Chinese People React to White Woman Wearing Traditional Dress Reddiy
When 18-year-old white woman Keziah Daum received backlash for wearing a traditional Chinese dress called a qipao to her high school prom, Daniella Greenbaum argued in an op-ed for Business Insider that the cries of cultural appropriation were "nonsensical."
Cultural appropriation is a term that refers to the adoption of elements in a minority culture by members of the dominant culture . Power is the defining difference between what is and what isn't cultural appropriation, and an analysis of power is essential when evaluating the circumstances.
Scholar Francis E. Kendall explains that white people are granted an institutional set of benefits, called " white privilege ," allowing them to escape the injustices and inconveniences that people of color experience every day.
White privilege is the reason why 73% of the senior executives at Fortune 500 companies are white, 97% of Republican politicians and 79% of Democratic politicians are white, and why the median white household has about 13 times the wealth of the median black household.
Asian people, on the other hand, represent a minority culture in the United States. From the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Japanese internment camps in World War II to the brutal murder of Vincent Chin , Asian people have historically faced discrimination in the United States .
It persists to this very day — barely one-third of television shows have an Asian series regular, white actors are still chosen to play the roles of Asian people in Hollywood movies, and Asians are the least likely to be promoted to managerial or executive positions at tech companies.
The discrimination that Asian people experience in the United States permeates every single aspect of society — from the institutional level to the individual level.
As an Asian-American, I have experienced marginalization. From the people who ask me if my family "really eats dogs," to the white men who tell me that they like my "exotic" features, to all the people who have told me to "go back to where you came from," to the seemingly innocuous question "Where are you really from?" and deceptively flattering comment "Your English is really good!"
All of these incidents remind me that I do not belong in this country, and that no matter what I do to prove that I am just as American as anyone else — eat hamburgers, drink Starbucks, wear J. Crew — I will always be seen as a strange barbaric foreigner, or a submissive exotic princess from the Orient.
For many years, I tried as hard as I could to push myself away from my Asian identity. "I'm not Asian," I would say. "I'm basically white." I refused to learn Chinese or wear the traditional Chinese clothing that my parents wanted me to wear. This defiance came from a place of intense self-loathing, a deeply-rooted feeling of humiliation for the shape of my eyes, the broken English that my parents spoke, and the spicy Chinese food we ate at home.
From an early age, I learned that all of these things that made me Asian — would also make me a target for humiliation and taunting.
It would have been unthinkable for me to wear a qipao and pose with my hands together in prayer, as Daum did in her prom photos. Then I would truly become the strange barbaric foreigner who did not belong in this country, or the submissive Oriental jade princess that inhabited white men's fantasies.
I didn't want that. I wanted people to see me as their equal. I wanted people to stop complimenting me on my English or asking me where I was from. I wanted people to see me for who I really was — another American, just like them.
It doesn't matter that Daum said , "I'm simply showing my appreciation to their culture." Cultural appropriation has everything to do with who has power and who is powerless, who is dominant and who is marginalized. That's why Daum was able to wear the dress she did without mockery — because of the power and privilege that her whiteness affords her.
And in a country where Asian people are marginalized, the decision for a white woman to wear a Chinese dress would be considered cultural appropriation — not cultural appreciation.
Source: https://www.insider.com/keziah-daum-wearing-chinese-dress-prom-cultural-appropriation-2018-5
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