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Underground > Head Shop >

Politics of white adoption of dreadlocks

  
  

Page: 12(3)

 
 
Saturn's nod
07:51 / 29.10.06
nighthawk, I had a strong emotional reaction to your use of "we" above. It doesn't read to me the same way as e.g. entity's use of we here, despite your declaration that it was intended to be the same.

When entity said we: White people sometimes lift the external manifestation of a cultural practice and adopt it as a stylistic or aesthetic element, or to express our* "solidarity" with people whom, frequently, we don't actually understand very well. In my reading he was marking himself as belonging to 'white people' by the use of that pronoun, not claiming anything about the experience or identity of anyone else here involved in this thread.

When you said: It felt a bit like we were distancing ourselves* from these other white people by picking them, and their lifestyle choices, for critique , you are instead talking about a reflective view of this thread. It reads to me as if you are either assuming that only white people are reading and contributing to this thread, or you are excluding as a group people involved in this thread who don't identify as white from your collective noun. "We" and "these other white people" in the way you have written it makes it seem to me that only white people are included, which makes assumptions about other peoples' experience and identification in a way that entity's doesn't seem to, to me.

I wonder if you can see how it's open to being read that way, and how the two usages of collective pronoun look very different? Maybe you could explain if it seems important (as I have obviously not got it) how your use of we had the same structure as entity's?
 
 
nighthawk
08:51 / 29.10.06
Hmm that's interesting, I think you might be right about me smudging things a bit there.

Having said that, and having reread this thread, I'm suprised your reaction was so strong? My use of 'ourselves' was deliberately rhetorical, in so far as I was trying to capture a particular dynamic which I felt was characterising this thread, without being too combatitive. I felt that using 'you'/'yourselves' would have made it seem that a) I was specifically criticising Allecto Regina, as the pronoun is more ambiguous in its number; and b) make it seem that I was somehow external to this discussion. I mean, taken literally, it should be fairly obvious that I was not including myself in the we you quoted, because I've been questioning that position throughout this thread, not propounding it. Which is to say that if I had meant it literally, I'd be talking nonsense.



I am worried about some of the points made in this thread however, for the reasons I highlighted in that post. I may well be wrong here, and if so I sincerely apologise - but this thread still reads to me like a group of predominantly white people identifying a particular form of cultural borrowing as 'racist', without any input from individuals belonging to the culture in question, and only minimal input from the group being discussed. You are probably right about the way I phrased that particular sentence, but I think I'm fairly secure in assuming that most of the posters to Barbelith are priveleged, from the developed [sic] world and, yes, largely white. Pretending that this is not the case would be a good example of the kind of thinking I'm worried about - it obscures the fact things like 'racism' affect even make-up of online communities such as Barbelith, which in principle are open to everyone and anyone the world over.

The rhetoric of that post was deliberate because I felt that singling out this single group/act of borrowing for particular criticism obscured the fact that noone is free from 'racism'; or, if you like, that white people with dreadlocks are prima facie no more or less 'racist', or involved in 'racism', than anyone else. As I tried to say there, I'm worried that focusing on this group (or people who adopt religions without putting in enough hardwork, etc.), we, the posters to this thread, are failing to recognise that we are all 'racist' in the sense used here, and that worrying about 'proper' forms of cultural borrowing is never going to change this. This last point is probably my biggest concern re: the dynamic of this thread.

As an aside, I'd rather we'd had this discussion by PM, as it threatens to derail the thread. I'm willing to carry it on publicly here or elsewhere if posters think my position deserves further critique though.
 
 
nighthawk
09:11 / 29.10.06
Damn. I just want to add that this was not meant to be a characterisation of Saturn's Nod, who was quite right to call me up on the way I phrased that sentence:

Pretending that this is not the case would be a good example of the kind of thinking I'm worried about - it obscures the fact things like 'racism' affect even make-up of online communities such as Barbelith, which in principle are open to everyone and anyone the world over.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:41 / 29.10.06
Surely community dynamics are just as likely to be affected by colonialism and racism, in terms of access to resources for example, or relative wealth - you don't avoid 'racism', at least in the sense in which I thought we were using it in this thread, just by living with people from different cultures. And besides, a straight-up colonial would live in a particular community, communicate with the people, maybe even really know about the culture they were borrowing from. Surely that's not all good?

Point, point. I didn't think that through. When Quantum said he lived in a Carribean community I took it as read that Quantum was not in fact Sharpe. I was trying to say that, when and if people live near, but, most of all, share cirumstances with, have contact with and do not conquer the people they're borrowing from, the borrowing becomes less problematic- in fact it becomes something natural that's always happened and always will, wouldn't you say? I was assuming that Quantum meant he was living with these people at an equal level- for example, he must have been talking to them frequently to get the teeth-kissing behaviour- that he was part of the community, in other words.

If you look back at my first post, you'll see it's the distance factor that I find problematic- when there's distance between one set of cirumstances and the other, when one has more power than the other. If by "living in a community" Quantum meant they were his servants that's obviously not healthy, but I don't think he did mean that.

I am worried about some of the points made in this thread however, for the reasons I highlighted in that post. I may well be wrong here, and if so I sincerely apologise - but this thread still reads to me like a group of predominantly white people identifying a particular form of cultural borrowing as 'racist', without any input from individuals belonging to the culture in question, and only minimal input from the group being discussed. You are probably right about the way I phrased that particular sentence, but I think I'm fairly secure in assuming that most of the posters to Barbelith are priveleged, from the developed [sic] world and, yes, largely white. Pretending that this is not the case would be a good example of the kind of thinking I'm worried about - it obscures the fact things like 'racism' affect even make-up of online communities such as Barbelith, which in principle are open to everyone and anyone the world over.

Firstly, at this stage I don't think any of us have actually identified the behaviour as "racist"- I started out fairly convinced that it was very problematic and now think the whole thing even more complicated than before. Maybe we haven't all given it the green light but a lot of us are quite in favour of it.

Now, on the issue of racism in Barbelith- on the one hand, yes, those problems exist in this community as elsewhere, yes, everyone, not just the white people adopting dreadlocks, are capable of racism. Me, you, Alan Titchmarsh, the list goes on. But, well, where did we deny this? There are threads about it. Also, does that problem then mean that we shouldn't be having this discussion? And without wanting to be rude, would you still be saying that if more people were agreeing with you?

_____________________________

I'm aware that this thread could be seen as a deliberate attempt at targetting a certain group of white people, or, worse, winding up Barbefolk and wasting time, but it really wasn't, and, first post which I have apologised for aside, I think people are being very quick to accuse it of being so. A similar thread could have been made about Picasso and African art, or the Beatles and India: by no means is it trying to suggest that white people with dreadlocks are somehow beyond the pale. The only reason I chose this subject over those others is that white people with dreadlocks seems to be the most current of these cultural phenomena.

Those last two sentences are important as I get the feeling that some people are assuming that, concsiously or no, I'm arguing for "white people" to stay "white", and that I don't like to see white people "looking like black people". This really isn't true: I'm overjoyed that things are mixing and changing. It's just that sometimes things that might appear to me, a white person, to be all great and a massive move towards open-mindedness might not appear that way to, in the case of dreadlocks, a Jamaican, or in the case of Picasso's art, a person from the Congo, or in the case of the Beatles, an Indian. Just because something seems basically right doesn't mean it shouldn't be interrogated- see for example the statement "We need more national unity".
 
 
nighthawk
10:59 / 29.10.06
If by "living in a community" Quantum meant they were his servants that's obviously not healthy, but I don't think he did mean that.

Yes, but you're caricaturing my position a bit there. I thought one of the assumptions that we shared in this discussion was that things like colonialism and racism can still affect our daily lives even when, as individuals, we are neither colonialists nor racists. That's how I understood your qualification in your opening post: they are engaging in a form of (probably) unconcious racism. In other words, you were not characterising these people as 'racist' in the same way you might characterise a member of the BNP or KKK.

So I think its misleading to suggest that I was comparing Quantum, or anyone else, to a modern day Sharpe. The distinction is not so clear-cut: historical colonialists on the one side, multicultural modern communities on the other.

With that in mind, I'm now genuinely confused about what it is that you are identifying as 'racist'. Initially I thought it was the fact that white people adopted dreadlocks without knowing enough about their political significance. If I've understood you correctly, you're also concerned about the different ways in which 'borrowing' occurs. At various points in this thread, you seem to be drawing a distinction between 'good' borrowing, based on genuine knowledge, faith, or direct interaction, and 'bad' or 'problemmatic' borrowing, which lacks these features. I assumed that this was still connected to 'racism', so I extrapolated a little, and decided that you meant that 'bad' forms of borrowing were enabled and encouraged by commodification and 'racism' (meant as something external to the beliefs and intentions of particular individuals, as you admitted that e.g. white people with dreadlocks are not straight-fowardly 'racist', although they might be 'engaging in racism').

I've been trying to suggest that, once we start thinking about racism in this way (i.e. in line with the definition I borrowed from id in my first post: a system that keeps white people in power by disempowering people who are not white), and connecting this to a critique of commodification, colonialism, and capitalism, it ought to become clear that 'racism' is not just something we are all 'capable' of, or something we can avoid if we're careful about our lifestyle choices, or something that will be erased because different cultures are living side by side; its woven through the whole fabric of contemporary capitalist society, particularly in an affluent west whose wealth originates in historical colonialism.

With that in mind, I was also suggesting that it might be useful to stop thinking about 'racism' as something that only problematises particular practices, which can still be divided into a spectrum ranging from good to bad. Based on your last post I gather that you are not arguing this, but previously it felt as though you were suggesting that as white people with dreadlocks are engaging in racism, a good way to not engage in racism if you happen to be white is to avoid having dreadlocks. I was trying to suggest that 'racism' will remain wholly unaffected by this sort of 'sensitivity', just as it remains unaffected by who I live/work/socialise with.

However all this depends on what exactly it is that you're identifying as problemmatic. I've been trying to clarify that, not criticising you for starting this thread or wasting Barbelith's time. I have no idea what you are implying when you say And without wanting to be rude, would you still be saying that if more people were agreeing with you?, and frankly I think you are out of order, given that I have not once framed my criticism of your posts as an ad hominem attack.
 
 
Lurid Archive
11:24 / 29.10.06
I'd like to make a couple of points, on which people can correct me if I'm wrong.

For a start, I entirely agree with Mister Disco that appeals to the natural are somewhat suspect. Where I diverge is that I think Legba's position only really makes sense from this perspective. Correct me if I'm wrong, Legba, but you aren't intending to criticise a black UK person for wearing dreads, right? That is, the cultural appropriation you are worried about tallies follows racial lines pretty closely. Imperialistic reality is only a concern in this argument for people with the wrong kind of hair - unnatural hair for dreads - whereas Imperialism is actually conducted by nations, whose citizens aren't racially determined. This is clear throughout, that the objection is a racial one.

Also, the commodification critique, in the absence of exploitation, seems a pretty direct appeal to the natural. Try analogous critiques of the commodification of gender, if you want, and you'll come out as pretty much against transpeople. This is the problem I have with the whole argument, tbh, since I think it relies heavily on tacitly accepting the natural hair for dreads and, despite what Legba says, if you don't look it at that way then the arguments would just as easily apply to learning language.

I guess one distinction that Legba wants to make is the presence or absence of understanding of a "culture" in some sense (where "culture", I think, actually means race and understanding is pretty vague so that learning a language is ok, even though it is quite possible to learn a language without understanding culture and via capitalist mechanisms). One problem I have with this is that it is far too thought-policey for my liking. I reject this kind of thinking in the niqab debate, and I reject it here for the same reason (I realise that the potential flaw is that the power dynamic is reversed, of course, but race isn't the only way of understanding power. In the case of the niqab, one can appeal to gender instead - this is why I'm deeply suspicious of appeals to power imbalance, on the whole, since it is both arbitrary and a general let out clause.)

But the real problem with requiring "understanding" is that such a position is so authoritarian and stifling. Culture is something that is spontaneously copied, changed, reinterpreted and reproduced. Thats a *good* thing, and the conservative impulse to demarcate valid uses of culture just seems wrong, dependent on natural categories, as well as hopeless, to me, even when backed by a power dynamic argument.
 
 
Disco is My Class War
05:35 / 30.10.06
Also, the commodification critique, in the absence of exploitation, seems a pretty direct appeal to the natural. Try analogous critiques of the commodification of gender, if you want, and you'll come out as pretty much against transpeople.

Lurid, I'd welcome some clarification about what you're getting at here, when you say the commodification critique is a direct appeal to the natural. Can you unpack? (This is totally off-topic, but I am actually making a critique of the commodification of particular transgendered subjective formations in my PhD, and I'm doing it without 'coming out against transpeople' at all, as far as I know. I'd be interested to talk about this further elsewhere if people are interested.)
 
 
All Acting Regiment
09:48 / 30.10.06
I have no idea what you are implying when you say And without wanting to be rude, would you still be saying that if more people were agreeing with you?, and frankly I think you are out of order, given that I have not once framed my criticism of your posts as an ad hominem attack.

Apologies for this, I hadn't read your post properly at the time.
 
  

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