Once Utah high-schooler Keziah Daum tweeted several charming pictures of herself on prom night, it was just a matter of time until the grievance and outrage industry found out about it. When it did find out it dealt with her in the usual way. Miss Daum’s offense? Her outfit: a high-necked, close-fitting dress in the style of a Chinese cheongsam, or qipao. Since she is not herself Chinese, her choice of prom dress was deemed an act of “cultural appropriation” and thus an offense to indigenous civilizations and their woke defenders.
“My culture is NOT your [expletive] prom dress,” one young tweeter responded, with impeccable logic. “For it to simply be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience, is parallel to colonial ideology.” “This isn’t ok,” another wrote, “I wouldn’t wear traditional Irish or Swedish or Greek dress. . . . There’s a lot of history behind these clothes.”
And so the faux-outrage crescendo mounted for days, with thousands of angst-ridden anti-appropriators tweeting their disapproval of Miss Daum’s dress. But when the “controversy,” as the New York Times generously called it, reached China itself, most people had a very different reaction. They were thrilled and considered it a small triumph for their culture.
“I am very proud to have our culture recognized by people in other countries,” one typical Chinese Twitter-user commented. Others noted that the qipao is itself a product of cultural appropriation, having been based in part on Western styles when it was created by the Han Chinese to celebrate their liberation from the Manchu dynasty in the early 20th century.
The Times story about this idiotic episode is appropriately wry, but we did object to one line: “The uproar surrounding the prom dress,” observed the reporter, “highlights America’s growing—and increasingly complex—conversation about race.” We don’t think this growing conversation is “America’s” at all, nor is it complex. We suspect 99.5 percent of Americans are happy to let a Utah teen wear whatever prom dress makes her happy.
