masalamermaid:

breakyourneck:

masalamermaid: sophiedoodlz: No it wasn’t.. that’s nice, but hippie culture is based in racism (◕‿◕✿)

really though, it wasn’t. stop trying to turn everything into a race war, tumblr.

Hippie culture continues today in people who call themselves “yogis” and practice smudging and wear dreadlocks. You know exactly who I’m talking about. They collect crystals and tattoo themselves with eastern religious symbols and pretend they are one with the earth.

Hippie culture is based entirely on the exotification of marginalised cultures.

Hippies have a fundamental misunderstanding of the pieces of the cultures that they use (I.e. Chakras, smudging, dreadlocks, etc.). The understanding that they have of these cultural aspects stems from racist interpretations of these cultures based on anthropology (which is still a very biased discipline), but at the time of the inception of the hippie movement, anthropology was still being used to show that other races were inferior to white people. Hippie culture takes bits and pieces of these cultures that they see as being “counter” the norm which is fundamentally racist because they see cultures of color as being outside the norm which further others people of color in a western context.

white hippies like to think they’re the least racist of all whites or even not racist at all because they travel to ~foreign lands and get to know the natives~ “embrace” dreadlocks, eastern religions and imagery; they think their appropriation of our cultures and history is acceptance when it couldn’t be further from it. the whole point of being a hippy is being “free”, a better and softer word for uncivilised which is what they ultimately consider us.

and if you think people of color talking about our experiences and things that affect us is turning “everything into a race war”, then you’re probably a racist