WHITE STUDENTS TOLD TO STOP WEARING HOOP EARRINGS

Two students at Pitzer College in Claremont, California, have demanded white women stop wearing hoop earrings, claiming that they “belong to the black and brown folks who created the culture.” The student newspaper, the Claremont Independent, reported yesterday that a message spray-painted on the college’s free-speech wall said, “White Girl, take off your hoops!!!” Then, in a campus-wide email, Alegria Martinez of the Latinx Student Union elaborated on the message, saying she and other women of color were “tired and annoyed with the re-occuring theme of white women appropriating styles.” Martinez said that hoop earrings come “from a historical background of oppression and exclusion.” It should be noted that hoop earrings have spanned diverse cultures. The New York Metropolitan Museum’s collection alone includes Sumerian hoops created between 2500-2600 B.C., Egyptian hoops possibly as old as 1981 B.C., Frankish hoops that date between 675-725 A.D., and dozens more civilizations who have had hoop earrings.
* So Alegria Martinez is not a history major.
* Are we supposed to go protest Claire’s at the mall now?
* Are women of color allowed to wear clothes from The North Face?
* I didn’t think the next race war would be over jewelry.
* Sorry, ladies. Find something else to be outraged about. Or better yet, go study.
* And yet, they say that the PC world is out of control.
* I can tell you one thing: I’m damn tired of jumping through hoops for all these stupid cultural battles.
* But what if a white girl self-identifies as black or brown? Then it’s okay, right?
* Interesting that it goes back to the Middle East. Everything always goes back to the Middle East.
* I think there’s a time around college-age where people are super-serious about things, without realizing how silly it will all seem later.