After my article on the way Color Run™ and similar for-profit charity runs like Run or Dye™, Color Me Rad, and the Color Vibe appropriate the Indian festival Holi in order to make money, Jessica Nixon, spokeswoman for the Color Run™ responded with the following letter:
Hello,
I recently read your article “Dye-ing Culture: Color Runs™, White-Washing Holi Since 2012”.
I want to say I am truly sorry that you feel the The Color Run is defrauding the Holi festival. I can assure you, that is the last thing we would want. I feel that one of your main concerns is that you could not find on our Website where the idea for The Color Run originated.
The inspiration for The Color Run was derived from Disneyland’s World of Color (we use wet “paint” for part of our event), color festivals such as Holi, and day glow paint parties. This is a great question and answer that we should add to our FAQ list on our Website. I am not in charge of our Website, but I will look into having that added.
As for the part where you question our charity efforts, let me explain. As it states on our FAQ page, we are a for profit event company. However, we choose to give back. In every city we hold our event, we make a donation to a charity, usually a local charity involved in that community. There are three ways in which we help our charity partners. You can go to this link to find out more.
Please let me know if there is anything else I can clarify.
Jessica Nixon
Though this was an incredibly polite response to my accusations of the Color Run™ co-opting Holi to turn a profit, it doesn’t exactly address my concerns:
The connection between the Disneyland show and day glow parties is tenuous at best because on the website, in the FAQ section, Color Run™ even liken the paint to “powdered sugar” and in their promo there are no traces of wet paint. It all looks like Holi’s colored powder.
It is important to highlight that the nature of this run, as they say themselves and as I’ve repeated multiple times, is to make money. Though they have said they have raised $600,000 for a variety of local charities, because they are not listed on Charity Navigator and because they do not disclose on their website how much of every dollar spent on registration or merchandise gets donated. There really is no way to check up on them. Any profiting off of Holi is incompatible with and disrespectful of the purpose of the event: While Holi has taken on a variety of meanings over the centuries, from the triumph of good over evil in holy texts to the greeting of spring, it has always been a community celebration. In India, currently, it remains one of the most unifying events as color play transcends religious and social divides – it’s like an annual block party. And even in the US, most campus or community Holi festivals will charge at the entrance but donate every dollar to a South Asian or local charity. Therefore, Color Run™ is not only appropriating culture, but they are misusing and perverting it as well.
Also, in any country that is home to the Indian diaspora, celebrating Holi is incredibly special because it’s one the few moments when brown people enjoy the rapt attention of their non-brown friends – where we don’t have to make fun of Bollywood movies or promise them samosas to make our culture seem more interesting and accessible. Holi is so important in the way hyphenated Indians are able to share their culture with their friends. Any misuse, then, of the culture ruins any attempt to properly share it.
I’m not just trying to stand up for the inclusion of a traditional festival in the roster of inspirations for a profit-earning charity run (though they did add it after my article). And while I appreciate Ms. Nixon’s attempt to make peace and clarify, it’s not enough to just stick in a mention of Holi in the FAQ where it will be generally ignored. When we are denied the chance to share our culture properly and when we allow others to ignore the influence of our traditions, ignorance increases. And where there is ignorance there is fear and violence. It’s impossible to separate a simple moment of appropriation from the vast array of issues that follow – there will always be a connection between something as banal as calling something ‘ghetto’ and the continued institutionalized persecution, oppression, and violence towards Black people.
If this seems superficial or just one drop in the ocean, please remember one of the most egregious acts of cultural appropriation – the adoption of the Swastika by Nazi Germany. Hitler and his crew were big into Indian history and ancient texts. The reason they called themselves ‘Aryan’ is because they believed they were descended from the Mughal conquerers who invaded and ruled Northern India and modern-day Persia. Along with this pseudo-racial designation, Nazis began to utilize aspects of Indian tradition, the Swastika most prominently, for their campaigns. Before that point in history, the Swastika was a symbol of peace and harmony in South Asian tradition and often used during Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh religious ceremonies. The use of the Swastika by peoples other than South Asians rendered the symbol devoid of its original meaning and entirely a vehicle of Western hatred. To this day, South Asians sometimes fear using the Swastika in their cultural proceedings because they fear a violent response from onlookers. We are practically no longer able to use a symbol that held so much importance to us because another group borrowed it and altered its purpose. I am not saying acts of cultural appropriation are on level with Nazism, but I am saying that current examples of appropriation may turn into something much darker if allowed to continue.
The particular occurrence of Western expropriation of non-Western culture in the Holi-Color Run debacle is only one in a very long laundry list. So if we let this one slide, we are letting our Sikh brothers get patted down by the TSA without comment while models walk the runway in Milan with ‘turbans.’ And cultural appropriation doesn’t stick to just one community – by ignoring the Color Run™’s apathy toward proper citation of cultural origins we are allowing for the continuation of people wearing ‘sexy squaw’ outfits to Halloween parties and music festivals while Native women are some of the most common victims of sexual violence in North America. When we ignore one moment of appropriation, we begin to overlook the other occurrences and dangerous results of it.
Post-graduate Sob Stories 