I don’t know if you can have an abstinence-only approach to cultural appropriation and wonder if it is best to accept that people will borrow shit and move the convo to being about properly contextualizing, crediting, and paying respects rather than enforcing do’s don’t’s

Pandora's box is opened. With culture and technology now it's not going to stop. What do BIPOC want to spend our time doing anyways?

Identity and self expression and creativity has always been messy. We are ourselves but we are also an amalgamation of our environment, our friends, our influences, etc. There are sociological and systemic instances where it perpetuates a problem and there's times where it isn't

And I don't have the answers but something tells me our ancestors didn't intend for me sit on my ass and guess whether or not a white person grew up around Asian people to determine if she could wear a Qipao

Does highlighting a systemic issue automatically mean it's up to us to be cops about it?

At some point, as with many things on Twitter, the conversation moved from a large scale sociological reading Whiteness as a whole system to being about individuals

I would anticipate the liklihood but would still be disappointed if this was somehow interpreted as a tacit approval of egregious instances of blackface—it isn't. Those are obviously fucked instances and deserve critique.

Like if something is offensive, say it's offensive because when it gets to that point, it's much more than about the actual act of taking.

Watching a TikTok video of a chinese american high schooler getting emotional about how a qipao isn't a constume when it sort of is these days because people dont seriously wear it and then I see some art school asian american do dragon stick and pokes and it's all silly to me

And frankly I see just as much watered down, reductionist, caricature-filled romanticisms about the Orient coming from Asian-Americans and I don't know if them having Asian ancestry gives them a pass from not critically thinking about their output

So clearly this framework has its limitations

It's why I stopped really sharing this project from years ago: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/eric-hu-a-thousand-characters. It's actually cringe to me now. I was "DisCovErIng My RoOts" in a very shallow way

And if we want to talk about power and who profits off of what, me making a statement on being Asian is going to have more weight than my cousins in Taipei saying anything because I was born in the US but am I more qualified to speak on it?