These delusionals are your white Rastas. Uh, they're big Marley fans, they think they're
Black. Semi-political, but mostly-- Smoke a lot of weed?
Don't even get me started on you two!
I live in the Bay Area, which means every August (except the past two) half the population of my
town gets all done up to go to some thing in the desert, and I end up seeing a lot of this.
If you don't understand why this frustrates me, you really need to stick around for the rest of
this video! Which is sponsored by Wondrium, more on them later. What frustrates me even more is
when one of them tries to talk to me about their hair, y'know, because I used to be a
hairdresser and people do that, and tells me "well the Vikings and the ancient Celts had dreadlocks,
so it's okay for me". Buddy. BUDDY.
Hi, I'm V : Former hairstylist, current fashion historian, and not a fan of this
look. And here I am to tell you how we ended up with this ridiculous myth in the first place,
what the Vikings and the ancient Celts might have done with their hair instead, and what your
options are if you are a white person who likes the Burner aesthetic but doesn't want to look
like a culturally appropriative racist dingus. The hairstyle we’re talking about is commonly
called “locs”, but there are plenty of abbreviations and alternate names. Many
people consider the term “dreadlocks” to have negative connotations, but there are also some
people who prefer that term. For simplicity I’ll be using the word “locs” spelled with
one C for the rest of this video. Before anyone goes off about how confusing this is: it’s not
like white people never disagree on the right word for something either. So if that is you,
please do examine why this particular bit of linguistic variance bothers you so much.
Locs have a long and established history in numerous African cultures beginning with the
ancient Egyptians, and if you want to learn more about that history, go watch this video by Muse
of Muse and Dionysus. Listen to a Black person instead of having to hear it from my pale face.
Because I am going to spend the rest of this video talking about all the things that are NOT locs,
I do want to make sure we have a working definition of what locs are. I’m not
saying all this because I think I am the most qualified person to talk about locs. I’m not.
Don’t get me started on how cosmetology school rarely teaches anything about natural hair. Source
info can be found in the upper corners, some further reading is linked in the description,
and then my Patreon has my full annotated bibliography with all the snarky commentary
too. However, listening to me is not a substitute for listening to Black people talk about Black
culture and should not be treated as such. Locs are formed by strands of coily hair
“locking” into place around eachother. With different styling and maintenance methods,
the hair can form styles from freeform locs to Sisterlocks and everything in between. They
are one of many ways to protect coily hair from damage and breakage; coily hair can be extremely
delicate with very fine strands and the belief that it is always “coarse” comes from ignorance
and racism. Another racist myth is that locs are never washed and are by their nature,
“dirty”. Caring for locs absolutely does involve washing them. How frequently depends on the
person’s individual life and hair routine, just like with any other hairstyle. Most people with
locs wash their hair far more often than most medieval Europeans did, and will often care
for their locs daily by misting or oiling the hair. The whole not-ever-washing thing comes
from uninformed white people and carries plenty of racist ideas about Black people
and their hair being inherently “dirty”. Locs are not gross, but this myth sure is.
One of the most important distinctions between locs and this nonsense is what the hair is
actually doing. Locs rely on the hair’s coil for their structure. My hair may be curly, but it’s
not curly enough to truly loc. Similar-looking hairstyles on straight hair have a different
structure because they don’t have the coil in their texture. They’re basically long, cylindrical
tangles, which I refer to as “matts”. Loc-like hairstyles do have long histories in certain
non-Black cultures, especially ones with trade connections to Africa : they have an extremely
long history in Hindu religion and may also have been worn by the ancient Hebrew Nazirites.
Loc-like styles also have a history among some Tibetan Bhuddists, Indigenous North Americans,
Indigenous Australians, and possibly the Aztecs. However . . . none of these people are white. The
Minoans are often brought up as an ancient “white” culture that wore locs, but Muse’s video does an
excellent job of stepping through the issues with that conclusion. Tl;dr : they likely picked the
style up from ancient Egyptians, who were African, and the Minoans would not fit well into our modern
idea of “whiteness.” A lot of the artwork held up as evidence for their wearing locs is not detailed
enough to tell whether it’s showing locs or braids or individual curls of hair. If you’re a costumer
who can distinguish the difference between, say, 1870s versus 1880s Western bustle dresses,
then you can in fact tell the difference between two visually-similar styles that are very
different in the details. You have that skill! You just haven’t learned to apply it in this context.
Let’s get to the myth-busting. The idea that ancient Celtic peoples had locs or matts is
often traced back to a supposed quote from a supposed Roman source— note my repeated use of
the word “supposed”— that says they had “hair like snakes”. However, there does not appear to
be any solid source for this quote. We can’t find who said it, or when, or in what context it was
written down. It does not appear in the primary sources we do have about the Romans’ interactions
with the Gauls or Britons or any other Celtic peoples. This is not a source that can be relied
on. Even if this quote did have a solid source, it has no context at all suggesting it refers
to locs rather than any other hairstyle that Romans would find unusual or want to denigrate.
It’s not like they were known for being fair and understanding of foreign cultures. They definitely
didn’t invent a word for literally every non-Roman culture that’s still used as an insult today . . .
The ancient Celts did do some pretty interesting things with their hair,
some of which are misinterpreted as evidence for locs or matts. A Roman source that we can actually
pin down describes the hair of the Gauls, a Celtic people living in France at that time. Apparently,
they would wash their hair in a lime solution— lime as in the mineral limestone, not the citrus
fruit. This bleached, stiffened and fluffed up the hair so it could be spiked if short or have
a ton of volume if longer. The chemistry of how this works is pretty cool. A limestone solution
would have a very high or “basic” pH, which raises the outer layers of the hair cuticle,
making the hair more fragile and tangle-prone but also fluffier. Playa dust is also high-pH
and is known for affecting people’s hair, so you might get yourself some historical accuracy points
(just, maybe not the ones you meant to). We also have records of the Irish wearing a hairstyle
called “gleebs” or “glibbes”. I’ve seen people say a “glibbe” refers to braids bound with yarn,
but what we have actual evidence for is this thing. It’s often called the “reverse mullet” by
modern costumers, where the hair is shaved on the back and crown of the head and grown into a long
fringe at the front and sides. Interestingly, this style might also have been worn by the Viking-age
Norse. There’s a letter from sometime between 990 and 1010 where a Saxon monk called Aelfric
chides his brother Edward “You adorn yourself in Danish fashion, with bared neck . . .”. And then
we see this hairstyle on the Normans in the Bayeux tapestry, who were descended from the Viking-age
Norse. As for the Irish, though, our sources for it are from the 16th century : Laurent Vital,
who wrote a chronicle of Archduke Ferdinand the First’s visit to Ireland, says “they were shorn
and shaved one palm above the ears . . . But on the forehead they leave about a palm of hair to
grow down to their eyebrows like a tuft of hair which one leaves hanging on horses between the two
eyes”. Much of the speculation about the glibbe being a matted style comes from one Edmund Spenser
writing around 1596 that the Irish went into battle without helmets and trusted their glibbes
to protect them from swords . . . but firstly, he writes this in an anti-Irish propaganda leaflet,
and secondly, he never describes the hair as matted, only as a “thicke curled bushe of
heare”. So this should be taken with a large helping of salt. To sum up . . . Bleached,
spiked hair? Check. Reverse mullet? Also, check. Anything remotely resembling locs? Not a thing.
Something I struggle with when doing this kind of historical research is that,
well, {lean in and whisper} I never got to take college history classes. It’s not that I
think I need a degree to do good research, but the background and context from lecture classes can be
super helpful. Enter Wondrium, the sponsor of this video : An educational video subscription service
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So, Viking-age Norse hairstyles. This is probably the one I hear most often, despite how contrary it
is to the historical record. Guessing that’s got something to do with the frequent appropriation
of Viking-age Norse imagery by white supremacists. Records of what the Norse actually did with their
hair are pretty thin. However, we have SO MANY primary sources that talk about the Norse combing
their hair, often daily and/or more than other cultures. The oft-cited Ahmad ibn Fadlan traveled
from the Abbasid caliphate in what is now Syria to the Rus Vikings in the 10th century, and though
his account probably contains much embellishment and pearl-clutching because Weird Foreigners, he
does describe the Norse men combing out their hair in a basin of water every day. A little later on,
the equally oft-quoted John of Wallingford complained that the Danes living in England
"were wont, after the fashion of their country, to comb their hair every day . . .”. [aside] He then
goes on to list all the other reasons that English women preferred Danish men, such as bathing weekly
and changing their clothes, and therefore all the Danes in England must be killed off, right?[sigh]
Daily combing was a common method of haircare in Western Europe during the early middle ages,
and I’ve tested its effectiveness out myself. Here’s the thing : You cannot comb locs or matts.
That’s just not a thing that works, unless you’re combing them in an attempt to remove them. The
absolute closest thing to evidence for the Norse ever wearing matted hair is a story that actually
emphasizes how unusual matted hair would be. In one of Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla sagas,
this Norse king called Harald fancies a woman called Gyda who says she won’t sleep with him
unless he conquers all of Norway. Which . . . [aside] look. If a woman in a folk story ever says
“I won’t sleep with you unless you do this extreme thing”, understand that she just means “no”.
Looking at you, Quebecois murder ballads. But I digress. Harald says “actually that’s a great
idea, I won’t cut or comb my hair until I’ve done it!”. This is supposed to be a sign of hyperbolic,
epic-fantasy-narrative-device-level commitment, that he would give up something as fundamental
as basic haircare until he’s finished his conquest. Dude gets nicknamed Harald Tangle-Hair
until he’s king of all Norway, then cuts his hair and is re-nicknamed Harald Pretty-Hair.
As for womens’ hair, we know even less about specific haircare practices, but we do have
some artistic depictions of a hairstyle where long hair is tied in a large overhand knot at
the nape of the neck. And to once again preempt someone saying that those lines represent locs
or mats : can I point out how the same sort of linework is used at the bottom of the figure’s
dress? There are only so many ways you can represent texture in teeny little metal figures,
so this is not evidence of anything other than “the artist wanted to show that this is hair”. The
Viking-age Norse might well have worn interesting hairstyles, they might well have worn braids, they
might well have decorated their hair in different ways than other cultures. But the information we
have about their haircare goes directly against the possibility that they wore matts or locs.
Literally the only record we have of a European culture wearing anything that remotely resembles
locs if you squint is the “Polish plait”, but this is a very specific hairstyle with a very
specific history. In this region, there were folk beliefs that a large tangle or matt in the hair
was caused either by illness leaving the body or by supernatural means such as curses or fairy-like
beings. Cutting the matt off could offend the supernatural forces and cause worse illness,
so people kept them and sometimes created them using waxy or sticky hair products.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish plait became the focus of classist
and ethnic discrimination against Poles, as well as antisemitism (because antisemites
will take any excuse). We do have some extant Polish plaits— as in literal sections of hair—
so we know this was a real thing that existed. However, because of the prejudice associated with
them it’s uncertain how much we can trust any sources from outsiders that may well have been
depicting them pejoratively. If you’re of Polish heritage and want to do this with your hair,
sure! But the rest of us need to understand that this is, once again, a different thing than this.
So where did this myth actually come from? It’s literally just cultural appropriation and white
supremacy. There’s no historical evidence at all that would lead someone to believe that either the
ancient Celts or the Viking-age Norse had locs, unless that person had already made up their mind
and was looking to invent a justification. There’s not even much to base a made-up justification on.
I also think it’s very telling that white folks didn’t become interested in locs at
all until celebrities like Bob Marley and Whoopi Goldberg popularized them in the 70s and 80s. From
then until today, white hippies’ matted hair is praised for being “free-spirited” and “bohemian”,
even when it’s very poorly cared for. White fashion designers are complimented
for the “edgy” choice to put fake wool locs on white models. While white people do all this,
Black people face extensive discrimination for wearing locs, to the point where the US
literally needed to make a law against hair discrimination. It’s good that we’ve done it,
but infuriating that we need it. This is the crux of what cultural appropriation is : taking
a culturally significant practice, especially from a marginalized group, out of context. Performing
it incorrectly, or without understanding, or in a way that disrespects its original significance.
And then benefiting from doing so, while the originating culture faces discrimination for it.
We don’t live in the time of the ancient Gauls or Britons. We don’t live in the Viking Age. We live
in the 21st century, and in the 21st century, white people appropriating Black hairstyles is
a huge problem. It does ongoing and significant harm to Black people, right now. Today. So what I
really want to know is : Why do folks care more about finding vague historical justifications,
then about hurting people through their actions in the present day? Some obscure quote from
the Romans isn’t going to undo centuries upon centuries of accumulated, ongoing racism. It would
not change things for any of my Black clients who had me straighten their hair before job interviews
because they knew they’d be lowballed otherwise— to say nothing of the Black folks who have been
fired, suspended from school, or had their hair cut or shaved against their wishes. In the modern
world, any scraps of history are nothing to what’s still going on. They do not matter.
Let’s say you’re a white person going to Burning Man or some other event and you want something
historical or protective or cool-looking to do with your hair. The good news is, you have lots
of other options! Unfortunately, historical-ish TV shows like The Vikings appropriate a lot of
African braiding into their hairstyles because it is considered “cool” and “edgy” when white people
do it, and that’s not what I’m talking about. Let me know if you’re interested in a video breaking
down the differences, and I’ll see what can be done? Europe has its own long and rich history
of braided and protective hairstyles, which can be great for situations where modern hair washing
isn’t an option. I’ve tested some of them, and there are some really knowledgeable medievalists
and historical costumers on Youtube and elsewhere who have done even more. You can do any number
of beautiful, festive, and damage-reducing things with your hair, and you will look all
the better for them not being based in racism. I have wanted to make this video for literally
longer than I’ve had my channel, and I am so glad to be sharing it with all of
you. [aside] seriously, I was making angry facebook posts about this in 2018. Send this
video around to your Burner friends (or any of your friends who you think might need to see it),
and tell me in the comments about an interesting hairstyle or haircare practice from your culture’s
traditional dress. Don’t forget to hit the like button and subscribe for more hair history
myth-busting— y’all can help me get some use out of that cosmetology training now that I’m not
doing hair! If you’re coming back from the playa, I hope you had a fun and safe Burn. Now go clean
your hair, you dirty hippies! Also hydrate, hippies.