I was sitting on the bus one day behind some white dude with dreadlocks. I swear it looked like he had taken barfed-up cat hairballs and stuck them to his head. I’m not exaggerating. It was gross, in that fascinating can’t-look-away way.
As for teenager’s hair - it’s just hair. When I was a teenager living at home (13-17) my mom let me do pretty much whatever I wanted with my hair, because she figured “it’s just hair” and as long as I stayed in school, out of jail and off drugs who cares what colour my hair is, it’ll grow out.
Dreads are the hair equivalent of felt. You can felt wool into a kidn of fabric, and you can felt hair much the same way into strings of felt. Felt can be easily cleaned.
The DIY variety of deadlocks can be very ugly, indeed. For good, even locks, it is best to go to a black hair salon and let the specialist do her thing. Or you can cheat and have her knot bougth dreadlocks into your own short hair.
Find some good youtube footage of this guy: JohnSomerville it was pretty gross to see that hair swinging around and imagine eating food he had cooked. Definitely changed my attitude about dreds.
Still, as said above, if they are clean and even, then there’s nothing wrong with that and her parents should really thank the fates for such high class problems.
P.S. Several months of Summer camp? Please explain. . .
Hair and dress doesn’t bother me anywhere near as much as affected speech and mannerisms. Dreadlocks and baggy pants - whatever. A white kid from the suburbs grabbing his dick and trying to talk like 50 Cent - obnoxious. People will not be nearly as off-put by a look alone as they will by behavior and speech.
When I was 18 and bored in my college dorm one day, some friends and I experimented with a set of clippers and a dye bottle. I ended up with the bottom half of my hair shaved down to about 1/8" and the shaved bits ended up dyed platinum blonde. I have plain old white girl light brown hair.
It looked ridiculously stupid. And I didn’t care.
Because I was in college. I had a job in the library where I was hidden away in the stacks somewhere in this enormous library. Otherwise, I went to class and partied and hung out with my friends. I couldn’t come up with any reason whatsoever that I needed a conventional, respectable haircut. That’s the age when you play around with that kind of thing, because you can.
Shortly after this new 'do, my grandfather died and I had to catch a ride home for the funeral. Of course, I showed up with this stupid semi-punk hair and my dad just took one look at me and busted out laughing. And then he asked why? So I told him, look, for the next four years, I only have to be responsible enough to get to class, feed myself and pay my tuition bills. I can find a job with this hair. Someday, I will have to go out into the real world and get a respectable job, at which point, I have enough sense in my head to know that I will need to have respectable hair by then. So why can’t I play around with a stupid ridiculous hairstyle now, before I have to grow up and look all straightlaced and shit?
He really couldn’t argue with the logic. My stupid hair wasn’t hurting anybody and it wasn’t holding me back from getting or keeping a job or anything like that. It only lasted a few months anyway, because shaved/dyed hairstyles require more maintenance than I care for. I’ve pretty much had respectable hair ever since.
When I was a teen (back in the Stone Age) the big point of contention was boys growing their hair long, and parents going apeshit. Major battles were fought at the dinner tables across America, with fathers refusing to have anything to do with their sons.
That’s stupid.
So by the time my own children were old enough to participate in adolescent BS, it was the “droopy drawers” fashion. My husband was almost ballistic. The constant chant Iwas “pull up your Goddamned pants” and “Go put on a belt.” The Son’s response was to do a half-assed upward yank on his belt loops.
I had a heart-to-heart with the boy. I told him, “I don’t care how you wear your pants. If you can stand the feeling that your pants are continually falling down, big deal. I only have two requests: (1) I don’t want to see your underwear, and (2) I definitely don’t want to see your butt. Wear long shirts.”
He respected my requests, and I never bugged him. And as long as I didn’t have to see his naked ass, I was fine.
Pick your battles.
As long a the young woman is clean and behaves, no problem.
I am just reminded of that stoner on American Idol with the dreadlocks. He always had a cloud of BUGS swarming around his head!
~VOW
My general opinion is pretty much what others have said. Hair styles are not worth getting upset over. She can always change to another hair style if she wants to.
This, on the other hand, is dumb. White people shouldn’t wear certain hairstyles because they “belong” to other races? That’s foolish. Just because a race invented some piece of culture doesn’t mean they have exclusive ownership of it. Imagine a white person trying to argue that black people shouldn’t paint because paintings are part of white culture and black artists shouldn’t appropriate it.
This. It can be kinda cool if you are, I dunno, playing in a Bob Marley tribute band or trying to reform Dread Zeppelin, but you still have to be black to pull it off. And a lot of black people still can’t.
White folks, especailly white girls, look hideous with dreads.
I’ll swim against the stream and say that I, a middle-aged white woman, would totally ROCK dreadlocks. I’m semi-seriously thinking about getting them. This is an interesting and informative site I found when I was researching the idea.
I always scoffed at the idea that white people’s hair could even lock, unless it was really curly or something. But no, apparently you start by drying your hair out to the point of damage, and then you can twist it and it’ll stay. I’ve had a fairly antagonistic relationship with my hair all my life, which only improved when I stopped using shampoo a couple of years ago. I just scrub my scalp with baking soda and rinse the rest now, so I’m already on board with non-traditional haircare.
It’s not about being white, and to me has nothing to do with politics. It’s about both the type of hair, and the style of dreads.
Dreads on people without naturally tightly curled or kinky hair textures (which come along with a ‘dry’ scalp) usually look hideous and messy to me, because they are fuzzy mats of straightish hairs that do not ‘lock’ together. And far too often they are oily, flaky, and smell bad. I’ve seen a tiny handful of exceptions in my life.
Well-formed (tight, neat, and I prefer smaller ones) and maintained dreads on a person of any ethnic background who has the right type of hair and scalp, I find just lovely (and very sexy, depending on the person).
Sometimes though even the most awful dreads can be overlooked. See Jason Momoa.
When I have kids they can do whatever the hell they want with their hair. If it’s ugly and stank, I probably won’t lie to them though…
I had no idea it was a “thing”. I think they look cute, especially with sandy blond or red hair. My daughter loves them and would have wear them herself if not for her job. We both have kinky curly hair so I think it would look rather nice on both of us.
If white people cannot have dreadlocks, then black people shouldn’t dye their hair blonde. And while I think both looks are of questionable taste, I try not to impose my judgments on others.
