Coachella attendee defends headdress: "It's okay, because my great-great-great-grandfather was a racist"

INDIO, CA—Jane Parsons, a 21-year-old attending Coachella for the first time this year, has made headlines after a photo surfaced online of her heading to the festival in a Native American war bonnet.

Parsons says that the entire controversy is completely overblown, because people rush to judgment without asking questions first. According to Parsons, people would feel very chastened if they simply realized that she has every right to wear the feathered headdress, because if you look back at her ancestry, her great-great-great-grandfather was in fact a full-blooded racist.

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"People just don't know, and sometimes it seems like they don't even want to know," said Parsons. "They think I'm just latching onto a new fad without thinking, when literally nothing could be further from the truth. I'm actually carrying on a long tradition of racism that has been passed down to me."

"If people knew that, I think they would really change their tune."

At least one online commenter was comforted by the revelations.

"It just goes to show that you can really misinterpret things if you don't have all the facts at your disposal," said Twitter user JoMo924. "I was upset at first, because I honestly thought that she didn't know. I thought she was some clueless person headed to a music festival who mistakenly thought she was 'honouring' or 'celebrating' the Native American people by donning this very inappropriate headdress, without even knowing what tribe it belonged to."

"But I was wrong. She knows! She just doesn't care! And that kind of commitment to knowledge, and then wilful ignorance of that knowledge, is something that you have to respect. She's honouring her tradition."

At press time, Parsons was wondering which tent was selling bottled water and sushi, and which tent might have some nice festival sarongs for sale.

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