Last halloween some friends and I decided to get dressed up and walk around the neighborhoods surrounding our college that are home to a plethora of students here at Muhlenberg. Walking around and seeing people dressed up was all in all fun, until from the corner of my eye I saw what looked to be a sombrero. For people who do not know, sombrero’s are a significant part of Mexican culture and a huge part …
White people are a boiled potato of culture – which is wild when considering the amount they’ve worked throughout history to spice themselves up (literally lol). By this, I mean that white people get to be nothing. They’ve convinced us they are not a race or an ethnicity in the same way other races are. They’ve othered themselves so much that they’ve convinced us white isn’t a color. If they were a number they’d be …
Culture is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as the “customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group.” Culture does not belong to just one person, it belongs to a group of people. I guess because culture is shared there is some confusion as to who gets to do what. There is a very thin line between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation which creates a lot of issues. I once …
I was scrolling through Tik Tok when I saw a woman of color speaking on how recently there has been a shift in how people perceive her. She was being told more and more frequently that she looks white. That got her wondering why people were saying that? Because for most of her life she has easily been identified as an ethnic minority. She started to hypothesize it was because recently ethnic features, especially Black …
Painting is about the world that we live in. Black men live in the world. My choice is to include them. This is my way of saying yes to us. -Kehinde Wiley I think that an interesting way to examine racism and its various permutations within the U.S., is to look at art created by Black American artists. In my experience, more museums have begun to feature exhibits by black artists and many of these …
In class this week, we discussed the perspective that some have of “variety is the spice of life” and to how this can quickly turn into the equally troublesome perspective of being “color-blind.” Being so celebratory of multiculturalism can easily turn into race erasure. Regarding diversity in race as simply variety or something to keep life interesting is diminishing of the serious struggles that people of all races have had to endure, past and present. …
After stumbling upon Macklemore’s “White Privilege II,” I was excited to hear what he had to say. It felt like a direct application of the concepts that we had been learning in Contemporary Racism. The song directly references protest slogans from the Black Lives Matter Movement, police brutality, the double standard of hip-hop, and (of course) white privilege. He goes as far as to call himself out for the base of his fame from—and the …
One of the most widely used terms in discussions about race is the phrase “cultural appropriation.” And yet despite its frequent usage, cultural appropriation is one of the most controversial concepts. It is especially difficult to understand in conversation with the arts. The primary purpose of the arts is arguably to provide a medium for creative and emotional expression of the artist(s). The visual arts allow for creative expression devoid of auditory stimuli. The performing …
In light of the recent posts regarding the performance of historical dance works by Muhlenberg College students as cultural appropriation, I find myself questioning cultural appropriation, its nature, what is appropriate, and what is not. To put it even more simply, can anyone really emulate someone else’s experience via performance? And if not, what is the point of performance, if it is not to express an experience of an artist? In my opinion, it comes …
At some point this week, I came across a BuzzFeed post entitled, “The BuzzFeed Black History Reading List,” which included a series of essays and articles reflecting upon the end of Black History Month. One of the articles in this post shines an accusatory spotlight down on Hollywood’s use of Blackface today. After some initial disbelief and some precursory digging, I found the amount of performers who have performed in blackface appalling and the names I …