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black hairstyles on the internet
I am enjoying Elden Ring, a lot, but like many things in video game fandom communities, any time you attempt to bring up issues concerning Black gamers, it can lead to a backlash. With the case of Elden Ring, that comes into play when bringing up the lack of Black hairstyles.
There is an ongoing half-joke about "white people ruining" certain slang words. From "bling bling" to "basic." From "on fleek" to "f**kboy." From "yass" to "ain't nobody got time for that." The "mainstream" appropriation, and subsequent overuse, of black slang is as predictable as the tides.
Portland-based Dominican artist and poet Manuel Arturo Abreu recently wrote a piece about the use of "Online Imagined Black English" for Arachne, an academic webzine that analyzes the relationship of mythology to the internet." They (Abreu's preferred pronoun) notes how the use of "Black English" has spread in recent years due to both use of the Internet - particularly, social media - and the worldwide popularity of rap, quoting linguist John McWorther's 2009 assertion that "Black English, especially the cadence, is becoming America's youth lingua franca, especially since the mainstreaming of hip-hop."
"I focus on the phenomenon of non-black English speakers with no fluency using real or imaginary linguistic features of Black English, which I call imagined Black English," Abreu writes, before referencing Cecilia Cutler's theory that white youth, in particular, are increasingly claiming that hip-hop is a multicultural lifestyle you can enter and exit, rather than a symbol of ethnic identity.
This claim, they say, "seems to allow whites access to a commodified, ephemeral black experience at various moments or phases in their lives without requiring overt claims of black ethnicity, and the sociolinguistic meaning of [African American Vernacular English] appears to be adjusted in the process."
In short, as hip-hop became more universal, some people who have no real connection to black people IRL freely borrow from (often stereotypical) aspects of black culture that they have consumed through mainstream rap and funny social media posts. It allows them to enjoy some of the "cool" parts of being black - stereotypical slang, "swagger," the ability to use the "N-word" - without having to deal with trickier parts like racial profiling, systemic racism, stereotypes, police brutality, and a lack of intergenerational wealth due to the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow laws and racist hiring practices.
As a person who loves writing and literature, language is very important to me. I'm specifically obsessed with colorful language. Slang, metaphor, proverbs, old "country" sayings and truly, vulgar curse words are a few of my personal faves. I understand the need for creative expression, and the love of clever words and phrases that are not of one's own culture - I get it. That is not my personal issue with this phenomenon. It's the erasure of black people, while using words we've created, that makes me cringe.
For years, we've watched black cultural markers, such as speech, hairstyles, fashions, be de-racialized and stripped of all ties to blackness. Cornrows are attributed to Bo Derek, or erroneously described as miniature French braids. Wheat Timberland boots are "the new Birkenstocks." Miley Cyrus apparently invented twerking.
In fact, Abreu's traces this phenomenon back to the days when "ragtime sheet music, black vaudeville, and race records to cultures across the world in the form of language, music, dance, and gesture."
It is as if these things just came up out of the ether, super-cool and completely up for grabs. This is what people who write about race, culture and appropriation like to call "erasure." It is possible to parse out bits of black culture and use them until they are completely deracialized. It is possible to love black culture and not love - or even hate - black people.
"The internet allows for communication and media dissemination to a wider and more diffuse audience than was once possible," writes Abreu. People with "less and less relationship to black media and linguistic behavior" have more and more access to it, through sites like Urban Dictionary and Genius, for example.
Then there is the case of terms like "basic." It's always been a pejorative term, used to deride someone for having very "low-brow" or "ratchet" tastes or habits. Then, the mainstream Internet got ahold of it and "basic" quickly became a term used to specifically ridicule white girls who like things like Ugg boots, black leggings, pumpkin spice lattes and posting food pics on Instagram.
"Deracialized and decontextualized, these redefined words entered the mainstream lexicon at an accelerated rate due to the internet, and their proliferation among white Standard English speakers prompts exhaustion," writes Abreu. The same writer who penned "This is What 'Bae' Means" for TIME in July 2014 listed it along with other originally black terms like "turnt" and the aforementioned "basic" and "yasssss" on a list of Words to Ban in 2015, Abreu points out.
The words are appropriated and then regurgitated back into the online space at hyper-speed. So much so that brands like Hamburger Helper (who did it best, and perhaps, least offensively), Burger King, iHop and Denny's, incorporating black slang into their social media copy to seem "fun" enough to grab users' attention.
Employers should recognize that the New Jersey bill and laws in other states do not entirely prohibit grooming policies addressing hairstyles in the workplace. However, policies in states banning hairstyle discrimination must not target hairstyles traditionally associated with persons of a particular race or culture.
Talks about girly curls or feather haircut are part of daily gossips among chit-chat groups and friends. Apart from weird news update that Japanese schools ban female students to tie a ponytail as it excites men in the premises, a "jellyfish-like" hair grooming has surfaced on the internet.
While the user shared the bizarre yet exciting look of the hair fashion, he wrote, "Look, y'all! The internet has discovered black hairstyles from the 80s and 90s! They're calling it "jellyfish hair."
The new social media trend of 'blackfishing' has shocked many users on Twitter (Zoellner, 2018). Blackfishing refers to the phenomenon whereby white women alter their appearance to such an extent that they appear to be biracial or black. Blackfishing shows how group boundaries defining insiders and outsiders are established. In this context, individuals accused of blackfishing are labeled as deviant, as outsiders, since they do not belong to the black community.
This article aims to analyze the phenomenon of blackfishing to understand why and how young white women would want to alter their appearance from looking white to appearing black, or at least to embodying "black emblems", like dark skin and curly hair. More specifically, the article aims at understanding this social identity issue and the creation of this deviant group in relation to fashion culture and the emergence of micro-celebrities.
In order to understand blackfishing, let us briefly turn to sociologist Erving Goffman's approach to people's presentation of identity in everyday life. Goffman looks at identity by focusing on "everyday, small-scale social engagements between people" (Branaman, 1997). According to Goffman, identity "comes about" through social interaction. In interactions, people stage an act and assume "roles" that create impressions favored by the crowd. In other words, we will understand identity if we can find out the different roles a person plays on the "front stage" (for example, in front of an online or offline audience) and the "back stage" (for example, in one's private space at home).
In order to understand why the appropriation of black identity is so controversial, we must look at hair and cultural identity within the Black community for context. In the past, black women were forced to hide their hair with headscarves in order to make themselves less attractive to their masters (Williams, n.d.).
Keeping in mind Goffman's approach to identity and the above-described history, we need to look at blackfishing as an identity issue and thus as a social phenomenon. One group of "white people" is presenting indexes of "black culture" or blackness, and in doing so follows certain behavioral scripts. So, what are the indexicalities of these scripts through which they identify themselves and are identified by others?
Blackness is defined not only in cultural, but also in biological terms. More specifically, the scripted cosmetic alterations concern white women altering their skin color to a darker tone, and fashionably styling themselves in line with black or biracial fashion gurus.
Of course, the alterations do not stop with skin color. There is a mainstream trend which includes getting lip fillers to appear more biracial. Also, one's hair is usually fitted with extensions to create more volume. Make up is applied three to five shades darker than the actual skin tone. These are only some among many more alterations that white women individually apply to appear more black or biracial. After the alternations, users mostly post their look or style on front stage social media like Instagram.
On the other hand, at home, i.e. back stage, these women remain white and keep their white identity. Below is the example of Hallberg who has been accused of blackfishing due to pictures she posted on Instagram (Hensley, 2018).
On the opposing side, we find Twitter users that were not convinced by Hallberg's video. In the picture below, Hallberg's usual make-up is displayed. A similar picture surfaced on the internet, on which one Twitter user commented that it looked as if she was "appropriating black features". Another user pointed out that "Emma Hallberg is not black" (mentioned in the video). This clearly indicates people draw a line between being black and identifying as black, and therefore between an ingroup and an outgroup. 2ff7e9595c
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