Urban Outfitters Sale on My Culture, WTF??

We’ve talked a lot about appropriation and with festival season in full swing, it’s a hot button topic.

It isn't that rare to see someone at a music festival dressed in some sort of Native-inpsired headdress, not realizing that headdresses are important, sacred in Indigenous cultural practices.

One thing that academics talk a lot about in terms of white privilege is the right to appropriate: the ‘I like it, so I take it’ mentality. It happens all the time.

Like, the flask pictured above, or an Urban Outfitters' smudge kit, designed and made by a white couple from America who live and travel in a trailor and also manufacture leather holsters for iPhones, marketed to hipsters as "energy balancing"? Excuse me???

So what do we do about this kind of thing? 

CBC’s New Fire took a look at how some people handle appropriation when they see it. You can check out the radio program here.

And for a laugh, here's DW Diaz’s ’Genocide Chic’ video. 

Have you seen cultural appropriation first hand? How did you deal with it? 

Photo sources: www.mancunion.com and www.jezebel.com