Sean Hobbs Staff Writer

Coachella is a music festival held over the course of two weekends in April in the Coachella Valley of California. This years festival occurred on the weekends of the 11th through the 13th and the 18th through the 20th.

At it’s heart, Coachella is well intentioned. It has quite the lineup of artists, from big names to small. It’s a celebration of music that doesn’t always get a lot of coverage in the mainstream, and it’s a good way for new artists to get their names out in the open. In these ways, it’s an exciting and fun series of weekends.

Likewise it’s among the safer music festivals, even compared to those that take place in the same valley. The nearby festival Stagecoach, which takes place not long after Coachella, has had a worse arrest rate for a number of years. And while most of Coachella’s arrests are for minor drug and alcohol violations, a greater number of Stagecoach arrests are for sexual assault and fighting.

The kind of crimes you don’t get arrested for are unfortunately numerous at Coachella, however.

Cultural appropriation is hardly a new activity in America, but Coachella brings it to the forefront. Whether it’s Vanessa Hudgens, an Irish-Filipino-American sporting a bindi, or one of the eighty white men wearing Native American war-bonnets. One doesn’t have to think too hard to see what’s wrong with these activities.

It is unacceptable for anyone outside of these cultures to wear these things unless expressly allowed to do so by a member of that culture under special circumstances. It doesn’t matter if you’re 1/128th cherokee or you have a friend that says it’s okay. Wearing a warbonnet that you haven’t earned is like pretending to have received a purple heart. These items have a significance that should not to be disrespected. It isn’t something you fake.

This isn’t restricted to Coachella of course, but for whatever reason the festival brings it out in droves. Perhaps it is the event-sponsored fake teepees attendees can rent for $2200, or the numerous celebrities that play dress up every year without a care to what their outfit means.

We can’t fix institutionalized racism in a day, as much as we’d like to. But the least we can all do is to stop thinking that we deserve something from another culture merely because we feel we do.