Many non-Natives do not understand why Native people get upset when non-Natives wear faux-tribal headdresses. For example, the super-mega producer Pharrell Williams recently wore a faux-Native headdress on the cover of European Elle magazine. Now, there are many Native people who are incredibly pissed off at the "Happy" producer, vowing never to support his endeavors again. He promptly apologized and Elle magazine tried to distance itself from any culpability for the offensive attire in the matter, removing their statement that "We persuaded Elle Style Award winner Pharrell to trade his Vivienne Westwood mountie hat for a Native American feather headdress in his best ever shoot."

But why are Native people so mad about this?

First, let me make clear that very much like those white hip-hoppers in the Hammerstein Ballroom, I don't think that Pharrell Williams is, in any way, racist. Just like those hip-hoppers, he was stupid. He was obviously guided by stylists from Elle magazine who "persuaded" him to do something idiotic; he's accountable, but he's accountable for being stupid or naïve and not necessarily a racist. However...

There are things that are still sacred in 2014. Simply because I'm 1) part black or 2) a hip-hopper, that does not give me the right to use the word "nigger/nigga"; that loaded and powerful word is one of those things that cannot be "commodified," as the brilliant bell hooks termed it. Black folks have paid for EXCLUSIVE ownership of that word over the course of centuries of oppression, recovery and then redemption. Headdresses are another one of those things. Native people utilize headdresses as one of our highest honors, reserved for those select few people who did something so valorous and special -- oftentimes in battle, fighting off genocide -- that we must identify them by putting pieces of the soaring eagle on their head.