the politics of hair

[novapsyche]

White Philly officer told to get rid of cornrows: Philadelphia Daily News reports many black officers have similar hairstyle -- MSNBC has this under Weird News. This isn't weird. It's wrong.

Comments

[rmeidaking.livejournal.com]

There are a lot of unanswered questions in that article, particularly since the officer changed his hairstyle without comment. That behavior implies that the white officer chose the hairstyle to be deliberately provocative, and if so, the less said about it, the better. It's possible that he *should* be on desk duty, actually.

Hairstyles and people's reactions to them always confuse me. I mean, it's hair. If you can't play with it, what good is it? And yet, folks get all prickly and weirded out over hairstyles. The world is bizarre.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

A little bit ago, I posted Hair Raising: A Review of Culture and Values, an academic paper of mine. Some of the passages might surprise you yet explain a lot.

[pstscrpt.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised they let it get long enough in the first place that he could make cornrows out of it.