Last week, the prestige press decided that it was National News that a 12-year-old black girl in the D.C. suburbs had come home with some of her rather unflattering dreadlocks cut off. When her grandmother asked what had happened to her hair, the tween refused to answer. But later she told Grandma that it wasn’t her fault her hair was cut because, see, three white boys in her class, you know, had held her down on the school playground, called her hair “nappy,” and pulled out scissors.
Granted, this story sounds to you and me like something Jussie Smollett, Tawana Brawley, Crystal Mangum, Jackie Coakley, and Tribal Elder Nathan Phillips would concoct while getting high together on nitrous oxide from whipped cream cans.
After all, few white males younger than 79-year-old Don Imus use the word “nappy.” And do roving gangs of male juveniles actually carry scissors for impromptu hairstyling?
But to the national news media, the little girl’s tall tale was exactly the kind of thing they imagine is happening everywhere, due to Trump and 1619 and Toxic Masculinity and, most of all, White People Wanting to Touch Black Hair.
Therefore, this ludicrous hate hoax was seized upon by The Washington Post and The New York Times. The latter darkly noted about the girl’s private school:
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Immanuel Christian’s website…says that it does not accept gay students and that it requires employees to affirm that marriage should be between one man and one woman.
That just proves that the Good People, such as blacks and gays and the rest of the Democrats’ Coalition of the Fringes, are all on the same side against the Bad People (i.e., straight white males).
The fact that Mike Pence’s wife, Karen, is a part-time art teacher at this school was gleefully mentioned. Perhaps the thinking was that when Trump is impeached and convicted, and meanwhile the vice president has to resign over this Dreadlockgate, then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would become president! Or something like that…
But on Monday all the fun ended abruptly when the girl’s family issued a statement apologizing for her having made the whole hair hoax up.
In the real world, of course, 12-year-old girls do silly stuff to their hair all the time, and then they sometimes make up implausible excuses for what happened to it.
Dreadlocks, by the way, are not a good look on a girl. They are associated with the patriarchal Rastafarians, like the late Bob Marley, who wore dreadlocks to resemble the Lion of Judah with a massive head. As of 2012, about 180 NFL players wore dreadlocks.
So it would hardly be surprising if a sixth-grade girl, or one of her friends, started trying to modify her hairdo, then discovered that cutting your own hair is typically not a good idea, especially in case, if I might speculate, your grandparents might have paid for an expensive dreadlocks weave.
I don’t know that that is exactly what happened, but something like it was always far more plausible than the nonsense the media played up.
You might think that national news organs would be aware enough to decide not to run with this trivial matter in case it blew up humiliatingly in their faces. But they are now beyond embarrassment.
