poemsofthedead:

dingane1:

most white people with dreadlocks do so to be counter culture/hippie not realizing that counter culture significance dreadlocks (that white folk appropriated from black folk) is about black folk rebelling against the white supremacist culture.

its ours.

it pisses me off as a black person from the us off not immigrant stock we have so much of what was ours destroyed only to rebuild it and have it destroyed again.

our music as been appropriated

our style has been appropriated

our speech has been appropriated

you gentrify our communities

you destroy our institutions

kill our best and brightest

its not just hair. its another instance in a long line of white people fucking our shit up

And it bothers me a great deal to see non-Black POC appropriate from Black cultures and think that because we are all POC that we just share all of this and that it’s okay for us to take something out of its context because we’re all in this together or some shit. No. We aren’t. Having grown up in a white family, estranged from my own culture, and attending schools with relatively high Black populations, it took me DECADES to unlearn these ideas that we can all share everything. It took me connecting with other Natives, marrying into other non-white families and having to learn the boundaries, and yes, reading A LOT from/by Black people to understand this. When I say “it is not yours to take”, I am generally directing it towards white people because white people have such a LONG history of feeling entitled to steal everything from everyone, and we see so much contemporary continuance of that history. BUT, just because I am shoving that in the faces of white people does not mean that we as POC don’t need to take our own advice. Much like the use of the N-word, we non-Black POC must acknowledge how much we are influenced by Black cultures AND be respectful of boundaries. We must avoid appropriation ourselves and speak up against appropriation when it is being done to cultures other than our own. We need to put some action behind our talk about “solidarity”.

(via queerandpresentdanger)