Cultural Appropriation Essay

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Cultural appropriation is a form of racism. A lot of people take things from another culture and give it their own twist. This has become a huge problem and a lot of people have taken a stand to stop this. In 2011, a campaign started showing off that peoples cultures are not costumes. The campaigns posters show people of different ethnicities with another image showing off what people assume about them. For example, in one of the posters there is a male boy holding the image of a terrorist costume with the caption “This is not who I am and this is not okay.” The message they are trying to spread is that we must stop assuming these things based on their background. It is wrong that majority of the people these days judge us on where we come from rather on …show more content…

For example Kylie Jenner has posted an image of herself with cornrows. Using black hairstyles, like braids and cornrows is a huge no to other cultures for the reason of “...getting your hair done in cornrows or an afro is disrespectful to black women who have been discriminated against for years (even fired from their jobs!) for wearing their hair in these ways. Black men and women originally invented these styles because it was the best way to take care of their hair…” (hellogiggles.com). Cornrows originally came from Africa. The hair indicated in which tribe you belonged to, obviously not a lot of people know that and simply just wear it for some type of fashion statement. Another example of cultural appropriation is wearing a bindi. In India, bindis are widely worn by women from many different religious and cultural communities, including Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Buddhists and Catholics. A red bindi means a woman is married, a black one is that they are widowed. “But while most would agree that wearing a headdress amounts to cultural appropriation, opinion on the bindi isn’t so straightforward. This may be because not everyone agrees on what the bindi symbolises.”

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