So black hair has always been an essential component of black culture.
Black hair requires upkeep in order for it to grow and remain healthy,
so black women have always done their hair.
It's just a part of our identity: braids, locs, twists and cornrows, etc.
Cornrows are a really functional way
of keeping black textured hair unknotted and neat, but like with style.
So you can see why hair is such a big part of hip hop and rap culture.
These are styles of music which African American communities created
in order to affirm our identities and our voices.
In the early 2000's you saw many R&B stars wearing cornrows:
Alicia Keys, Beyonce, R. Kelly and many more.
As hip hop became more and more popular and integrated into pop culture,
so did Black culture.
Eminem's album went four times platinum and he achieved immense success in the hip hop world.
Black culture had become popular.
As the early 2000's turned into 2010's, white people began to wear
clothing and accessories associated with hip hop,
more and more celebrities could be seen wearing cornrows and braids and even grills.
So by 2013, the fashion world had adopted cornrows as well.
Cornrows and braids were seen on high fashion runways,
for brands like Marchesa and Alexander McQueen,
and magazines had editorial campaigns featuring cornrows as a new urban hairstyle.
Riff Raff came on to the scene, a suburban white middle class man
who almost ironically took on a Black-set and wore braids and gold teeth.
And then James Franco took inspiration from Riff Raff for his role as an alien in Spring Breakers.
Pop stars and icons adopted Black culture as a way of being edgy and gaining attention.
In 2013, Miley Cyrus twerks and uses Black women as props,
and in 2014, in one of her videos called This is How We Do,
Katy Perry uses ebonics and hand gestures, eats watermelons while wearing cornrows
before cutting inexplicably to a picture of Aretha Franklin.
Soooo... as you can see cultural appropriation was rampant.
Not only were white people becoming rappers but they were excelling in the world of hip hop.
Macklemore and Ryan Lewis' song Thrift Shop
garnered a number one spot on Billboard's year end chart for 2013,
and then Iggy Azalea's song Fancy reached number one the following year.
And in May 2014, Forbes released an article titled
"Hip Hop's unlikely new star, a white blonde Australian woman."
But at the same time, police brutality against Black people came to the forefront.
In an incredible movement ignited by the murders of
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Graner and many others,
people began to protest institutionalized racism by marching and by using social media.
Celebrities spread awareness and shared condolences, or at least some did,
as Azealia Banks, a Black female rapper, pointed out.
As Azealia Banks observed in her tweets,
white musicians who partook in hip hop culture and adopted Blackness
-Iggy Azalea in particular-
failed to speak on the racism that comes along with Black identity.
Banks & Azalia feuded on Twitter until Banks participated interview on New Yorks Hot 97.
[Azealia Amanda Banks] I have a problem
when youre trying to like say that it's hip hop,
and youre trying to like put it like up against black culture.
It's like cultural smudging, is what I see.
All it says to white kids is like,
'Oh yeah, you're great, you're amazing, you can do whatever you put your mind to.'
And it says to black kids,
'You don't have shit, you don't own shit, not even shit you've created for yourself.'
And it makes me upset."
[Amandla Stenberg] That itself is what is so complicated when it comes to Black culture.
I mean the line between cultural appropriation and cultural exchange
is always going to be blurred, but here is the thing:
Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes
where it originated
but is deemed as high fashion, cool or funny when the privileged take it for themselves.
Appropriation occurs when the appropriator
is not aware of the deep significance of the culture they are partaking in.
Hip hop stems from a black struggle, it stems from jazz and blues,
styles of music which African-Americans created to retain humanity in the face of adversity,
which itself stems from songs song used during slavery to communicate and survive.
On a smaller scale but in a similar vein, braids and cornrows are not merely stylistic.
Theyre necessary in order to keep black hair neat.
So Ive been seeing this question a lot on social media and I think it's really relevant:
what would America be like
if we loved black people as much as we love black culture?