When white girls wearing nameplate necklaces is “racist,” we’ve reached peak stupidity

Oh, to be young and dumb! It must be difficult to be a millennial these days; constantly making mountains out of molehills. Take, for instance, Collier Meyerson, who may have penned the most idiotic column I’ve ever read.

It’s all about nameplate necklaces, those customized danglers from gaudy gold chains that little girls have been wearing FOREVER — just not according to this young, black writer. In her whiny Fusion article, Meyerson declared: “Nameplate necklaces: This sh*t is for us.”

That’s right! They are for black women only and shame on any white girl for trying to cop the look:

Nameplates have always leapt off the chests of black and brown girls who wear them; they’re an unequivocal and proud proclamation of our individuality, as well as a salute to those who gave us our names. The necklaces are a response to gas-station bracelets and department-store mugs emblazoned with names like Katie and Becky. But most of all, they’re a flashy and pointed rejection of the banality of white affluence…

For black Americans, names can be a form of resistance to white supremacy. Plucked from our homes in West Africa and forced into chattel slavery, bodily autonomy wasn’t the only thing stolen from us. Our names were stolen, too.

Spoken like a true twenty-something with zero grasp of anything that came before the year 2000. That’s when Meyerson said the first transgression occurred… in HBO’s Sex and the City:

I first began to encounter white girls wearing nameplates in the early 2000s, after the HBO show exploded in popularity. The series’ main character, Carrie Bradshaw, wore a single-plated version of the necklace that had a tiny diamond dotting the “i.”

Does she not know that girls have been wearing them, at the very least, since the 1970s and ’80s? But let’s go back even further, shall we?

That’s Anne Boleyn — King Henry the VIII’s wife and Queen of England from 1533 to 1536 — before she was beheaded right about where her nameplate necklace lays! Just sayin’.

But Meyerson knows best. She knows that white people stole this from the blacks just like they did everything else:

“White girls and women have other stories, but they don’t have ours. It never feels like a homage to me when I see a white woman rocking a nameplate. Instead, it comes across as nothing more than an awkward replica—true ‘biters’ of our sh*t.”

And Meyerson’s other writer friends agree and are seething at the “cultural appropriation:” “I’m not tryna march or impose a ban, I just see you wack hos for what it is. It’s a look and a look we did to be outside, and now they realized they are boring, so they’re copying.”

I heard about this ridiculous story after reading Katherine Timpf’s article at National Review. I LOVED her take on this:

Now, to be fair, I’d totally agree that white girls wearing nameplate necklaces really aren’t doing it as a “homage” to anyone but themselves, evidenced by the fact that they are literally wearing necklaces of their own names. Unlike Meyerson, however, I don’t think it’s such a big deal. Cultures and trends are shifting all the time, and elements from outside sources are always inspiring mainstream fashion. I’m wearing a leather jacket, which is a look that I “stole” from World War I military culture. That’s right… the leather jacket started as a protective layer for World War I fighter pilots, and I’m just sitting here appropriating the hell out of it without ever having to have known the horrors of active combat. Does that make me a “biter” of WWI veterans’ “s***”? Or does Meyerson need to chill the hell out?

Any other questions?