2008 Woodie Awards
More than a fashion statement
When cultural appropriation and solidarity blur
By: Adrienne Potter Yoe
Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: Opinion
|
Looking around at the different stalls that seemed to be carved into brick buildings, I saw myriads of trendy keffiyahs lining the walls. They came in different checkered shades of navy blue and red, and I even spotted a pink one. They were cute enough, cost only a few shekels, and I was ready to make a purchase when the image of former PLO Chairman Yassir Arafat in a keffiyah leapt into my brain. I began to doubt my desire to buy one.
Did I actually know what I was buying? Actually, I didn't -and it was a good thing that Yassir's image haunted my brain at that moment. Or I might have become one of the millions of ignorant non-Arab, non-Muslim trend-addicts across the globe who purchase one of the Middle East's most potent political symbols as a mere "scarf."
Had I purchased a keffiyah as a symbol of solidarity with Palestinains, I would have been something far worse than an ignorant trend monger. I would have been a clingy overempathizer. In a stirring essay in the New York Times last month, Daniel Mendelsohn, the author of Lost: A Search for Six Million, discusses those who empathize to the degree to which they believe that they can "feel" what another person, or group, has been through.
But Mendelsohn points out that the overempathizer can empathize with victims of Nazi gas chambers all they like-but the days of Holocaust victims and overempathizers end very differently. Holocaust victims endure terrible deaths, while overempathizers can walk away and return to their homes. Another case of fashionable overempathizing can be found throughout the country: dreadlocking. Dreadlocks appear throughout the world, as symbols of politics and religious beliefs.
In North America, they are most commonly associated with Afro-Caribbean resistance towards Eurocentric culture, particularly within the Rastafarian religion in Jamaica. New Yorker of Jamaican descent Natasha Gutierrez'09, does not appreciate seeing her Caucasian classmates wearing dreadlocks. "White people are trying to adopt the culture and adopt a struggle that they can easily shed, because they were born in privilege, whereas people who weren't, Rastafarians and people of color, wear it as a statement of struggle, and they can't shed that kink in their hair-but white people can."