This is an article from the May 2025 Civitas Examiner (Volume 2, No. 2) and was written by one of our students, Navya M. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue. To read more Civitas Examiner stories or to submit your own, click here.
Many diverse women are tired of being overshadowed by white people’s perception of superiority.
If you take and use elements from another culture that aren’t your own, it’s called cultural appropriation. Examples include images, symbols, artifacts, and practices. When you get compliments, money, or awards from those objects, it benefits you, but the people in that culture will most likely get negative attention from it.
Out of the many times that I’ve logged on to social media, one thing I always notice is the fashion and food trends. Fads come and go: Scandinavian scarves, turmeric milk, bohemian chic, or crop tops, just to name a few.
It feels obvious to me to say that these trends listed above clearly stem from South Asian roots, yet seemingly, no one acknowledges the background and history. Most people online brush over that fact, even though others have tried to bring it to the light.
Just pretending that something isn’t what it is and brushing it off when others get offended is cultural appropriation. Heck, even Scandinavians don’t call dupattas “scarves”. And yes, it’s actually called a dupatta. The Scandinavian Scarf trend is just a recent chapter in a long history of erasing South Asian textile heritage.
As an Indian girl growing up in the West, I have had to accept, too often, the demeaning treatment I have received from my white peers, without questioning it.
For me, and others like me, it has been a case of quiet survival: never raising ourselves too high because when we do, we threaten not only the structures we co-exist in, but also the relationships that work as long as a power imbalance is maintained.
I, like many other women of color, have been forced to hold myself down so everyone else can remain in their comfort zones and feel secure.
People on social media paint India as this dirty, unsanitized place. They focus on perpetuating stereotypes about the ‘bad’ side of India, yet steal long-standing traditions just because they can. It doesn’t add up. Would you rather accept that you’ve taken inspiration from a colored community or mislabel it on purpose and promote colonialism?
And, it’s not just India that has been suffering through cultural appropriation. It’s the Black, Native American, and Arabic (just to name a few) communities that have been subjected to this treatment. It’s about time we gave notice to this issue.
Behaviour unchallenged is behaviour accepted.
When singer Jason Aldean dressed up as Lil Wayne for Halloween, he didn’t stop at fake dreadlocks, he even smeared blackface on in order to recreate Lil Wayne’s skin tone. When asked, he offered a typical response to cultural appropriation accusations. He stated that people will always make a big deal out of something you do and that he had no malicious intent.
This is the type of behaviour that cannot go unnoticed because it is destroying other people’s cultures.
We live in a time where we pretend everything is perfect with the help of social media. We get to paint a picture for others to see. This can be a good thing, but it also undermines certain issues and refuses to call things out for what they are. “How we are seen determines in part how we are treated; how we treat others is based on how we see them; such seeing comes from representation,” English academic Richard Dyer once said.
So how does feminism tie into this?
I was reading White Tears/Brown Scars by Ruby Hamad, and it opened my eyes to the issues plaguing women of color. I never realized how the feminism I read about in typical female empowerment books failed to consider the experiences outside of the white community.
The books I read about feminism discussed how abhorrent it was that women were expected to be conventionally pretty and written off as the frivolous sex, but they never addressed how colored women in the United States face a domestic violence rate far higher than that of white women or how the mainstream white feminist movement has largely failed to lift the voices of women of color and (in many cases) has actively silenced them.
Often, when I have attempted to speak to or confront a white woman about something she said or did that impacted me immensely, I am presented with tearful denials and indignant accusations that I’m hurting her. My confidence diminishes and I start second-guessing myself. I either flare up in frustration at not being heard (which only seems to prove her point) or I back down immediately, apologising and consoling the very person who caused me harm.
Whether angry or calm, shouting or pleading, women of color are still perceived as the aggressors in some of the minds of outsiders with no context. Likewise, some white women are uneducated that their race privileges them as surely as women of colors’ condemn theirs. In this context, their tearful displays are a form of emotional and psychological violence that reinforce the very system of white dominance that many claim to oppose.
This same behavior is what many are facing now with all these social media trends that are promoting cultural appropriation.
We need to revisit our experiences through a revised lens, but not remain in a state of anger or repose. Ask yourself how we can all live together in peace. Don’t just do better, but do it right so that humans, no matter their class, skin color, religion, traditions or cultural conditioning, can claim a place in society that is fair.
