Imane "Pokimane" has commented on a viral Reddit post from the popular subreddit r/facepalm, which made fun of a tweet that falsely accused her of cultural appropriation. The post basically pointed out her curly hair as evidence of her trying to copy Black culture, all the while missing out on the fact that Imane is Morrocan.
Posting a screenshot of the Reddit post, she joked about the premise in the caption, clarifying that the misspelled 'Pikimane' is also fully Moroccan:
The original post from the Twitch superstar is basically a collection of selfies of her naturally curly hair. Although the tweet castigating her did not go viral, a Reddit post making fun of it did, accruing over 33K upvotes within seven hours. In the misinformed tweet, the Moroccan-born Canadian streamer was accused of culturally appropriating an African hairstyle.
Cultural appropriation is a pretty nuanced topic where an element from a culture is used inappropriately by people from a different culture. It is especially problematic when a non-dominant culture's iconography, such as hairstyle, is used in a way that reinforces stereotypes and thus contributes to oppression.
However, this does not apply here because Pokimane has publicly talked about being Moroccan several times on her channel. She directly addresses her heritage in a video from 2019 where she sees the results of a DNA test which confirmed that she is 84% North African.
The completely misinformed tweet claimed:
The streamer even speaks a Moroccan dialect of Arabic and used it when she found a Moroccan restaurant in Korea during her travels this June. Fellow streamer Rhymestyle even joked about it in the thread Pokimane posted, sarcastically calling her out for appropriating her own culture:
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