Afro puffs and space buns look nothing alike because you know, Afro puffs puff because of black hair texture, while space buns loop and shine because of white hair texture. So what you’re left with is trying to call dibs on a *skull location*.
Anyway imagine knowing you’ve contributed so little of actual utility or innovation to world history that you’re left with trying to claim hairstyles and slang words. The ONLY actual “blacks only” hairstyles involve some pretty heinous shit that no one else would choose to wear except maybe for weird artsy photo shoots, like when they put red mud on their dreads and it makes big dookie-shaped logs all over their heads. Imagine that’s ALL you can come up with. Every single other race except for Australian Aborigines have forgotten more of their own valuable contributions than you’ll ever achieve of your own, so you look around, and think ahh! Let’s claim braids!! Let‘s claim buns! Let’s claim the word “shade” and argue endlessly over whether black women or black gays own it! Etc etc.
Imagine that, and imagine not being embarrassed that this is all you can come up with. Yikes.
I'm tired of the insane idea that one can own ideas, or only use them if one is born the "right" race.* I doubt those "woke" screechers ever bothered to learn that cultures grow by copying.
Thinking back to reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, with Africa being shaped like it is, he explains east-west cultural exchange to be the key to advancing civilizations since the greater likelihood of similarity between climates in the same latitudes means greater success in the exchange, thus growth. So a continent like Africa, which when you look at a map, you can see that there WAS cultural exchange in North Africa along the Mediterranean with Greece, ancient middle eastern civilizations etc., Europeans, the near east, the Middle East, Egypt, India, China. But then you have a lot of difficult land that was too hard to consider clearing and it goes for thousands of miles north and south, effectively cutting off cultural exchange with the rest of Africa. Also note how all those countries or regions or civilizations, you can identify so many contributions. And, funny thing, nobody inside any of those countries gives even that first fuck about “appropriation.” Please wear our kimonos! Go ahead, use Celtic runes as decorative elements divorced entirely from cultural meaning! We’re thrilled you love a nice hot curry!!! Lol enjoy!!! Because they were all part of the exchange, have cultural confidence, things ebb and flow and civilizations rise and fall but since all these places and peoples know they have that legitimacy, that they contributed, we don’t freak out because someone with a different skin color wants to borrow our scrunchies.
But the rest of Africa? Australian aborigines? North American Indian tribes? Holy shit. Do NOT ask to borrow a scrunchie. That scrunchie is all they have and they are mad about it. They couldn’t exchange, traditionally. All they could do was be used as a source of something, usually something geological, once places and peoples who were able to exchange discovered something they needed there. Finally, there was something to exchange: the fruits of thousands of years of cultural exchange and innovation for their diamonds, or gold, or rubber plants, or wtfever. Still, nothing that Africa actually produced, developed, invented. Just something beneath their feet that they happen to have been born adjacent to.
I think this is the root of their fury. Braids have to be theirs, they have nothing else.
