Revelation (followed closely by dismay)

Blog reading is good for me. Generally, it's just up building; it bonds me to others; it's artistically/creatively inspiring. Then, every once in a while (or back-to-back, like this week), I run across a post that gets all kinds of red flags waving in my brain. Today, the matter involved dreadlocks. [Googled image] Of course you recognize Bob Marley, reggae God, hottie beyond hotness, musical angel, and (heretofore, in my mind) the epitome of Those Who Wear Dreadlocks.

Now this [Googled image, runway model, dreadlock-coiffed]: What I read today was someone's innocent, simple declaration of her lifelong desire, and new found intent, to have dreads. Someone who is a white woman. I read, and found my face screwing itself into a pretzel. And my brain trying to launch a fur ball of some sort. ????????????????????? And BAM FLASH KAZAM, Batwomen!! This image then blasted into my brain. Since its introduction into media history, I have DETESTED this photo. It's not the swimsuit, the bouncety-bouncety-breasts-on-the-loose beach jog, the chiseled body and cheek bones. IT'S THE HAIR!!! I have categorically (and for, what, DECADES, now?) despised the hair. Inauthentic! Poseur! White Woman Wanna Be!!! Why should Bo Derek launch beaded tresses into the main stream? Bo Derek, a white woman?

oh. eesh. oh. blimey. oh shite shite shite!

Today, my friends, Toni tripped ALL DAMN OVER an internal prejudice. SPLAT. It was NOT pretty! Toni's prejudice: white women, by virtue of being white, are somehow disallowed from braids and dreads. As if I have felt, without realizing it until today, that they are ethnically challenged, inadequate, and otherwise lacking in credentials to do so. And (especially, I soon realized), BLOND white women, who are of course the farthest removed from my, Toni's, Epitome Of Those Who Wear Dreadlocks, Mr. Marley himself.

I never knew. I never knew I felt that way. And in examining it, earlier, in my journal, I discovered a deep, relentless FEAR at the bottom of it -- fear of being ACCUSED of being a wanna-be, an impostor, a poseur, especially by those my mind has deemed ethnically 'allowed' (qualified) to wear the dos. Fear of what other people in general think, would think, have thought, of a blond white woman walking through life with a head full of dreads. Or braids. Ridiculous! Outrageous! Arrogant! Doesn't know who she is or where she's from! ... oh the weird, revealing daggers my brain threw!!!

I'm dismayed, & dagger-shredded & quite bloody!!! Me, who just two days wrote this: 'We've fought to rise from under it, to declare ourselves WOMAN in whatever way WE define, for so many decades.' And yet I've been carrying around this discriminatory, close-minded, shrunken, absurd opinion all this time?!!!

So ... what happens, I guess, is that I'm looking at a white blond woman in dreads or braids and WORRYING (for her, but actually for ME) that fingers are pointing and tongues are wagging about how she's being inauthentic, that she's illegitimate in that style, that she's appropriated something she 'has no right to'.

I'm so ashamed. I've got some major internal housekeeping to do. I know I won't be growing dreads as atonement because ... because ... I'D BE SCARED!!! [I don't, actually, like them, not for me -- I don't like ANY 'do' I have to actually take care of, spend time on .... ] but the REAL REASON is that I'd be scared!!! of external opinions! ME!!!!

I gotta reckon with that. splat, splat, splat.

Oh, thank god for blogs and others with more enlightened viewpoints -- I LIKE being busted hard across my chops when I need a wake-up call.

ROCK ON, BLONDS WITH DREADS, BLONDS WITH BRAIDS!!! I have new eyes and a new heart, now, with which to see you!