The Troubling Trend of White Women Being White

After the shift away from "cultural appropriation," I'm being informed white women are now acting TOO white

As many of us alive in the 2010s remember, there was a lot of discourse about cultural appropriation, especially as it related to the chosen aesthetics or fashion trends of white women (almost never white men.) It’s easy for us to snicker at the topic now, along with things like Kamala Harris informing everyone that her pronouns were she/hers (we had no idea!) but like a lot of goofy woke stuff of the 2010s and early 2020s, there was a nugget of reason to the idea that you shouldn’t mock other cultures or use sacred cultural emblems as trendy accessories.

But we don’t hear much about cultural appropriation anymore. Instead, the new aesthetic complaint lobbed at white women is that their chosen aesthetics are simply too white for their own good.

I first noticed this discourse trend around the early 2020s, after the cultural appropriation stuff had hit a fever pitch. I was more recently inspired by a Substack post (which I’m not linking because I don’t want to incite harassment, even if the post was extremely silly) that skewered the various “white” aesthetics of our modern era (cottagecore, pilates princess, balletcore, frazzled Englishwoman, etc) for being the canary in the coal mine for fascism and emblematic of insecure white women desperate to “assert whiteness.” AKA: white women are doing white women things and if you’re paying attention, this should terrify you.

You’re laughing. White women are wearing wide-leg linen beach pants to channel Diane Keaton and you’re laughing.

According to this line of thinking (and some very entertaining media coverage) cottagecore is racist, if not downright MAGA, unless it’s done ironically. Y2K aesthetics were racist and misogynist on the basis that people were racist and misogynist in the 2000s (opinion article, indeed!) The return of the gym bunny body ideal, aided by Ozempic, and the step away from the slim-thick curvy baddie, is making whiteness dominant (and is “body fascism.”) Dark academia was “too white and British.” And the Clean Girl aesthetic, which was entirely racially neutral (does anyone have a monopoly on Aritzia sweatpants and smoothies, really?) was lambasted as both stealing from women of color and so painfully white that women of color weren’t able to partake.

Naturally, I saw these headlines and thought, uhhh…what exactly do you want us to do? Because it wasn’t that long ago that we were told that the only acceptable aesthetics and trends for white women to follow were ones that posed no risk of stealing from or emulating another culture—which by default, requires them to be extremely, well…white.