11 of the Most Culturally Appropriated South Asian Accessories – And What They Really Mean

These are only "headlines."  If you are interested in details, please link to the whole article.
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/01/south-asian-accessories-mean/

While it looked cool to my friends when they sported a bindi, I could not help but feel strange about it, like an invasion of space.

When is it acceptable to wear a Bindi?

• If you are getting married to a South Asian
• If you attend an Indian festival/ritual and have a vermillion dot placed on you as a sign of welcoming one’s guest

Which was why I was defiant in school when I was told to remove my nose ring after piercing my nose at fifteen. I did it to commemorate my very first trip to the homeland.

When is it acceptable to wear a Nath?

• When it is not a bridal nose ring being worn as a fashion accessory (the other styles are just fine)
• If it is a part of your own culture

These hefty accessories are meant to accentuate the rhythm of dance and to appreciate the complex footwork for the forms of Indian dance.

When is it acceptable to wear a Paayal?

• If your culture wears them as an accessory like us
• If you are an Indian dancer or a South Asian bride

When is it acceptable to wear Chudiyaan?

• If you are in attendance of a Hindu friend’s matrimonial functions and the dress code is Indian ethnic – but be sure to check with your host first

South Asian women across the world and from all walks of life wear them at home, during an occasion, while in attendance of prayer, or at the workplace.

When is it acceptable to wear a saree?

• If you are in attendance of an Indian function that stipulates Indian ethnic attire. It would be advisable to get a hand with how to wear one properly since it takes some effort.
• Please do not wear this for Halloween.

When is it acceptable to wear a Bichiya toe ring?

• If you are married to a South Asian.

The Aum is used everywhere now – and not as it should be.

When is it acceptable to wear the Aum?

• If you sport one as a pendant, bangle, bracelet, or a tattoo (be mindful of its placement) and are a practicing Hindu

When is it acceptable to get a tattoo of a Hindu God?

• While I am deeply appreciative of tattoo culture, it would be advisable to get these tattoos only if they hold a deep significance to you
• Please mind where you place them on your body. The legs are considered the dirtiest part of one’s body, and getting one on your back is frowned upon.

Henna
The issue here is not the use of the plant; it is the convenient fashioning that inadvertently erases the cultural significance of this ritual that is a bother.
So if you are not a person of color, I would caution you against wearing this for an “Indianized” look – I don’t even know what that term is supposed to mean. It is offensive, but I have read it one too many times. Here’s looking at you, Madonna.








 

A Lot Of People Are Very Upset That An Indian-American Woman Won The Miss America Pageant

Racism alive and well - hint - if you begin a sentence with "I'm not a racist, but… " then there's probably a problem there.   America IS DIVERSE!  http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/a-lot-of-people-are-very-upset-that-an-indian-american-woman

But Don’t Call Them Racist: Right Wing Freaks Out Over First Indian-American Miss America http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/09/16/miss-america-right-wing-racism/
Moments… no, seconds after the new Miss America was crowned, the Twitterverse exploded with racist Tweets. Miss New York, Nina Davuluri, is the first woman of Indian descent to win the title of Miss America. The 24-year-old from Syracuse is studying to be a doctor. After she became Miss New York, Davuluri told the Syracuse Post Standard:

“Everything happens for a reason. If it’s meant to be it’s meant to be. It’s a win-win just to be in it.”

If Ms. Davuluri is correct and everything does happen for a reason, maybe the reason she won the title of Miss America was to demonstrate that Americans come in all varieties. After all, in a competition that included one contestant rocking a knee-brace (Miss Florida) and the first ever contestant with tattoos (Miss Kansas), this year’s batch of beauty queens was pretty diverse.

Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/sunday-review/has-caucasian-lost-its-meaning.html?_r=0

The Supreme Court, which can be more colloquial, has used the term in only 64 cases, including a pair from the 1920s that reveal its limitations. In one, the court ruled that a Japanese man could not become a citizen because, although he may have been light-skinned, he was not Caucasian. In the other, an Indian was told that he could not become a citizen because, although he may have been technically Caucasian, he was certainly not white. (A similar debate erupted more recently when the Tsarnaev brothers, believed to be responsible for the Boston Marathon bombing, were revealed to be Muslims from the Caucasus.) 

The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.” 

  

In 1889, the editors of the original Oxford English Dictionary noted that the term Caucasian had been “practically discarded.” But they spoke too soon. Blumenbach’s authority had given the word a pseudoscientific sheen that preserved its appeal. Even now, the word gives discussions of race a weird technocratic gravitas, as when the police insist that you step out of your “vehicle” instead of your car.

Susan Glisson, who as the executive director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation in Oxford, Miss., regularly witnesses Southerners sorting through their racial vocabulary, said she rarely hears “Caucasian.” “Most of the folks who work in this field know that it’s a completely ridiculous term to assign to whites,” she said. “I think it’s a term of last resort for people who are really uncomfortable talking about race. They use the term that’s going to make them be as distant from it as possible.” 

There is another reason to use it, said Jennifer L. Hochschild, a professor of government and African-American studies at Harvard. “The court, or some clever clerk, doesn’t really want to use the word white in part because roughly half of Hispanics consider themselves white.” She added, “White turns out to be a much more ambiguous term now than we used to think it was.” 

There are a number of terms that refer to various degrees of blackness, both current and out of favor: African-American, mulatto, Negro, colored, octaroon. There are not a lot of options for whites. In Texas, they say Anglo. And there is the pejorative we were so pithily reminded of when a witness in the racially charged George Zimmerman trial said the victim, Trayvon Martin, had called Mr. Zimmerman a “creepy-ass cracker.” 

IN the South, I was often asked about my ethnic origins, and I had a ready answer. “My father is from India,” I would recite, phrasing it in such a way as to avoid being mistaken for an American Indian. “And my mom is white.” Almost invariably, if I was speaking to black people, they would nod with understanding. If I was speaking to white people, I would get a puzzled look. “What kind of white?” they would ask. Only when I explained the Norwegian, Scottish and German mix of my ancestry would I get the nod. 

Such racial boundaries have increasingly been called into question in the debate over affirmative action, once regarded as a form of restitution to descendants of slaves, but now complicated by all sorts of questions about who, exactly, is being helped. “What if some of them aren’t poor, what if some of them don’t have American parentage, what if some of them are really stupid?” Ms. Painter, the historian, asked. “There’s all kinds of characteristics that we stuff into race without looking, and then they pop out and we think, ‘I can’t deal with that.’ ” 

Doubtless, this society will continue to classify people by race for some time to come. And as we lumber toward justice, some of those classifications remain useful, even separate from other factors like economic class. Caucasian, though? Not so much.

Shaila Dewan is an economics reporter for The New York Times.