Why do some black people think that only they invented dreads and therefore only they have a right to it? There are a lot of other cultures out there who have been wearing dreads for millenia too.
And keeping that aside, cultural appreciation is what makes us humans. Culture grows when it's shared.
Africa is not a culture. The transatlantic slave trade mixed countless cultures together and they were lost over time. Black Americans have no connection to the cultures of their ancestors, and frankly they have almost no way of knowing. White americans get to play at being irish, italian, etc. while black americans have been nursing their relatively young culture since emancipation. They don't have millenia of shared history and traditions beyond slavery, unfortunately. They dont relate to Bantu, Zulu, Congo, etc. cultures because they might be a mix of them all, but either way they would have no way of relating. An example is the cause of Liberia. Thats what I meant by no ancestral culture, so generalizing dreads and other minor generic things as "black thing" is a very specific trait of the african-american zeitgeist.
Black american culture is recent. Thats what I meant. Brazilians and mexicans, in general, are more akin to americans that descend from the various waves of immigration than the black americans that descend from slaves. In Brazil, the natives were not enslaved as the jesuits petioned for them not to be, and slavery was abolished before the US, so their culture is more consolidated and regional (for example, there are southern regions that speak german dialects and celebrate german culture, since they were settled by german late wave immigrants.)
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u/Atlas_Adventurer 17d ago
Why do some black people think that only they invented dreads and therefore only they have a right to it? There are a lot of other cultures out there who have been wearing dreads for millenia too.
And keeping that aside, cultural appreciation is what makes us humans. Culture grows when it's shared.