Bring the Culture to the Crib

Apartment Decor, Dinner Parties, & Neocolonialism

Grab your drink and a snack because I’m about to yap.

So a video came up on my for you page on TikTok one day talking about how it seems like everyone gets apartments only to make them look basic and minimal. Now I’ve already talked about how I want my future apartment to look like (and I say that because I want to own a house with my God given husband), but I do find it fascinating how our personal spaces (homes, bedrooms, offices) can be such a reflection of our culture. Interestingly enough, I’ve heard this same discussions with dinner parties.

I don’t currently have an apartment or anything like that of my own just yet, but I definitely have thought about all of the dinner parties I’m hosting and the dresses I’m gonna wear when I do, or even the cute pijamas I’ll buy for my friends when I have a sleepover with all of them. The main thing I find interesting is how much these thoughts are rooted in neocolonialism.

Now neocolonialism is not a new concept, as it was introduced in World War I and ll as a way of trying to sort of “correct” the ways of other countries. This included advertising, social cues, and even music. So it’s no surprise that for many, the only showcase of culture was in the home. From white lace curtains to artefacts of black history, everybody has something in the home that indicates their culture. However, as we get more into the idea of “luxury” apartments, we see a shift in how, or rather what, the home should look like.

This is always something that I’ve found odd because when you look at most apartments and houses, more specifically the ones that market themselves as “luxury”, there’s almost this…plain feeling. What makes this hilarious to me is that when you look at the estates of many people, you see so much personality within them. I remember seeing one estate where the person who lived there had a pink bathroom with a sunken tub. Really, the entire house was a 2021 coquette girly’s dream house.

Seeing the way so many people don’t try to make a house or an apartment their home is honestly disheartening, but I think there’s a deeper reason as to why this has become the norm. We’ve seen this normalisation of high rise apartments and beautiful balconies, while also trying to create this air of similarity that hits the borderline between that and being entirely identical to one another. It’s one thing for people to have similar tastes in design, but it’s another thing a home to feel so similar that it just feels like the prototype of something done multiple different ways.

In the comment section of the TikTok that I mentioned earlier in this essay, I read someone comment how the main reason why many people of colour (primarily Soulaani) are following this common theme is because we are “traumatised by the clutter”. Essentially, this can be interpreted as the user saying that having a china cabinet that no one is allowed to touch on any regular day, beaded curtains in the kitchen, or plastic on the sofa, isn’t culture, but rather the reason why so many of our parents and/or grandparents struggled with letting things go. While I definitely see how they can be correlated with one another, I find it interesting as to how we view things that our parents and grandparents did like this as traumatic or simply clutter.

I’ll give you an anecdote.

My late grandmother loved teddy bears. They were her favourite thing to collect. Whether it was the stuffed animal or figurines, if it was a teddy bear and she had the funds, she got it. When she passed away and my parents were going through her things, my mom kept her collection of teddy bear figurines, including one for displaying Bible verses and 12 other ones to represent the months of the year. In my mom’s eyes, she was keeping a piece of her mother with her. For my Nonny, she was showing her personality in her home.

My grandfather felt that my grandmother’s love of teddy bears was childish initially, but as they got older and had children of their own, he grew to love it. To him, it was one way to keep the love of his life happy, even though my grandfather was a neat freak like nobody’s business. He wanted all of his girls (my grandmother, my mom, and my aunt) to be happy in their home. Who cares if it meant having a few teddy bears or having to build a walk in dollhouse?

While I completely understand the need for a clear and clean environment, I feel like having a space of your own is a reflection of how your personality shines. I feel like so many people keep their personality confined in their room as a way of hiding something that they were shamed for growing up. To that I say, show it off. You like kitanas? Have them on your wall in the living room. You like vinyls? Let’s have a listening party together. Show it off!!

Going back on my point of neocolonialism and how this affects interior decorating, a lot of the things that people of colour, especially Soulaans, loved putting in our homes were seen as tacky or even dirty due to assimilation. I remember when the “mob wife aesthetic” was trending at the beginning of this year and everyone calling out the white girls that were participating in it because things like fur coats, elaborate acrylic nails, and gold jewellery are things that Italian immigrants along with us, were things that white Americans, primarily white women, made fun of us for having for decades.

This translated into dinner parties as well. I feel like when we think of dinner parties, we think of homemade pasta, seafood, or anything that is seen as a luxury good in the eyes of white Americans. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good pasta. Heck, I ate some right before continuing this essay. My point is, why is cultural food not on the Pinterest boards?

This may be the Afro-Caribbean in me speaking (or my love of learning about culture through food), but I would love to see someone throw a dinner party with mofongo (Puerto Rican plantain dish) y carnitas way more than another pasta dish. I would love to see mango lassi made by the pitcher and served in cute little glasses for everybody. Give me a martini glass full of agua de jamaica and I’ll talk about this party forevermore. I want to see whatever your culture is. There’s nothing wrong with food from cultures outside of Western and palm coloured European cultures at all, but baby it’s getting boring.

So many of us grew up having to hide our food because we were told it isn’t real, that it smelled bad, that it was slave food, or any insult under the sun. I’m sorry that your taste buds cannot compute the rich flavours of a culture other than your own, but please don’t come to me saying that guava and cheese pastries are nasty when you just drank an entire cup of horchata right before…leave your prejudice at the door.

The feeling of having to hide parts of yourself due to the normalised judgement and discrimination that people like us receive is the real reality of a non white person in America. This isn’t meant to be some radical statement. It’s the truth.

Just like the people desperately seek realness, the people also seek personality. Bring it into the home.