White Women On Instagram Are Using the Hashtag #NappyHair

Recently, in yet another attempt to claim something that Black people had all to themselves, white women have taken it upon themselves to use “nappy” to describe their own hair. Just search Instagram or Twitter for yourself – you’ll find mixed in between the thousands of pictures of fly black women with natural hair of all lengths, textures, and colors a spattering of photos from white women with straight hair. Click on a few and you’ll find that #nappyhair is used synonymously with fresh out of bed hair, frizzy hair, lazy hair days, or bad hair days.

This trend was originally brought to light by Buzzfeed’s recent “17 People Who Totally Have Afros” and it’s followup on Tea and Breakfast, “13 People Who Totally Have Nappy Hair,” which both spotlight – you guessed it – people with neither afros nor natural hair. While I’m more or less in favor of people of all shades embracing the natural hair movement and learning from the wealth of knowledge we generate, I think a fundamental requirement should be that you at least have curly hair with either shrinkage or detangling woes to be a true member of the natural hair community. I am not at all here for nappy hair becoming the new twerk, used inappropriately, done incorrectly, and said so often that both it’s meaning and significance are diluted.

Moreover, I’m especially not down to share the term nappy hair with people who do not know what it means to have had to collectively reclaim the term from it’s derogatory meaning dating back to the slave-era. Many naturals, in what is nothing short of an ideological counter-revolution, have embraced the term nappy and used it to refer to their curls, coils, and kinks with pride

Source: http://blackgirllonghair.com