After nearly a decade, it was clear that playing whack-a-mole with casual racism did not mean that we’d someday get to retire our hammers. The sort of pipe-dream world I had envisioned, where cultural differences would be celebrated and shared in full, not just in caricature, and definitely not as a tool to demean or discriminate...I don’t have to tell you that that did not happen. Instead, cultural appropriation seemed to expand in definition to the point of absurdity; in turn, these instances became platforms that exacerbated racial tensions. A Caucasian high schooler choosing to wear a qipao at prom somehow turned into thousands of adults bullying a teenager, which led to an opportunity for a former Bush speechwriter to talk about the cultural upside of the French occupation of Vietnam (a sandwich!) — and The New York Times to justify hurtful Asian-American stereotypes by pointing out that Chinese people outside of the United States are not offended by a caricature that has never been used to personally denigrate them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s partnership with The Vatican on a fashion exhibit and celebrity-studded party inspired dozens of articles claiming that the most powerful institution in the world should not be disrespected; to suggest that the Catholic church could be criticized was, some argued, a form of bigotry on par with blackface.