I haven’t forgotten the remarks a boy made about an Indian girl in 1st grade: that her lunch was “weird” and “smelly.” I haven’t forgotten the time in 7th grade when a girl said to me, “You know, Indian people are so…ugh. But, oh my gosh, if you were Indian, you know I’d never say that, right?”. I haven’t forgotten that girl who laughed at me in 4th grade for having thicker eyebrows than the other girls. I haven’t forgotten how much I tried to hide my Bengali culture when I was younger, something I regret so much when I think about it, and something I try to drill into my six-year-old sister every single day. I want her to be proud of her South Asian heritage. I want her to actively participate in it, and not have to hide it from anyone.
On Eid (a Muslim holiday), as a child, I would almost never get my henna done because I didn’t want to come to school the next day, or after the weekend, and have people ask about it or talk about it. I didn’t skip school on Eid like all the other kids because I didn’t want to seem different. I refused to wear traditionally and culturally South Asian clothing, even to Bengali gatherings with family friends. If I ever did, I would make my parents promise to go straight home so nobody would see me and my family looking “different”.
After all this, I’ve started to love my culture. I love doing henna on Eid. I love wearing South Asian clothing. I love telling others about my culture. And I’m doing all this with confidence. At the same time, I’m seeing girls doing their henna and wearing bindis and kurtas that they buy from Forever 21 with the same amount of confidence. The girl from 7th grade just got her henna done last month. The girl who was making fun of my brows is filling hers in to appear thicker, and frantically applying castor oil on them to make them grow. A girl from a Twitter makeup account did South Asian eye makeup to complete her “festival look”.
These “festival looks” are becoming okay to wear through celebrities like the Jenners and Vanessa Hudgens, who donned South Asian styles at Coachella.
In fact, when I Google “festival makeup”, I see South Asian styles, but only one South Asian girl in the first three rows of the image search.
And though the term “cultural appropriation” generally applies to a situation where someone white is appropriating POC culture, white people are not the only ones appropriating South Asian culture. Even now, when I wear anything culturally South Asia, anything that’s culturally mine, people will stare. But when they’re “festival looks” or a “fashion accessory” worn by non-South Asians, nobody bats an eye. In fact, people seem to get excited about the fact that they look “so ethnic”. Wearing anything that’s culturally mine makes me exotic to non-South Asian men, but they make other girls look fashionable.
Because there is little to no outcry from South Asians heard by non-South Asians (compared to cultural appropriation of black culture), appropriation continues. At the end of the day, appropriators can take off their makeup, bindi, and jewelry, and reflect on what a fun day they had and how good they looked. At the end of my day, I take off my makeup, bindi, and jewelry, and think about how much I missed out on as a kid, and how I can’t wear any of this casually. My culture is for me. It’s not something that exists to prop you up and make you look better. So next time you want to “complete” your look, opt for something that isn’t a piece of anyone else’s culture.
