re: #344 Justanotherhuman

Appropriating someone else’s culture/religion as a fashion statement (like the bindi), is just so wrong. And Gomez has been asked to stop wearing it by Hindu folks.

And, I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a pair of ripped, faded jeans (no one would have unless they worked in the fields) when I was a teenager. We may have been poor, but we wanted something better.

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The congregation—perhaps 400 strong and, again, two-thirds female—was all black. The congregants were dressed in all their finery, immaculately turned out in elegant hats and dazzling dresses; the older among them wore veils and gloves. Some might be inclined to laugh at this quaint sartorial echo of the respectability of a bygone age; but I learned long ago, when I practiced briefly in the townships of South Africa, that the yearning of poor people for respectability, their desire to appear clean and well-dressed in public, is not laughable in the least but is, on the contrary, something noble and inspiring. It is the prerogative of the unthinkingly prosperous to sneer at the bourgeois virtues, and I now recall my own adolescent gestures and affectations in that direction with distaste.

- Theodore Dalrymple (Bolding mine)