jjongrawr:

damnlayoffthebleach:

cynique replied to your post: I haven’t seen any posts here about it soo how do you feel about the ganguro fashion trend in Japan?

this is exactly how i feel about b-gal. it’s so fucking appropriative i just want to go to japan and tell those girls to stop. japan really has a skewed view on black people in general and this doesn’t help at all. |:

Asia, especially East Asia, has a REALLY skewed view on Black people. This is part of the reason why we at DLOTB talk about Black positive influences in the media. Because a lot of time, the only interaction with a culture that some people may be able to get is through the media. To some Americans, their understanding of Chinese culture is Bruce Lee films. It’s the same in Asia in regards to black people. Their understanding of American and European cultures, especially in a modern setting, is based mostly on our media. If we never show Black people in anything but stereotypes in our shows, movies, and music videos, then they’ll never know how diverse and rich Black culture is. They’ll never see what the average Black person is really like. We become caricatures and not actual people.

It’s why B-Gal IS a thing. It’s why kpop is so huge and why Korean boys can go stepping on stage and have kpop fans cream their pants all over the world (I’m never letting that shit go; I’m looking at you B.A.P. Fuck off). It’s why when fans heard 2NE1 was making an English album with Will.I.Am, they freaked, talking about how he was going to ruin them and he didn’t understand music. Even though HE’S part of the culture that would know hip hop the best. Especially in a Western/Global market. And yet these Asian girls who don’t even write their own songs understand hip hop better than he does? 

Oh, okay.

The issue is that these things turn Black culture into a gimmick. It’s not a REAL culture that you need to part of in order to REALLY understand it. It’s just something that anyone can do and it’s cooler when it’s non-Black people doing it. It denies us the right to our own culture. It tells us that our culture is nothing more than something other non-Black people can profit over. And it robs us of what little identify we have left in our colonized world.

TL;DR: It’s fucked up.

PREACH.