Flight of the Culture Vulture
Originally published in Mosaïk, 2018.
MAASTRICHT, THE NETHERLANDS - Non-black/-brown people who wear dreadlocks bother me more than I’d like to admit. Not in such a way to where I’ll tell them to shave their heads, but in a way to where, when I see one proudly displaying the nest they spent so much money to artificially create, I am comfortable in making a few foundational snap judgments about them.
To start, my racial makeup is a mix of black, Native American, and European descent. In the United States, I grew up as a “black” kid; contrary to European nomenclature, one is black in the U.S. whether he or she is 100% black or 25% black (which has led to odd moments in conversations where folks on the eastern side of the Atlantic have made it clear I don’t pass their blackness threshold).
I grew up entirely around my white family in predominantly white suburbs, and it was fairly late in my adolescent life before I started questioning the identity of “black” in America and even later, when I moved to South Korea around four years ago, that I started questioning the identity in the context of the globe.
In fact, the exact moment the questioning started was after I decided I no longer wanted to deal with cutting and picking out (combing) my hair (I did, however, continue to regularly wash it). It, inevitably, started matting. I would idly play with it and pull the mats apart into smaller ones during my lectures until one day when I looked in the mirror and realized that I had naturally grown dreadlocks.
Racism in the United States is often more nuanced than simple supremacy. In fact, of all the forms of racism I’ve witnessed and experienced, hate-borne supremacy is the most palatable and least jarring of them. At least you know exactly what you’re getting when you see it.
On the other end of the spectrum, “clean-hands” racism is often more sinister in that it sneaks its way into a person’s moral framework and entrenches itself to the point where it’s tough to root out and extermination is nigh impossible. It often comes with loosely-related qualifiers that give its owners a misplaced feeling of authority when speaking about race-related issues. If you’ve ever pulled out “I have a lot of black/East Asian/Hispanic friends...” or “I don’t see race” or any similar faux cosmopolitanisms in expository discourse, you probably have a bit of clean-hands racism running through your blood.
“But wait a minute,” you interject. “What’s wrong with not seeing race? Doesn’t that ‘solve racism?’”
Nope. Personally, any time I hear “I don’t see race,” my brain automatically translates it to “I want the ability to cherry-pick things that I like from different racial cultures while summarily bypassing all the unpleasant things they’ve had to deal with.”
“I want to wear Native American headdresses to music festivals, but I don’t want anything to do with the depression and alcoholism that run rampant through Native American communities, due in no small part to the forced relocation and genocidal slaughter at the hands of the (European-)American government.”
“I want to spend five weeks WWOOFing in South America before coming back and speaking authoritatively on South American cultures, but I don’t want to contribute any solution to the current economic crises happening throughout the continent nor the postcolonial scarring that has left many cultures there in battered forms of their original states.”
And finally, “I read a Wikipedia article about Rastafarianism one time and subsequently want the agency to wear dreadlocks, even though I have probably undergone exactly zero of the struggles that ethnicities who naturally grow them are plagued with intercontinentally to this day, nor have I undertaken any measurable action to counteract the conditions that cause those struggles in the first place.”
Now, it seems that I’m gatekeeping by way of saying “if you haven’t fought the fight, you don’t deserve to wear the uniform.” And no: as harped on time and Time again, that argument is tired and doesn’t fly very far. After all, nobody has ownership of dreadlocks. Historical depictions suggest that dreadlocks have had places in various African as well as Indian cultures for millenia.
But there is something to be said about the audacity of wearing a certain hairstyle, something that is semi-permanently attached to you, that transcends even the obnoxiousness of wearing an article of clothing from a culture that has no correlation to your own on The Great Venn Diagram of Cultures. At least an article of clothing can be hastily removed and stuffed in a box, as some Indians have wished of Justin Trudeau’s attire during his visits.
No, hairstyle is something different. Hairstyle is a bold flag one flies that implies to those surrounding him or her that they are so vested in whatever fashion they’ve emulated that not only have they spent a lot of time and money in procuring it, but removing it would be an equally arduous endeavor. It ups the stakes, and thereby garners proportionately more attention.
And that attention is worthless if you’re going to do nothing with it. I am speaking directly to those of you who, for some reason or another, have chosen to wear a distinctive hairstyle of a culture wildly different than your own: do it, but be effective. Wear the dreadlocks if you must, but do your part in positively affecting the communities from which you’ve taken them. If you take, give back. How you choose to do this is up to you, but most all of us in the orbit of Maastricht University will have to deal with researching a thesis at some point: maybe do your part in stopping the race- or religion- or culture-based discrimination that ethnic communities around the world deal with while you sit in your hair stylist’s chair (or wherever people get their dreadlocks manufactured).
So, to be clear, I’m not universally bashing on people who pluck one or two articles from cultures that are not their own. And even to call myself out, you’ll see me habitually drinking yerba mate, though I’ve had zero traction in the current impending Argentinian market crisis (or at least I’ve had negligible traction; who knows, maybe my occasional purchase of Argentinian yerba mate is the single thread holding the country afloat). The point is: I get it. We can’t fix all the problems in the world, nor are we, in appreciating these cultures by emulating whatsoever convention we choose, culpable for the transgressions of aggressors past or present.
But we can start by calling into question those feckless many who thieve from societies they have no interest in investing in. As the term “culture vulture,” implies, these are people who pick scraps from whatever corpse they can find, noticeably arriving in vogue well after the battle that killed the animal in the first place concludes.
To answer the burning question: I now shave my head.
Here is a good article for further reading.