A couple of weeks ago, two well-known American football players had an uncomfortable public exchange on social media about the (mis)appropriation of what one player considered the sole cultural property of his particular ethnic heritage. Crazy as it may seem, two exceptionally elite individuals performing at the highest level of their game had a tensely bitchy discussion about....world politics, gun control, healthcare, or was it famine? No, it was hair. That's right: a hairstyle. It brought me back to a scene from Chris Rock's movie "Good Hair" when he actually asked Maya Angelou what she thought about the issue, to which she famously replied "It's just hair!" Right! It grows on your head. Or not.
I get it, because I also have what's called "difficult hair" that I've written about before on this site (also known as "curly hair"), and for many years, the world didn't let me forget that my hair was a sign of poor genetics, or as my father calls it, "mongrel DNA". It's his defense mechanism for having what was once known as "the taint" of Indian blood in his familial line. You know that old squabble about all the "bad" stuff that comes from the other side of the family. For me, salvation was finally found in the pages of a book written by a similarly-afflicted Briton who also suffered from the genetic legacy of "poor hair" that was to be covered up for being too "wild", because it was seen as overtly sexual.
After that, my life changed. I bought products for my hair type, switched up my cleansing routine/styling techniques and....voila! Better hair. It seemed so simple that it almost felt criminally easy, until my heightened awareness made shopping for products in stores a lesson about the blatant racism that drives marketing stances used to sell products to whichever group can be victimized with their profitable shaming techniques. So, I guess it was progress to read men feeling the sting over appearances now aimed their way through corporate endorsements, as an inevitable outgrowth of civil rights with "hair shaming" for men.
But, I still didn't quite get it. I understood that an African-American man felt he could stand up for dreadlocks to be his hairstyle specifically, given the context of an American history that has brutally taken away too much from his ethnic group, except for this: all mixed martial artists wear "war braids" in the sport of fighting while in the arena, because we all want our hair off our faces during a fight. It's too messy and distracting, otherwise. And then there's this: my hair's also a fine voluminous blend of textured curls that can dread freakishly easily. Scarily so, as my friend noted at the Jersey Shore. She can quickly run a pick through her wet hair and be done with it, while the Medusa-like snakes on my head changed every minute or so from straight, wet hair to a snarled mess that needs a long list of products, tools, and accessories to be somewhat manageable. She admitted to me that it was like nothing she'd ever seen before.
So, I thought to myself: well, maybe the other guy wearing a helmet wants that same kind of ease with his hair, Asiatic as it is. I know a dude whose Cuban Chinese fro is so thick that he can also stand a pick up in it without any intervention. And then it occurred to me that maybe people just don't know about the range of human hair historically, or how other tribes and clans of the world can also feel the struggle deeply and personally, like I do. Just like one picture can cover a thousand words, here are two infamous warriors from the past wearing dreads from other cultures, as legitimate to them as any on the planet. Meet the Kouroi of ancient Greece and "The Dying Gaul" during his last, beautiful moments before death. Welcome to the world.
