hey there! NOW WHERE DO I START. WHERE.
- African Americans do this thing of describing anything from a country or a culture in an African country as just Africa. By refusing to call something by the actual name of the country (or the culture) you make an entire regions look homogeneous, just because those countries all share one continent. It erases identities.
It is not an African print. It can be described as ‘a print from an African country’. This new description acknowledges that not all African countries are similar and most are entirely different to one another. Many countries in Africa do not share the same culture, therefore they do not share the same style of dressing and names. The style in the pictures looks Ghanian or Benin or Nigerian or Togolese. but everyone is just calling it AFRICA, as if these countries don’t exist.
- Mixing clothing from Africa with European cultures style of clothing is is fine IF you even knew the countries the style of clothing originated from and their history and you weren’t simply mixing different cultures to make your own individual style just because you think you can. that’s not appreciating, that’s appropriating.
People get mad when they see young white girls mixing white style with styles from African countries / native Americans because they do not understand that what they do is appropriating these cultures. that’s what’s going on in this pic. ANYONE can appropriate a culture, being connected through ancestry does not change that.
- It encourages more people to believe Africa is one big box full of loving primitive exotic creatures when the reality is, we are just everyday people who go to school and watch Naruto and when some of us see the bullshit that some African Americans pull, we take to the internet, like Tumblr.
