battleground.
Warning: tangientially related semi-rant.
As a Person of Indian Descent, I would be thrilled to see saris become a common or even default mode of dress for western women (or anyone who wants to wear them). I am happy for Indian food to become as ubiquitous in the West as Mexican food is in the U.S. (as it is in Britain).
I have a strange relationship with Indian culture, but the sari is one thing I can look at and unreservedly say, “that’s better than the western equivalent (in this case a dress).” Granted, I don’t have to wear one, so I make no judgments about whether it is equally practical; my opinion is aesthetic only. Not so much with salwar kameez. Fuckin’ hate those things.
I grew up in similar circumstances to Hari Kondabolu (the The Problem With Apu guy). He saw a harmful stereotype; I was just happy to have the existence of Indian people acknowledged somewhere on TV. There are like three Indian-American entertainers who most people have probably heard of today, which is bad enough, but until the mid-2000s there weren’t any. We had Freddy Mercury and Ben Kingsley, but nobody knew they were Indians.
Even shows about hospitals didn’t have any Indians in them. Have you ever been to a U.S. hospital and not seen an Indian doctor? General Hospital has never had one, as far as I can tell. E.R. didn’t get one until the 10th season.
grumble grumble At least Chinese had token characters. We didn’t even get that. grumble
I’m a Jewish man with long naturally curly hair. Once a week or so, I have to put a bunch of conditioner in it and brush it out when I shower. If I don’t, it would, of its own accord, turn into dread locks. If I let my hair do what it would naturally do, I would be accused of cultural appropriation.
Conversely, Jamaican Rastafarians who have no historical or genetic link to the Jewish people (they are not Falashan) use Jewish imagery and claim to be a lost tribe of Israel. I don’t have an issue with this but I have yet to see them criticized for cultural appropriation.
The whole thing is bullshit.
Getting 1600 on your SAT.
Regards,
Shodan
Hmmm, I don’t know about Rastafarians, but I have definitely seen, say, “Messianic Jews” aka “Jews for Jesus” criticized for cultural appropriation. Along with non-Jews who wear kippot or star-of-David jewelry or light a menorah at Chanukah or get tattoos of Hebrew characters.
So no, it’s not like complaining about cultural appropriation of Judaism isn’t an actual thing.
You will be assimilated.
Your biological and technological uniqueness will be added to the collective.
Resistance is futile.
Winky Dinky Hoe Cakes!
Hos gotta eat, too
Run me off? As if I’m so scared of such cutting name calling I’ll leave? 
CHICKEN FUCKER!! :mad::mad::mad: 
:mad::mad:
My two examples are perfect counterpoints of one another.
My wife immigrated to North America from Taiwan when she was 10. One of her hobbies is studying the history of “Chinese” clothing (that is, clothing from various ethnic groups in China and Taiwan.) Her opinion was this was a nothingburger topped in nothingsauce, and anyone who thinks the qipao is some kind of sacred cultural landmark doesn’t actually know anything about its history. It’s not even originally from the Han Chinese, it was adopted from another ethnic group’s traditional attire.
Qipao (or cheongsam in Cantonese) aren’t worn a whole lot these days, and mostly as a fashion statement or at a wedding. (And peculiarly, the qipao that was worn as a prom dress was a traditional wedding color, but that’s still not a huge deal. My wife said the cut made it clear, this is not a wedding dress.)
If you want to see a really formal modern qipao, look at the way the Chinese President’s wife, Peng Liyuan, sometimes dresses. A qipao with a small slit that shows ankles and a touch of leg.
And it still wouldn’t really be particularly offensive if someone non-Asian wore it, at least in my wife’s opinion.