Cultural misappropriation and hair

[meandthem]

Am I being unreasonable to object to ethnicity being a factor in respect of what hairstyle choices women are "allowed"? I am pissed of that it now seems acceptable for some styles to be considered cultural misappropriation. What happened to the sisterhood and feminism and women's right to do what the hell we want with our hair!

Dundee is a great city

....backs away slowly...

Sorry, I'm from Perthshire, I can't help it

“And the 'black oppressors' that @PerrieGrey quotes are black people who sided and supported White supremacy at the expense of their own people in Jamaica. A white Rastafarian is an insensitive poser and an oppressor, they are not descended from slaves, but from their owners. They are not African, they cannot believe they have a right to be repatriated to Africa (which is central to Rastafari), they have benefitted from the systems of oppression which have beaten down black people for centuries.“

What a ridiculous comment. Not only do you have no ideas what races their ancestors are. (They could very well be descendants of slaves despite being white) but not every white person had been owners of slaves. Infact, widespread domesticated slavery wasn’t a thing within the uk, so you couldn’t be more wrong.

Wow.
Yet we all benefited from industries which used slavery such as sugar and tobacco.
That's extremely disingenuous

I secretly cringe a bit when white people do Reggae . The guy I knew that was into it was white , upper MC and had a VERY rich family . Even in my 20s I felt uncomfortable about cultural appropriation even though it didn’t strictly exist as a concept back then !

Same stopfucking. I think it's a scenario which describes CA quite clearly.

Finally a good analogy?

The music/religion part of it i mean. The fact that there's hair involved makes it clearer still to me.

In fact, widespread domesticated slavery wasn’t a thing within the uk, so you couldn’t be more wrong

We were a key part of the triangle and made a fortune out of it . Just because we didn’t have slaves as the US did - we were massively complicit in the Slave trade !

So I think you are actually in the wrong here

Thank you @Speedy85

I guess if people with 'normal' hair (be it straight and curly) knew what African hair felt like, they may start to get it a little.

My hair type is 4C. So in order for my hair to appear 'normal' and 'professional' for work, I (and millions other black women) have a hair routine.

Mine is below:

1. Travel to a different city to the Afro-Caribbean hair shop for shampoo, conditioner, leave-in, oils etc suited to African hair. Regular brands work as well as plain water.

2a. Wash hair - add extra 1hr to condition hair to get it to soften for manipulation (more hours if I'm treating damage from no5). 2b. Detangle hair - EACH strand of my hair forms a tight coil around the next strand and the next and so on. You CANNOT run a comb through 4c hair. Anyway, that's another hour or 2. Twist up the hair and rinse out so that the hair doesn't tangle before item 3.

1. Add leave-in conditioner so that moisture remains in the hair - if the hair air dries (and not manipulated dry), not good.
2. Dry hair using tension method because heat is very bad for this hair type (we'll use heat later) so the drying that should take 30mins will actually take about 2hours.
3. Finally begin to straighten hair little by little using a steam straightener (I had to order mine from Amazon US) - ceramics, titanium etc straighteners don't straighten my hair - only burns it - another 2.5hrs
4. It's now about 11pm (I started around 9am and probably fed the kids 3 meals in between) and my arms hurt like hell. I must now use a satin bonnet / scarf so that the hair can stay intact for work tomorrow. I must apply a 'special' oil and use a satin bonnet every night so that it can remain straight for work every day. I also mustn't get caught in a drizzle because the hair will 'revert' and we can start all that again.

So, I can only do this on a Sunday where I can spend all day on the hair. I must do this whole process every Sunday if I am to have 'normal' hair.

I love the weeks where I just stop at item 2b and spend 30mins plaiting my hair neatly and in the way I love it.

Alternatives:

1. Chemically relax my hair using harmful relaxers to change my hair structure to straight - must be redone every 6 weeks to for any new growth. I had this from age 15yrs till 26yrs when following scalp damage, I shaved it all off to repair and regrow. I had to wear a wig though... I was looking for work in the UK.

1. Install weaves - another 3hours and endless ££ for scalp dirt, itching, redness, dryness and breakage.

1. Stop at 2b and wear a wig - just why? I have my own hair.

All this so that I can look normal and professional at work.

This is why I appreciate small actions like with Speedy85

Maybe if one more person in their own home is a little bit educated on what we have to do to look 'normal' or 'nice', it will become more acceptable for black women to wear their own hair neatly.

We shouldn't have to wait for white people to culturally appropriate natural hair from other cultures to make it acceptable for us to wear our own hair.

Sorry for the long post.

insideoutsider Maybe if one more person in their own home is a little bit educated on what we have to do to look 'normal' or 'nice', it will become more acceptable for black women to wear their own hair neatly.

I must honestly say that i've never considered braids or natural black hair to be anything other than just a hair style. The only thing thought is 'i bet that takes ages'. I did know that black hair needed oils. That was the sum total of my knowledge.

This thread has been an education for me. I did not realise black women are being marginalised in the work place because of their hair. I did not know about the historical significance of braiding. I can see the CA of a white person wearing braids. I've watched the links and I've genuinely learned so much. Thank you to those who have been so eloquent here.

@Qtgirl spectacularly missing the point. The UK was one of the main players in the slave trade, but we had more interest in selling/using them in our territories in the US as agricultural labour for tobacco and sugar crops than as domestic servants in the UK. DPs ancestors were owned by a Scottish family with land in the Caribbean, he has a friend whose ancestors owned another plantation nearby, but were English. Yes not all white peoples ancestors owned slaves, but all white people have benefitted from slavery and it's legacy. White people claiming Rastafarian culture as their own, or adopting hairstyles intended to protect African hair textures as a fashion statement look incredibly naive at best, and blatantly offensive at worst.

Can I just say as a white person I think its a shame some black people may think that they cant wear their natural hair, my friend is black and wears her hair in an afro she looks beautiful with it infact better than when she has on the few occasions chemically straightened it, Resulting in burning her scalp.
Not every white person is going to look down on you infact I think its the minority that would and I do feel uncomfortable seeing on this thread all the claims of what white people think about black people.
Its simply not true I prefer to be judged on what I am like as a human than the colour of my skin as I am sure everyone does.

Inside

I also heard about the extreme labour associated with black hair - the school mums refer to it as ‘hair day’

I have ‘Arabic hair ‘ (per my Arabic friends and hair dressers) so I can’t just blow dry it - it needs natural drying then straightening
OR I just scrape it back but for professional situations it looks a bit meh

For the little black girls at school it’s a bit easier as they plait it (though that takes hours too)
Can I ask what would happen if you did literally nothing , washed and dried naturally what would it look like ? And how would you feel with your hair like that ? I can really see why my colleague has a wig .

In fact, widespread domesticated slavery wasn’t a thing within the uk, so you couldn’t be more wrong
Damn, all those tobacco and coffee plantations owned by the English using slaves with cornrow hair...

*@Prettylovely, Of course I don't think white people look down on black women for their natural hair. I explained in my first post that this issue for me is about work. In my work, when I started, they said all hair needs to be 'professional'. I coincidentally have no appointments to visit some companies when I had plaited hair but I'm fully booked when I have straight hair.

@stopfuckingshoutingatme I plait my kids hair for school - takes hours but they look beautiful and I won't straighten or damage their hair (hoping they would grow into a world where it's accepted in the work place). As for me, I would love to just roll out of bed, do a quick brush and get ready for work. See the 3 images - 1 of them is how it looks before starting the hair routine, the second is how I like to go to my friends, family and one job, the 3rd is how I straighten it for my role where I present my reports. Obviously, these pictures aren't me - they are just random photos from the internet but my natural hair is this length.

I wasnt singling you out insideoutsider fwiw I think the middle picture looks the best, I think it looks really pretty.

I totally understand @Prettylovely, thanks. To achieve that middle hair, you do the first 3 steps, twist it up into 8 individual twists in the needed shape with lots of conditioners and oils and then wrap it up overnight. When you wake up, shower and do your make up, THEN you unravel and style the hair to look like that (about 1 hour in the morning for the hair alone) But yes, at least, it's my hair.

Yes even look 2 which is fab is labour intensive hey

I do see Women out and about with 1 but not too many I have to say. I see in fact more white women with their hair out and frizzy in actual fact .

What you said about jobs and 3 is soooo depressing .

Thanks for sharing as despite knowing loads of black women they are mysteriously silent on this . I know they won’t join me for a swim in the work gym for hair related reasons . Obvs!

Thanks for sharing - I didn’t quite realise the Herculean labour

I like the middle picture with the twists too! Didn't realise how much labour that would take though. I thought it was just natural with maybe a bit of pinning and product.

I also like the first one, but I know that's considered untidy and messy. Probably because my hair is allergic to tidiness itself, I like messy styles on other people!

Terrific posts insideoutsider. Genuinely I think 99%+ of white people have no clue about any of this. They just think you can give it a quick brush and look like Beyoncé.

“Qtgirl spectacularly missing the point. The UK was one of the main players in the slave trade, but we had more interest in selling/using them in our territories in the US as agricultural labour for tobacco and sugar crops than as domestic servants in the UK. DPs ancestors were owned by a Scottish family with land in the Caribbean, he has a friend whose ancestors owned another plantation nearby, but were English. Yes not all white peoples ancestors owned slaves, but all white people have benefitted from slavery and it's legacy. White people claiming Rastafarian culture as their own, or adopting hairstyles intended to protect African hair textures as a fashion statement look incredibly naive at best, and blatantly offensive at worst.”

How have poor white people (the majority) benefited? Because of the money it brought into the country? In that case every British person regardless of race has benefited. There have been plenty of civilisations that had slaves. White people had been slaves to other ethnicities too. So why the double standard?

Qtgirl I also thought the same.

I was on the sidelines of an interesting discussion about hair today. Two women (one is a longstanding friend of mine, the other was someone I had never met before). A (my friend) is white, and wears her hair in locs: she has had her hair like this for the whole 20 years I have known her and, to her, it's a crusty/squatter/rave/traveller thing. The other woman (B) is black, and her hair was in very, very narrow locs. B said to A, 'I love what you've done with your hair' (A has a way of wrapping her locs round her head in a kind of coronal, it looks lovely) and A admired B's hair and they had a long chat about having your hair done, looking after it etc. B was telling A and me about the process of having her hair done. It was really interesting (certainly to me, a lazy ungroomed sort of person whose hair gets either cut with kitchen scissors or I go to the student'hairdressing place and they cut itfor about £5) Complex hairdos are something some people like to do.

Qtgirl
PrettyGirl

I think I would agree. I am from humble roots. We didn’t live in some kind of reglemented apartheid until the 1960’s as in parts of the US.

In the south of America, in the wake of the abolition of slavery, poor white people suddenly were able to get work. Before that they were not required afterall, why pay when you can get Labour for free. Before abolition, white nuclear families were split up to find work and crime was rife amongst whites just to eat. The former now free slaves took their slot on the bottom rung of the ladder and now white people could find work. The poor whites now one rung up were then exploited by the former slave masters and encouraged to see themselves as better than and this fuelled a lot of racism and the birth of KKK. But we are not the US.

We had a very small percentage of black people brought in as slaves. In 18th century Britain, apparently the poor black and white population were friends and intermarried. Not all black people in the country were slaves and black people lived in this country centuries before the existence of slavery.

There was panic in London at the end of the 18th century as the black population swelled their to 10,000 (only 1% to put it into perspective) resulting in blacks not being allowed to hold apprenticeships there (not countrywide). However, i think this was anectodal and integration amongst the poor was the norm. Of the 10,000 black Londoners at that time not allowed from holding apprenticeships many found employment. Coupled with this, we had a completely open immigration policy between 1836 and 1905 (slavery within Britain was abolished in 1833) where everyone was welcomed with open arms. The open borders policy was reviewed as the numbers of people coming in started to swell.

Politicians manipulated this situation to their own end and it is politics, which created a them and us situation. From 1905, immigration laws were slowly shaped to how they are today (or at least were pre EU).

What I’m saying is from my understanding, racism in this country was and continues to be fuelled by immigration policies rather than slavery. Although I know some rich slave and former slave owner families had different views, they were a tiny minority. This history has been largely forgotten and British and American history has been conflated in part because of British rich plantation owners. But my ancestors weren’t rich slave owners. Few were.

Even after the open borders policy was repealed, Britain did seek out people to come to live and work in the country. Notably after WWII and this continued through to the ‘60’s during full employment where people were asked to come in to do the menial work British people didn’t want to do.

So how do I as a white person benefit from slavery? I think we all benefit by living in this country, I mean the population at large S without slavery the industrial revolution wouldn’t have been possible.

I know that ethnic minorities are underrepresented in management. In part, this is definitely because of recent migration to this country. But I imagine that isn’t the whole picture of course. But that isn’t due to slavery. It’s because of immigration, both attitudes to it and because not all immigrants speak the language or have the skills.

I am Peak Cultural Appropriation too.