People Are Mad Because A Magazine Posted A Tutorial For How White Women Can Have Afros
BF – Inside of the [Allure Magazine] special issue, called “Amazing Hair,” readers find pages of hairstyle tutorials — including one for Afro hair…
The editorial, titled “You (Yes, You) Can Have An Afro*”, stars actress Marissa Neitling from the TNT TV show The Last Ship. It offers a step-by-step for how to get what Allure calls a “Loose Afro.”
Not only did the magazine choose to not use a black model with straight hair, it failed to reference the very sacred and political context of the natural style, worn during the American Civil Rights era as a symbol of black pride and protest for equality.
And onto the outrage:
I certainly admit I’m not the first person to come to mind as a spokesperson for the Black Hair Experience but I can’t see any world in which this is a bad thing. Isn’t the whole point of evolving as a society that we’re not defining ourselves solely by what makes us different? So you get a white chick who looks like this:
And she goes and gets her hair done up to look like a black woman’s natural look, doesn’t that just mean a step towards everything even out? And even if you’re taking the most skeptical view of it, couldn’t you say this being a trend just means that black people won? Our little white kids have tried to dress like you and imitate your coolness and slang for years and white girls getting deep dicked by Jamaican tour guides in Montego Bay have gotten their hair braided for decades. The last frontier was getting Becky from the “Baby Got Back” video to want to look like Beyoncé and now you’ve done that. There’s a reason “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” is a commonly accepted phrase, take the win and move on.
OUTRAGE-O-METER READING: 2.0
Cultural appropriation blah blah aside, if we’ve gone from decades of black chicks straightening their hair to look like white girls to white girls wanting to knot their hair up to look black, there is no reason to be angry at that. And for those of us who’ve never tasted the darker berries, now we can have the Tofurkey version of it in our lives. Classic cultural exchange win-win-win situation worth any minor Twitter outrage featuring crying emojis, skulls, and the word “bruh.”