"American Indian headdresses" banned from major San Francisco festival

Second this!

The whole point is that there are A LOT less of us Native Americans in the general population. I gladly educate anyone who asks about what stuff is okay to appropriate and what’s not okay, but I’m only one person.

Native Americans have gladly shared many things with Europeans. There are certain aspects of our culture, however, which still have a lot of meaning to us, and we feel a bit troubled to see these things trivialized in this manner.

White people do in fact feel empowered to take whatever they like, do whatever they wish, without asking. That’s privilege. Nobody ever asked, “hey, is it okay if I wear this? It looks real groovy and exotic, man!”

There’s also a huge amount of history. Without that history, lots of our discussion about race and racism would simply not exist. “White people” as a privileged group would NOT be a thing, if in fact, Europeans had not developed a hierarchy of “races” in order to justify all kinds of atrocities.

To put on a hat and say “Oh, I’m now colorblind!” is naive and disrespectful.

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