What's the Big Deal with Braids?
2018 was the first time we heard the term “blackfishing”. Finally. A word that adequately describes this phenomenon of women from other races benefiting of the aesthetic of black women without actually experiencing the struggle.
Many Instagram influencers have mastered this art. Tanning several shades darker, exaggerating their lip sizes, creating an hourglass figure — through surgery or structural clothing — and of course ccutesy braided hairstyles.
Wanna Thompson coined the term after her Twitter thread calling out Instagram influencers went viral. She explained this practice as non-black girls “dipping their foot into the pond without fully getting themselves wet... just enough to hang on to racial ambiguity without fully dealing with the consequences of blackness”.
It may be a bit controversial to say, but personally, I don’t believe in the whole ‘people of colour’ narrative. At least not to a certain degree. It seems the world connotes that we are all minorities on equal footing, united in a struggle against one common enemy. But in my experience, this is far from the truth. This is precisely why it’s problematic that the same people who want to enjoy what they may consider the good and fun parts of our culture ultimately look down on us.
The history of blackface goes back over 200 years when white performers painted their faces Black to make jest of enslaved African Americans in minstrel shows. These performers darkened their skin with polish and put on tattered clothes (to not only embarrass our demographic but inhibit economic growth).
Many people regard blackfishing as a contemporary form of blackface. Mainly due to the critical underlying principle they share: one privileged demographic capitalising off the looks of an oppressed group.
A major issue with this form of cultural appropriation is that many women who mimic the look of Black women benefit from their aesthetic. Meanwhile, actual black women are rejected and belittled. Many of us are often left feeling slighted as endorsements are given to those fashioning our characteristics in ways society considers just Black enough, aka the Kardashian-Jenners.
In 2006, James Rodriguez wrote a paper proposing the Colour Blind Ideology. He theorised that white people have a flexible set of ideas that they use to ignore the glaring racial inequalities around them. Basically, they have selective vision and hearing to the Black man’s struggle, so they enjoy Black culture without having to feel guilty about it.
For example, my best friend at university happens to be a white male. There are so many times I’ve tried discussing racial issues with him. Unlike other parts of the world, racism isn’t some abstract idea, it is a systematically institutionalised constant. Obviously, as someone who didn’t grow up in South Africa, I haven’t learned to roll with the punches or just get used to it because ‘that’s just how they are’. A couple of days ago, he sent me a video of the DJ at a festival playing Caroline by Amine. He knows it’s my favourite song, so it’s not so surprising. The biggest surprise was my lack of shock when he and all the other white people in the room amply shouted along to the n-word in the lyrics without a thought.
Perfectly in line with Rodriguez’s theory, my friend would eagerly shut down conversations about race, but happily morph himself into our hip hop culture as do many other “colour-blind” people. We often see them captioning their photos with rap lyrics, wearing Afro/Caribbean inspired outfits, dreadlocks and braids. Yet, they are violently silent whenever it’s time to lend their voices to movements that humanise us, such as Black Lives Matter. Actually, point of correction! They respond with facades such as All Lives Matter as if they have ever needed to defend their right to live.
The craziest thing to me with blackfishing is that after taking traits of Black women, these influencers are then seen as the new standard of beauty. A revolutionary type of beauty, preferred much more than actual Black women, especially by the men in our own community.
So when people ask what’s the big deal with braids, they need to realise that it’s much more than white girls borrowing hairstyles that got us kicked out of our workplaces and schools. Asides from regularly having our rights violated, and our being cultures replicated into the mainstream, this is another battle to which no one recognises its significance. As Malcolm X said:
The Black woman is the most unprotected being in the world