I’ve gotten into the habit of unplugging from most of the Internet and social media on weekends because after five days of predictable messiness and attention-starved shenanigans, I need two days to reconnect with the real world and people whose every action isn’t predicated on what kind of response they can get from the masses. Still, every Monday morning I can almost predict the headlines I missed over the weekend: Beyonce did something that was “everything,” Kanye and Kim got on people’s nerves again, and some white person/media outlet appropriated something fundamentally Black.
This past weekend, the last two things actually came as a joint package of annoyance when Kim Kardashian West stepped out in cornrows and MTV UK called them “boxer braids.” Cue the cultural appropriation tweets and think pieces, which I’ve personally come to be bored with. See, at this point in the game I don’t even feel like our culture is being appropriated, we’re just being trolled. And every time we engage this nonsense we’re only feeding the beast, which this time around has two players: mainstream white media (the original trolls) and the Kardashian empire (the new school trolls).
If you think for one minute whoever wrote that piece on boxer braids for MTV UK doesn’t know what cornrows are you’re as foolish as some say the media company is for labeling them as such. While I am well versed in the time-honored Anglo Saxon tradition of Columbusing and agree that it very much still happens today, what happens far more frequently is faux appropriation for the sake of attention. It’s what we’re seeing with this boxer braids headline, it’s what Cosmo UK pulled less than two weeks ago when they called undercuts “hair tattoos,” and it’s what Kim, Khloé, and Kylie do every time they step out of the house in cornrows with spray tanner and cosmetically altered butts. None of these characters has just stumbled upon anything and tried to claim it as their own, what they have discovered is how even a hint of cultural appropriation has become synonymous with the saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
Here’s the recipe: mainstream outlet intentionally, in my opinion, writes an article renaming a trend regularly seen in the Black community something ridiculous; mainstream outlet tweets article with trolling wording in 40 characters or less; Black Twitter takes the bait and gets in their feelings; either the outlet or a hilarious hashtag like #CosmoHeadlines begins trending because no one can believe x or y did z; because no one can believe x or y did z, they have to click on the link to see the latest example of appropriation; outlet gets expected spike in traffic; tweet gets removed without a trace of an apology once the day’s traffic goals are met; one week later another mainstream publication gets hip to recipe and the cycle continues.
Now I’m not saying it isn’t necessary to call out real examples of cultural appropriation and hold people and brands accountable when they cash crop on our cornrows, as Amandla Stenberg would say. But there’s no way these weekly stints aren’t intentional and there’s also no way making these incidents trending topics addresses the problem. We may think we’re embarrassing these companies with our funny rebuttals but they couldn’t care less — the consistent lack of apologies proves as much. At the end of the day, we’re feeding into their profit by making them trend and spreading their not-so-stupid “stupidity” around as they watch their numbers climb with every tweet.
When I see moves like what MTV UK pulled or Khloé wearing cornrows on her “Kocktails with Khloé” talk show I don’t even get upset anymore. Instead I feel like a rabbit with a carrot being dangled in front of my face, wondering if this is a battle worth picking and feeling mentally exhausted that we’ve gotten to this place where it’s cool to just troll Black people all day and get us riled up so we can talk about all the many ways in which we’re made to feel powerless and do nothing about it — you know Black Fatigue. I appreciate the way Black Twitter takes some of that power back when we expose these trolls, but sadly every time we do it seems we’re just giving them the desired outcome as we sit and wait for the next carrot to fall in our lap.
