“Have you considered putting your hair in dreads?” the hair stylist’s assistant asked. “Your hair is made for dreads.”
“If I walk into a classroom wearing dreads, students will think I’m mocking them,” I said.
“She’s a professional,” the stylist explained to the assistant. “She doesn’t have a dread-type job.”
P.S. Does anybody know why every single contact I have with the outside world is so hilarious? I’m not looking for comedy. It just happens around me.
Some people consider it cultural appropriation for white people to wear dreads. I do not understand this, since the aphorism ‘Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ has always made a lot of sense to me.
Two professional people with wonderful dreads are Nnedi Okorafor and Philip Farber. It is probably possible to find pictures of both online.
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Part of the problem is who exactly is wearing dreads. If the two populations wearing dreads are regular Black people trying to wear a hairstyle that’s unusual for North America but that is way easier to maintain for very curly hair than more “professional” haircuts and (mostly non-Black) kids raging against the machine by wearing badly-made dreads of questionable hygiene, dreads end up being associated with kids of questionable hygiene and become even more unacceptable in a professional context. There’s quite a bit of history constraining Black people’s hairstyle choices to either stuff that just plain doesn’t work right for curly hair or stuff that makes it impossible to be perceived as respectable, and having the stuff that does work right for curly hair end up even more strongly associated to unprofessionalism is evidently a problem for a lot of Black people.
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And some people consider the idea of “cultural appropriation” to be morally bankrupt tribalism.
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And now we know that the USS Hedgehogs is a dread-nought š
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Does anybody know why every single contact I have with the outside world is so hilarious? Iām not looking for comedy. It just happens around me.
You have the face of an innocent and the soul of a comedic straight man. :-p You have a fine sense of the ridiculous.
Seriously though, did you let them handle your hair or did you leave? Sitting in that chair would fill me with dread since they left the “ethnic hairbrushes” at home and were suggesting dread-locks which are far more labor intensive and easy to mess up.
My hair causes no comment when I walk into salons except for its length.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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