Dashiki Chic: Color-blind Racial Ideology in EDM Festivalgoers’ “Dress Talk”

Abstract

This article examines how electronic-dance-music (EDM) festival participants construct narratives about dress (clothing, accessories, and other body modifications) to reinforce EDM as a demographically and ideologically white terrain. Through individual and focus-group interviews conducted over the course of 12 festival events, I explore how popular campout EDM festivals in the Midwestern United States use conversations about dress to discuss and defend practices of cultural appropriation, often by drawing from interpretive frames of “color-blind” racial ideology. By doing so, these interviewees distance themselves from race and racism, frequently by claiming a “white innocence” that obscures the ways that larger racial inequalities infiltrate and replicate within the EDM scenes many participants insist are unwaveringly egalitarian.

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