A reaction to “If it’s not you, why are you offended”

The fact that I, as a woman of color, have to accommodate ignorance is infuriating. I didn’t want to write this in the first place, but yet here I am accommodating to white people. To those confused,  I am addressing the issues in “If it’s not you, why are you offended?”  article from last week’s issue. 

Women of color are constantly being sexualized and eroticized much more than white women. For example, Native women have been portrayed as immoral, promiscuous women since the time of Columbus’ conquest of the Americas simply because they didn’t follow European dress codes. This is because that’s not in their culture. The “sexy Indian princess” costumes are the result of years of systematic rape and genocide. Dressing up as one is just playing into the violence that has plagued these women for centuries. Straight from the Huffington Post, who got their source from the US Department of Justice, Huffington states, “Indigenous women in the US experience some of the highest rates of sexual assault in the country. According to the US Department of Justice, nearly half of all Native American women have been raped, beaten, or stalked by an intimate partner; one in three will be raped in their lifetime; and on some reservations, women are murdered at a rate 10 times higher than the national average.” These are the lives of women you are reducing into a joke. 

Often you hear people say “I’m celebrating a culture” but people fail to remember that it’s not their culture to celebrate. Then those same people will tell you that you’re against exchanges of culture; however, exchanges of culture are MUTUAL, not one-sided. Dressing up as a Mexican by wearing a mustache and a sombrero is not celebrating a culture; you’re playing up a stereotype used to reduce that group. This dehumanizes them so that they are easier to alienate. And this whole “celebrating a culture” thing is purely a white, Western idea. White people have conquered about 99.9 percent of all cultures, and they have passed down generation to generation a need to celebrate that, trying to pass off mockery as appreciation.

Part of the problem is that people are trying to victimize themselves and blame a minority for being “melodramatic” about something they have never felt in their life. The other part is ignorance. Cultural appropriation has become so normalized that people don’t know to be indigent. For example, I’ve dressed up as a witch for Halloween. Did I know I was appropriating Wiccan culture? No, I was eight years old. Am I ever going to dress up as a witch, knowing what I know now? No, because I know better. We’ve all done problematic things but the important thing is to put forth the effort to know better. 

Getting offended does not make you automatically correct, but realize that the author is getting offended about being called offensive. And it is only subjective to the author because the author probably has had the privilege of not belonging to a culture where they are often ridiculed. This has caused  a narrow-minded view.  

You are not being asked to accommodate to anyone; you are being asked to be respectful. 

Editor Note: To read “If it’s not you, why are you offended?” visit http://bit.ly/1wT7KCO.