In last week’s Sexual Politics column about how a guy choking his girlfriend with his dreadlocks shouldn’t be a punchline, I made this flippant joke: “It’s tempting to laugh at this news because, of course, dreadlocks are disgusting and everyone who decides to grow dreadlocks should be publicly mocked.”
This sparked a couple thoughtful responses from readers about the racial components of dismissing dreadlocks. From reader Alex:
This stereotype is often funny and true, but at it’s core has an ugly racial distinction: it is ok for people of one “race” to have a haircut that you consider disgusting on another “race”.
I fundamentally agree that most dreads on white people look terrible. You need really curly hair to pull off nice dreads, but some of us of non-African descent do actually have this.
And Liz:
Dreadlocks are a historical and current way of maintaining and styling hair for people of color (POC), and they were doing it for centuries before us dirty Europeans even started using soap or shampoo on ours. POC, especially women, have been discriminated against in social and professional circles for having dreadlocks for decades. Then there are the white people who dread their hair—this is cultural appropriation to the max. Who dreads their hair aside from POC? Basically, white people who think it’s “natural” and “earthy” and every other hegemonic, ignorant, and privileged adjective based on this centuries-old notion we have of POC being, well, “natural” and “closer to the earth,” etc. While it’s pretty easy to conclude that “dreadlocks are dirty” in an area that… the only dreads you see are on a bunch of privileged middle-class kids who think it’s cool to emanate poverty, please don’t forget the racial roots of the style. While it seems like a small thing, doing so just reinforces the notions we have of POC and perpetuates inequality.
These are two valid points that I didn’t think about while being hyperbolic about the hairstyle. A smarter joke would have been to not call for mocking everyone who has dreadlocks, but mocking the kind of dreadlocks that the suspected abuser sports—ratty, greasy dreads that make it impossible to tell where the hair stops and the beard begins. That style of dreads has so overwhelmed the image of “dreadlocks” for me that when I see someone whose dreadlocks actually look good, it’s a shock. This is maybe a Portland-specific problem of having a negative view of dreadlocks. Or, more acutely, a Southeast Portland problem, especially in the summer near Colonel Summers Park.
Here’s my conclusion from all this: It’s fine to make fun of dreadlocks that are inarguably gross. But dismissing dreadlocks as a hairstyle categorically is unfair, because it lets a hairstyle that people of color have worn for generations be overshadowed by a mimicking crop of people who use dreadlocks as a symbol of earthy identity, often with aesthetically displeasing results.
Liz says that white people who dread their hair do so because it’s “natural” and “closer to the earth” etc. How does Liz know they think this? How many white folks with dreads has she polled? Privileged middle-class kids do it to “emanate poverty”? I think Liz must mean “emulate,” but that’s her assumption that dreads are inextricably linked to poverty. Seems rather judgmental and presumptuous.
Finally, where does “cultural appropriation” begin and end, given that culture has spread globally for hundreds of years so that virtually everyone is doing things that originated in various areas of the globe? Is cooking curry and getting tattooed also cultural appropriation? Does it depend on where all my relatives came from?
The “Portland-specific problem” is constant lecturing by 20-year-old white people about what is or isn’t racism.
You also should have known, SMirk, that bringing up dreadlocks at all would lead to nothing but whining. For some reason, it’s just part of the package.
The only Portland-specific problem I’ve noticed is people assuming that everything they don’t like that happens here is a Portland-specific problem.
It’s perfectly fine to make fun of white people with dreadlocks (WPWD) because it looks ridiculous. It also looks like they’re from the mid-west, because the Pacific NW got over that in the early 90’s.
When I see a big pile of WP dreads on someone over about 25, I always wonder if they really would rather just cut that stuff off, but they have X number of years invested growing it, and their identity all wrapped up in being “that guy/girl with dreadlocks”. And they just can’t bring themselves to do what they secretly want to do and get rid of that crud.
But yeah, make fun of them. Just not their face.
I’ve kind of always wanted dreads, if only to save me time and effort preening-wise. Purely for laziness’ sake. But i’ve always been too chicken.
Most would label me as ‘white’ (but i prefer the more accurate, ‘mutt’) and, yes, i imagine they would look pretty damn horrible on me, but that doesn’t worry me nearly as much as not being able to *thoroughly* clean my hair does.
I guess i’ll just have to choke my girlfriends the old fashioned way.
So nice to see the cultural appropriation discussion on the table.