By Rachel York

I would like to address a project I read about recently on the internet. Hungarian journalist, Boglarka Balogh, seeking to spread awareness and act as an intermediary between the western world and women of African tribes, created a project in which she used Photoshop to morph her own face with the faces of these women.

After receiving much backlash and accusations of blackface, her project has been removed from the online community, www.boredpanda.com, with a message from her stating that her intentions were 100% pure and that she was not attempting to offend anyone. With that being said, the intention of this article is not to create more backlash, but rather to incite conversation, elicit thought, and question why as a society we feel the need to westernize other cultures in order to understand and relate to them.

Without a doubt, almost anyone living in western society has heard of, or seen in the media and public, instances of cultural appropriation and westernization of other cultures. Sometimes these instances are very apparently disrespectful, such as in the music industry. Other times they can be more subliminal, as in the ignorance of a person trying to understand a culture that they are not a part of.

The problem is, cultures foreign to those of the western world do need to be seen through the lense of a westerner to be appreciated or understood. It is counterproductive for this journalist to morph her own face with the faces of women in African tribes to spread awareness of their culture. This is not conducive to helping them in any way. She could have spread awareness more efficiently by showing these women exactly as they are, without modification or exoticism. By modifying these women, she crosses the line of appreciation into appropriation. Though her intentions may not have been out of malice, she has made herself a part of a system that overemphasizes the importance of the western world while devaluing other cultures. This system is damaging and needs to stop as every culture should be appreciated under its own merits, without the approval of western culture.