Using Openness To Address Cultural Appropriation
When I was in elementary school, I refused to wear my áo dài to school because I knew kids would point and laugh at me like they did when I brought Vietnamese food in a thermos for lunch. That's one of the reasons why I personally find it upsetting that non Asians dress up as Asians and wear clothes inspired by asian cultures as a costume. Those people get to feel comfortable, confident, and cool in asian clothing while people who actually are asian do not always get to do the same and often, are oppressed and hurt when they wear their own culture's clothing.
It's graduation party season and this past week, a white college graduate in my hometown had his graduation party where his entire caucasian family dressed up as asian people. A woman of color who also graduated this year called the graduate out on twitter and there was a flurry of almost 100 tweet circulating following the original tweet as my hometown was divided on what is or is not appropriate or offensive. I had always seen acts of cultural appropriation in the global media, with fashion designers and remote areas of the US that seemed distant from me but this time, these acts were in my immediate surroundings and furthermore, people who I had gone to high school with, who I had been friends with, were suddenly using white supremacist phrases and racist slurs to defend the college graduate who had the party. All of this made my blood boil and my first thought was to jump into the discussion and talk down every person who thought it was okay for a white family to dress up as asians for a party.
However, I was then reluctant to jump in because the twitter discussion had already grown to massive proportions, moving past the original discussion of cultural appropriation and became people just throwing insults around and trying to "win" by tearing down others in a fight for some unknown prize. It made me think, what was the goal here? It started as a woman of color calling out a white man for cultural appropriation and trying to educate her peers but ended as a fight with people calling her "ling ling" and "attention grabbing" while those who defended the woman called her opposers "stupid" and "worthless;" both sides were lost. As much as I wanted to jump in to defend the woman of color who originally called out the white family, I knew that any tweet I sent would be lost in the conflict and I doubted I could get all my arguments out, explaining to people against the woman of color that they have no right to tell her what she should or should not be offended by and furthermore, by protesting the fact that they were involved in cultural appropriation, those people just became more racist, trying to put the woman of color down.
With the core value of openness in mind, I read through all of the tweets from both the supporters of the woman of color and her opposers because I knew that anything I posted online needed to address the points made by both sides and I wanted to make my argument clear so my words would not be twisted. The main argument of the twitter fight overall seemed to be that opposers thought the woman of color had no right to be offended by this cultural appropriation since the party had nothing to do with her. I wanted to address this point because first, a privileged white person has no right to tell a person of color what is or is not offensive to the person of color's race and secondly, in a bigger picture sense, cultural appropriation affects everyone, especially when people participating in it are posting about it and celebrating it on social media where the world can see it and react from it and be influenced by it.
I made the following instagram post, both as a reaction to the boy's graduation party and a larger PSA to people in my hometown about why I personally am affected by cultural appropriation. I tried to make my message as clear as possible so that everyone could understand why cultural appropriation is more than a silly costume.
I tried to make my message as clear as possible so that everyone could understand why cultural appropriation is more than a silly costume. I hope that people listen to what I had to say, just as I listened to what they had to say and tailored my response by trying to hit all the opposing points that were discussed on twitter. Rather than just attacking people on twitter, openness requires a careful consideration of both sides and then a strategic, effective response. While firing off wordy tweets on twitter would have been satisfying, keeping openness in mind made me realize that doing so would not be the most effective way to proceed and get my message heard by those who I wanted to hear it.
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