Appropriatory Fashion: The Stuff Nightmares Are Made Of

Having just gotten back from the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce's annual conference, Creating Change, there's quite a lot I need to process. There's a lot of information and emotional processing to do. There's this bizarre new and amazing person in my life that I have no explanatory system for. And then there are my nightmares, which may be the weirdest bit.

I rarely remember my dreams. I can count the number of times I've remembered anything at all from my dreams in the past six months without removing my shoes. That said two of those times have been nightmares about bad haircuts. One was a mullet, and then last night there was the nightmare about having a mohawk. Well more accurately the nightmare was about appropriation, and I was well aware in the dream of having committed appropriation not only of the mohawk, but also of something else I can't remember. When your white guilt starts surfacing in your dreams, something proactive around it has to be done.

Now I've had a mohawk before, and as recently as last year I didn't feel guilty about that, but recently I've recognized that while I don't really know that much about the history of the mohawk, it's probably not a fashion statement I have the right to make. Fauxhawks, I'm more okay with, and still occasionally sport--rightly or wrongly. I don't even know what brought the issue up. Sure lots of white queers have mohawks and I certainly took note of them at the conference and every white gay boy was wandering around all fauxhawked up but I didn't think too much about it--until I woke up this morning all anxious.

I'm not normally all white guilting everywhere. I took the get off your butt and do something philosophy and generally try to my work around white privilege and anti-racism. So I'm not sure what to make of this nightmare or what it means I need to be working on within my psyche. Maybe I just need to be chilling with more white folks who are doing their work--there aren't enough of them in my life right now, I acknowledge.