ruhani:kiehm:ruhani:ruhani:February 10th, 1987, my parents during their wedding day.I don’t ha

ruhani:kiehm:ruhani:ruhani:February 10th, 1987, my parents during their wedding day.I don’t have that many pictures of me in a bindi or desi garments - because I pretty much stopped wearing them as a preteen - since people would tease me and think that my clothes and culture was something gross and ugly. Which made me believe that it was true. But something I still secretly loved was my parents wedding album. The colours. The culture. The people. The happiness - in every picture. Why couldn’t I have that with out being teased?Then as I grew up, I saw more people being more appreciative of my culture, or so I thought. They weren’t really appreciating our culture, obviously. They were just picking our culture apart - taking, no, stealing, the things they liked and ignoring the meaning behind it all. Along the way the things they appropriate loses their original meaning. Stripped entirely of the culture it belongs to. Just another massproduced accessory. History repeating itself since the British.It has taken a great deal of time for me to unlearn all the internalized self hatred towards my background. So yeah, it really gets to me whenever I see someone who isn’t desi - using our culture as a fashion statement.If someone desi can’t wear their culture with pride without being harassed for it, why should anyone else be allowed to wear it w/o having to face the shitty side that comes with it?1. Why did she submit to what the people who were hurting her had to say? She knew they weren’t right and that what they said was painful, but she chose to accept it. Their ridicule did not force her to believe they were right. She chose to believe it. 2. Was she the only one who wore the desi when she did? Did she have zero peers to support her? How many people actually teased her and how many tried to comfort her and reinforce her when she was hurt? 3. Why did she only secretly love her parents wedding album? Was it a secret from everyone or just a secret from her oppressors? Did she not share this love with her parents? Did they not encourage her for it? What about her friends and other immediate family?3. If she were being teased for anything else, would she have still wondered why she couldn’t avoid being teased at all?4. Did she ask those she encountered wearing the desi why they were wearing it? What made it so obvious those people did not have some level of appreciation for the culture? 5. Did the bindi truly lose its meaning entirely because people in another nation began to wear it? Where is the empirical proof of this? 6. She hated herself. Seeing others wear clothes that reminded her why she hated herself made her assume those people were doing so as a fashion statement and nothing more. They were merely stealing her identity and culture. How did she know this?7. Because she was harassed for wearing the bindi, all those who resemble her oppressors and wear the bindi must now suffer the same harassment that she endured. This is justice in her eyes. Eye for an eye, except, even though that individual was not the one to take her eye and only resembles those who did, it is righteous to take that individuals eye nonetheless.First of all, my pronoun is not she. I’m non-binary. Second of all, I was a fucking child. Children are easily affected by the things that happen around them. If more than one person keeps saying you’re ugly or anything else, you’ll start to believe it’s true. It’s not something anyone chooses to believe in.I was the only desi kid in my class for a very long time actually. And yeah, my parents tried to teach me more about our culture and to embrace it but when you constantly hear negative things about it from the outside of your home, you’ll start neglecting what your parents say because there is a feeling of wanting to be accepted by society.Do you really need ‘empirical proof’? It’s pretty obvious when some people start calling the bindi “a dot” and have no clue what cultural and religious meanings are behind the bindi or where it’s even originated. When it’s being used in occassions where it’s not made to be used. When it’s being massproduced by large western companies to make profit out of.I do not want others to suffer because of their culture - I want people to understand that desi people suffer even today just by being themselves and/or by embracing their culture - whilst other’s who do not belong to the culture can look past that and use our culture as something you just throw on and can take off w/o any problem. But we can’t because we’re still wearing our brown skin. -- source link

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