When is it cultural appropriation and when is it just kids playing dress-up?
Last week we ran a sponsored post for a family photographer that featured this image of two children playing dress-up, one of them in a Native American head-dress.
The photo struck several readers as objectionable. Let’s talk about why, and what it might mean.
Editorial diversity hacks: is tokenism ever ok?
Here’s a sad reality: 90% of the content submissions we receive to the Offbeat Empire’s websites feature young, white, able-bodied heterosexual Americans. When we go out and actively recruit more diverse content for the sites, is that tokenism? And is that kind of tokenism ok if it’s increasing the media visibility of minority communities?
Is the name of the Offbeat Bride Tribe “problematic and frankly racist”?
Since monthly readership of the Offbeat Empire sites is over 300,000 people, it’s to be expected that we’d receive a fair number of reader complaints. Sometimes, these complaints are truly educational (I had no idea that the Society of Professional Journalists had voted to replace the phrase “illegal immigrant” with “undocumented immigrant” until a reader emailed me about it) and other times they’re ludicrous (Offbeat Bride’s hilarious “motherfuckergate” comes to mind here). I’ve written about this before, but this last week I had a especially challenging reader complaint.