So we have people yet again talking about how “if PoC say white people can’t wear feathers” or bindis or whatever people like to bring up that belongs to PoC then “non-whites should not be wearing ANY Western clothes, as that would be cultural appropriation of whites…sorry guys and girls, but you will have to chuck out all shirts, pants, skirts, dresses and shoes.” Well.

PSA: there’s Western PoC too! It would be nice if you didn’t erase them. But because whiteness is normalized, what they all mean is “stop wearing white people clothes”.

To get it out of the way, people not of that culture can’t wear those things or do those things because, they’re of religious and cultural significance. I’m not wasting time explaining cultural appropriation, it’s been done. See through that link.

Now. It may come as a surprise but PoC didn’t go around wearing leaves and feathers for clothes! I mean come on, we had clothes, we had shirts and pants and skirts and things. We had shoes. We had cloth. The Silk Road is called the Silk Road for a reason.

Oh, and many of the… “modern Western” clothes are simply adaptations of PoC fashions. Case in point: “harem pants”. And, to add:

Trousers first enter recorded history in the 6th century BCE, with the appearance of horse-riding Iranian peoples in Greek ethnography. At this time, not only the Persians, but also allied Eastern and Central Asian peoples such as the Bactrians, Armenians, Tigraxauda Scythians and Xiongnu Hunnu, are known to have worn them.^[3][4] Trousers are believed to have been worn by both sexes among these early users.^[5]

So we got pants/trousers for both sexes before white people. Whoa.

A straw-woven skirt dating to 3,900 B.C. was discovered in Armenia.^[1] Skirts have been worn by men and women from many cultures, such as the lungi, kanga and sarong worn in South Asia and Southeast Asia, and the kilt worn in Scotland.

The earliest known culture to have females wear clothing resembling miniskirts were the Duan Qun Miao, which literally meant “short skirt Miao” in Chinese. This was in reference to the short miniskirts “that barely cover the buttocks” worn by women of the tribe, and which were “probably shocking” to observers in medieval and early modern times.^[2]

We have skirts of so many different forms too! Look at that!

I can’t find something specific for dresses, and sure, dresses, frocks and gowns as they’re called now are officially recorded as showing up in Medieval Europe. But hey, there’s abayas, which are just like dresses, just not as tight. And didn’t require corsets. There’s also the Ao Dia, from Vietnam. And the Boubou. The examples go on and on.

The earliest known shoes are sandals dating from approximately 7,000 or 8,000 B.C., found in the Fort Rock Cave in the US state of Oregon. in 1938.^[1] The world’s oldest leather shoe, made from a single piece of cowhide laced with a leather cord along seams at the front and back, was found in a cave in Armenia in 2008 and is believed to date to 3,500 B.C.^[2][3]Ötzi the Iceman’s shoes, dating to 3,300 BC, featured brown bearskin bases, deerskin side panels, and a bark-string net, which pulled tight around the foot.^[2]

Many early natives in North America wore a similar type of footwear known as the moccasin. These are tight-fitting, soft-soled shoes typically made out of leather or bison hides. Many moccasins were also decorated with various beads and other adornments. Moccasins were not designed to get wet, and in wet weather and warm summer months, most Native Americans went barefoot.^[6]

As civilizations began to develop, thong sandals (the precursors of the modern flip-flop) were worn. This practice dates back to pictures of them in ancient Egyptian murals from 4,000 B.C. One pair found in Europe was made of papyrus leaves and dated to be approximately 1,500 years old. They were also worn in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus Christ.^[7] Thong sandals were worn by many civilizations and made from a wide variety of materials. Ancient Egyptian sandals were made from papyrus and palm leaves. The Masai of Africa made them out of rawhide. In India, they were made from wood. In China and Japan, rice straw was used. The leaves of the sisal plant were used to make twine for sandals in South America, while the natives of Mexico used the Yucca plant.^[8][9]

Indigenous people with shoes! PoC with shoes! And the original flip flops! What’s all this?!

Checkmate, racists.

You might all want to reconsider bringing up clothing. All “western” clothing is adapted from PoC clothing. With no credit given to PoC cultures. That’s usually called plagiarism, which is stealing. So it’s not really that of white people now, is it.

And we’re not even telling people to stop wearing shirts and shoes, seesh. Just telling white people to stop ruining our cultures decreasing the significance of things by all the appropriation. It really isn’t all that much. Just don’t touch things that you don’t have permission to.