It costs a bundle to attend Pitzer College, an elite liberal-arts institution in Claremont, California, that used to be a women’s college and still skews female (57 percent of its 1,000 or so students). Tuition and fees alone are $48,670 a year, and when you throw in room and board, the price jumps to $65,880.
So it was surprising to read that Pitzer actually houses an “oppressed group” of women students—how oppressed can you be at a $66,000-a-year college that’s consistently near the top in the U.S. News ratings? The “oppressed group,” apparently all Latinas, is complaining that a “privileged group” of women students, that is to say, whites, have committed the sin of “cultural appropriation” by wearing—get this—hoop earrings. (The phrases “oppressed group” and “privileged group” come from an Inside Higher Education article) about the appropriated hoops.
First, an anonymous but probably Latina student wrote this in huge letters on a Pitzer dorm’s free-speech wall: “White girl, take off your hoops!!!”
Then, according to the Claremont Independent, the conservative student newspaper for the five Claremont colleges:
The Claremont Independent then got into trouble with Pitzer for daring to cover the hoops controversy, which, as might be expected, generated quite a bit of nationwide ridicule of the earring-sensitive. Pitzer’s president, Melvin L. Oliver, issued an open letter titled “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech.” condemning “a cycle of violent hate speech that threatens the safety and well-being of every member of our community.” According to Inside Higher Ed:
So it was all that pesky Claremont Independent‘s fault. We can’t have anyone making fun of outrage over jewelry choices.
I myself started to wonder how it could be that hoop earrings, sold everywhere in America—and worn by women everywhere in America—could be considered such an integral part of a specific ethnic culture that wearing them amounted to appropriation. It turned out that even the oh-so-politically correct Bustle had trouble with that one, too. Admonishing white women never to so much as look at a pair of hoops, Bustle writer JR Thorpe admitted:
Vice writer Barbara Calderon-Douglass, in an article a couple of years go, elaborated:
Chola culture! We had that when I was growing up in Southern California—except that then it was called looking “cheap”—and it was scarcely confined to particular ethnic groups. We college-bound girls dressed preppy in prim dresses, monogrammed sweaters, and loafers, and we wore our hair demure and short. The non-college-bound wore tight skirts, alluring white shoes called “bunnies” that sold for about $3, Maybelline eye makeup by the bucketful, and elaborate teased hairdos, plus earrings dangling to their shoulders. Frankly, the “cheap” girls looked about ten times as attractive as us preppies and had about ten times as many boyfriends. I envied them and I secretly wanted to look just like them.
Indeed, the archetypal 1950s “cheap girl” wasn’t a Latina at all. She was Wanda Jackson, the Oklahoma rockabilly star from whom Elvis Presley borrowed his first songs. Jackson, gorgeous with her black eyebrows and huge head of permed black hair, regularly performed in tight dresses and, yes, oversize hoop earrings. So when militant college Latinas talk about “cultural appropriation,” I have to wonder who appropriated what from whom.
