As the US race debate crashes
head first into the issue of black women wearing blonde hair and/or weaves,
fuelled by Whoopi’s comments on a recent episode of The View
(https://youtu.be/jbUFQZ1KuTsm) it’s time to throw in my two pennies’ worth.
If ‘cultural appropriation’ is
when “a dominant group in society exploits the culture of a less-privileged
group without understanding that group’s experience”, as explained by Sunny
Hostin on the programme, then by definition black women wearing blonde hair
and/or weaves is not an example of it; and, more importantly, black people in
the US can never be guilty of it….unless they become the dominant group that
is. Off the top of my head, West Africans who copy, make and sell the kilts
that their Scottish ex-pats wear, to other West Africans, would be an example
of black people being guilty of cultural appropriation.
Zainab Karim of Jet magazine
(http://www.jetmag.com/talk-back-2/whoopi-goldberg-cultural-appropriation/#ixzz4DTCGpI2B) responds to Whoopi’s comments by saying that
what is going on is ‘assimilation’ instead. She explains that “assimilation is
the process by which a person or a group’s culture comes to resemble that of
the dominant group. Essentially, assimilation is the culprit behind the phenomenon
of skin lightening and the belief that lighter is better, or the idea that
anything that resembles whiteness holds more weight. It was the colonizers way
of destroying indigenous culture”. But this is a misuse of the word
assimilation. As any dictionary or thesaurus will tell you, assimilation means
integration, adjustment, acclimatisation, accommodation, adaptation, absorption
and incorporation; so, examples of this are learning and then speaking the
dominant’s group language, learning how to cook and then cooking the dominant
group’s cuisine, and so on.
OK, yes, by ‘any dictionary or
thesaurus’ I mean those readily available, and they are typically based on the
English language that was constructed by white English people, so I will gladly
review the above if anyone has a different definition from another type of
thesaurus or dictionary.
What Karim is describing is the
belief that anything that resembles that dominant group is of more value or
importance. This belief is typically unconscious and has been brought about by
enforced conditioning like slavery, plus covert racism and discrimination like
institutionalised prejudice and exclusion. It is typically called ‘having a
complex’ but that is a terrible expression because it blames the victim, and we
need to call to something else like ‘unfair conditioning behaviour’.
Black women wearing blonde hair
and/or weaves is not cultural appropriation or assimilation. It is not unfair
conditioning behaviour either EXCEPT when the blonde hair and/or weaves are
TOTALLY AT ODDS WITH THEIR FEATURES. There are a myriad of reasons why a black
woman would wear blonde hair, straight hair, a weave or wig (convenience,
fashion, protective styling, etc.) - see my old article on ‘Black women and
wigs and weaves’ (http://www.simiweave.com/#!Black-women-and-wigs-and-weaves/ytkor/576186ba0cf26813fb953c17).
#whoopi #jetmagazine #sunnyhostin
#culturalappropriation
