"It's Just a Dress"

[Roger]

So I was just sitting around reading my morning news (yes, I'd rather read my news than watch it on TV), when I saw this article, Utah teen shamed for wearing 'racist' dress to prom, sparking cultural appropriation debate.

A 18 year old student who attends Woods Cross High School in Utah, wore a Chinese cheongsam dress to her prom. The student, Keziah Daum, also posted four prom pictures to Twitter on April 22, with the simple caption, "PROM."

One of the photos in the album has Daum posing with a group of her friends, crouching down with folded hands— a gesture many people deemed inappropriate, while some others have claimed the prom dress and pose to be racist.

Since posting the photos, Daum has recieved hundreds of negative and angry comments.

Now, if these people are going to chastise a high school student then they should also look at other western women who've worn a cheongsam over the years, such as Elizabeth Taylor, Nicole Kidman, Paris Hilton, Ann Hathaway, Emma Watson, Celine Dion, to name a few. Furthermore, quite a few Christian missionaries in Hong Kong have attired their female students in a more severe cheongsam style. Also, several designers have "borrowed" ideas from the chinese dress, just as the cheongsam design has been influenced by western culture, hence the more modern cheongsam is a mix between chinese tradition and western style.

Calling the wearing of this particular dress as inappropriate, or the wearer insensitive to cultural tradition and a racist is simply baised ignorance on their part, as the modern cheongsam was not considerded as a cultural tradition, and was even seen by the Chinese Communist as bourgeois, which was considered a political misbehavior by the emerging anti-tradionalists, from the 1950s to the 1970s.

In my ever so humble opinion, some of these politically correct folks have gone over board, taking something that was intended as different, and even fun, and tried turning it into something vile. Actually, this type of behavior starts to fall into the waters of harassment. More so, these type of critics really need to get a productive life as their ignorance based vitriol has become ever more tiresome.