A resident assistant at Pitzer College in Los Angeles has decreed that white female students are no longer permitted to wear hoop earrings.
After a group of minority students wrote "White girl, take off your hoops" on the school's "unmoderated free speech wall," white students brought the message to the attention of the school's administration and were told that the wearing of hoop earrings by white people is seen by minorities as an act of cultural appropriation.
RA accuses white students of exploitation
The students behind the message that was written on the wall, Alegria Martinez, Jacquelyn Aguilera, and Stefania Gallo-Gonzalez, sent a series of emails to the entire student body explaining their actions.
Martinez, who is a member of the Latinx Student Union as well as a Pitzer College Resident Assistant (RA), stated that 'black and brown bodies' who wear hoop earrings are viewed as 'ghetto,' but the same stigma doesn't exist when it comes to whites. "White people have actually exploited the culture and made it into fashion," added Martinez, as reported by The Daily Mail on Tuesday.
"The culture actually comes from a historical background of oppression and exclusion," claims Martinez, perhaps unaware that hoop earrings have been worn by since ancient times by women of numerous cultures.
Does Pitzer College not have a history department?
Another Pitzer College student who appears to be woefully ignorant of historical context is Jacquelyn Aguilera, one of the students who helped spray paint the "White girl, take off your hoops" message.
The Clarement Independent reports that, in her school-wide email thread, Aguilera wrote:
"If your feminism isn’t intersectional take off those hoops, if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops, if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops."
According to Victoria Pitts-Taylor's 2008 "Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body," the oldest examples of hoop earrings, dating from 2000–1600 BCE, come from the Minoan civilization of ancient Greece. Perhaps if the activist students at Pitzer College spent more time with a history book and less time spray painting controversial messages on walls, they would know that.
