What is your take on people claiming a wide array of Halloween costumes (gypsies, Native Americans, sexy nurses, geishas, and just about any feminized version of a typically male costume, for example) are offensive? I'll be honest. My knee-jerk response is something like, "But wearing Native American-inspired feather hairpieces makes me feel pretty. I LIKE the over-the-top girly outfits. So what if I want to be a cop in a skirt?!" Just b/c it's my knee-jerk response doesn't mean it's right, ofc.
This is going to be long because this shitâs complicated.
First, just recognizing that your knee-jerk response isnât necessarily correct is excellent. A lot of people would use the phrase, âcommon senseâ instead of âknee jerk responseâ and move on having determined that they were in the right. Knowing that you might be wrong despite not knowing why is a life skill that some never develop.
Second, âg****â is a slur. This is complicated by the dominant culture in America not actually having significant negative feelings about the group in question but it is still loaded with deeply negative connotations to the people to whom it applies.
Third, I donât personally have any issue with wearing a cop costume with a skirt. Iâm not sure who does, but Iâd be interested to hear their arguments.Â
But wearing the garments or ceremonial dress of another culture does have its issues. I live in Montana where a significant portion of the population is Native American Indian. That culture persists here despite a literal genocide that was waged by my ancestors against their ancestors. And then thereâs the continued racism (recently a /high school football coach/ was reported for shouting at a team from a reservation the phrase âprairie n*****.â)Â
All of that is to say, the dominant American culture attempted to destroy hundreds of cultures that were spread across America, and we succeeded in destroying the majority of them. Some people would like to destroy the ones that remain.Â
This is the far extreme of how a dominant culture can act. Members of the marginalized culture either are killed or are asked to abandon everything that makes them different. People who argue that we didnât do that to Native Americans are demonstrably wrong.
This is not unusual historically. That does not make it not disgusting. But I think itâs important to recognize that the people who participated in this practice didnât see it as wrong. They may even have seen it as righteous.
There are also much more subtle, much less harmful ways to harm a marginalized culture. One of those ways is to ask members of that culture to conform to dominant and arbitrary cultural norms (wearing business suits or traditionally western clothes) in order to interface with our society (which we do, though we do it less now than we used to.)Â
Another subtle way to harm a marginalized culture (without even knowing youâre doing it) is by picking out tiny bits of that culture and removing them from their context because theyâre please us (whether thatâs because theyâre edgy or attractive or funny or monetizeable) but without any respect for or knowledge of the culture they come from.
To me, the furthest extreme of that is wearing the religious ceremonial garb of a culture against which my cultural ancestors perpetrated a literal genocide.Â
Itâs amazing that we donât always see it that way, but that is the blindness of culture.
Now, cultural appropriation (which is what this is called) is also a necessary part of how cultures communicate and adapt. There was a time that Irish Americans were considered sub-human by many dominant-culture Americans and the process of incorporating that marginalized culture into ours (while allowing it to preserve some of its uniqueness) was full of racism and hatred and appropriation and forced marginalization. But the outcome is a culture where the Irish culture is respected and many people are very proud of their Irish heritage.Â
But it is not a culture that has become 100% Irish, or that allowed Irish people to hold on to 100% of their culture. Indeed, I would say a majority of that culture was lost in the US. Certainly there are very few Americans who still speak Irish, for example. Indeed, I would guess that most Americans donât even know that Irish is a language.
But the adoption and tolerance of other cultures in America (though always a battle and often a bloody one) is what has made America so wonderful. This country cannot be a pile of thousands of isolated cultures. Common ground must be found, and the dominant culture is necessarily going to change less than non-dominant cultures.Â
Today is The Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday that calls for people to celebrate the dead. I am going to go downtown to watch a Day of the Dead parade in which 95% of the participants will be white. This is absolutely cultural appropriation, but it is also cultural appreciation. There is respect and a feeling of cultural equality that goes into saying, âYes, this is something that is external to my culture, but it resonates with me. It is something I wish my culture did, and this existing ceremony has a history that I appreciate and I want to engage with.â
Now, lots of people will tell you that thatâs not acceptable, especially as we inevitably pick and choose which parts of a ceremony or holiday we are most comfortable with. And maybe theyâre right. But I really want the dominant American culture to blend more with Mexican culture and to appreciate and participate in Mexican culture, especially as anti-Mexican racism is at an all-time high in America. We cannot breed tolerance without cultural exchange.Â
Some will say that any appropriation is bad. That it is necessarily a kind of theft. I understand that viewpoint, but am more of the perspective that rites, ideas, holidays, fashion, food, music, languageâŚthese things can and must be shared between cultures in order to breed understanding and tolerance and can do much more harm than good. It is mostly when we intentionally separate the cultural creation from the culture, as a way to remove the power of the members of that culture, that appropriation becomes inherently harmful. Itâs worth saying that we constantly do this to Black American culture. The dominant culture loves Black culture in America, but it is also terrified of Black people. So we take the bits we like because it makes us feel cool, but fight tooth-and-nail to continue to marginalize Black people.Â
Harmful appropriation often seems OK to us largely because people in the dominant culture have a hard time realizing they are in the dominant culture. Itâs difficult to feel that, and so a Native headdress just seems like a funny, fun thing to wear. Like a cartoon character or a personâs profession. But a culture is a much more beautiful and wonderful and complicated thing than that. They should be treated with care, especially by those of us who, by virtue of our birth into a dominant culture, have far more power than we realize.
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