notablyindigo:

For you to treat our tattoos like a part of some costume…! My culture isn’t a game!

Gene Yang has done a lot of very strange/generally incorrect things with The Promise, but this is something I’m glad to say he got very right. Culture isn’t a costume, and wearing traditional dress or images from an unaffiliated culture simply because you’re a “fan” is inappropriate.

This is how I feel every time I see bindis included in magazine spreads, or decorating the foreheads of celebrities and schoolgirls. It gets taken up by fashion and becomes “cool”…as long as it’s not being worn by my mother or my grandmother or, for that matter, me. I’m not cool when I wear a bindi—a real one, the red, thumbprint-sized one. I’m ‘ultra-Indian’. I’m conservative, traditional, demure. I am all the stereotypes that the West has ever imposed on Indian women. I’m not fashionable or modern or admired.

Tread lightly where other peoples’ cultures are concerned. There are ways to appreciate them without appropriating.