The Irony of Dreadlocks In the Media
Originally published on www.kesifelton.com
April 20, 2016
Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP
With all of the media coverage currently around Justin Bieber, joining the likes of Miley Cyrus, Zendaya, and the student at San Francisco State University, I started to question how dreadlocks are portrayed in the media. And my realization was that the individuals causing many of the larger-scale media outcries about dreadlocks are white or involve white people.
My issue with this is that the only representation of dreadlocks in the media is chock-full of criticisms. We spend more time arguing about why white people should or shouldn’t wear dreadlocks instead of celebrating people of color that wear them. People, myself included, are quick to criticize Justin Bieber and hundreds of other white people with dreads and accuse them of cultural appropriation but don’t even bother to acknowledge the cultures from which dreadlocks originated in the first place. People of color with locs are hardly visible in the media, and when they are it’s after they’ve been fired from their job or expelled from school, or told that they “smell like patchouli oil and weed” for their hairstyles. Then, of course, you have white people with dreadlocks who are called “edgy,” “trendy,” and... how did Bieber describe himself? Oh yeah. “Weird.” When I was first doing some research for this, I couldn’t even find the most recent article about a child being suspended from school for having dreadlocks because a multitude of articles about Justin Bieber pushed it to the fourth page.
It also seems like the black community as a whole doesn’t publicly appreciate those with locs. Often in the photosets on Twitter captioned “Natural Hair Appreciation” with more heart-eye emojis than women with locs. Faux locs are even more recognized now than natural locs when dreadlocks are as natural as it gets. Loose natural hair is becoming more and more accepted in mainstream media, and rightfully so, but we’re leaving a large part of the natural hair community in the dust and we don’t even realize it.
I feel as though this has to do with the lack of visibility of locs in the media. Only publicizing one version of who or what you think someone with locs is and criticizing anything outside of that only reinforces to the thousands of people of color with locs the idea that their hair isn’t valued nor is it beautiful. And that representation has to go beyond the “Rastafarian” persona that everyone portrays people with locs to have. There are doctors, lawyers, teachers, journalists, engineers, musicians, business people, filmmakers, artists, and a multitude of other societal roles that people with locs embody universally.
–kf
