THE CRUX OF IT: Veiled ignorance in the form of forced assimilation.

 

 

Students at the Pretoria High School for Girls in South Africa came together to protest the racism that they claim to have endured throughout the school year. That discrimination was allegedly directed at them from their white teachers.

200 students, led by the Congress of South African Students, protested a school policy that in effect, bans them from wearing their hair in its natural state. The styles banned include bantu knots, locs, braids, and afros.

One student reported that she was asked to “comb” her natural afro because it looked like a bird’s nest.

According to South Africa’s News 24, the students are not permitted to use their native languages and are also called “monkeys” in the classroom.

Throughout the world, women of color have be threatened by the military, and discouraged by the business world and schools with regard to their naturally styled hair.

At the same time, other groups have sought to imbue themselves with some degree of “cred” or uniqueness through association,  by taking on specifically African do’s.

While there is most definitely a correlation to the issue of cultural appropriation ( the borrowing of an ethnic groups unique characteristics by outsiders) the true egregiousness of this situation goes much deeper.

The most important aspect to consider is the attempt to control the natural born inhabitants of the Continent by what was and may yet be an occupying foreign group. (The white settlers are not indigenous despite being present for many years) The attempt to regulate the way in which African people appear, by white men and women, is an overt effort to define the parameters in which the former ruling class will allow black people to exist in what they deem their society.

Americans did it to the Africans and also to the Indigenous American people when they forcefully cut their long hair and dressed them in European attire. There is no difference.

The veiled act that is “legislated civilization” is quite possibly just as easily labeled as “forced assimilation”.

What is European is too often revered as the primary acceptable standard. This truth can be evidenced in beauty standards, history, philosophy, religion, and other arenas as well.

While everyone should be completely free to appear as they would like, it would be a step toward enlightenment if the embracing of  naturalness   became widespread.

 

The minority standard should not continue to be the majority conviction.