Blaming Nature (On Vanessa VanDyke, Rihanna, and Natural Hair)
Rihanna at the AMAs
In the hood, I’ve seen girls and women rock doobie wraps to tuck in a hairstyle they’ll show off the next day. It’s akin to wearing rollers or, for guys, wearing a doo-rag before gelling their waves. As someone who doesn’t have much hair, I always smirked at the doobie, a rather creative and neat way of keeping a woman’s hair tucked in before a big party or a graduation. Even to this day, I see some of my girls wear doobies on the day of the prom, with black bobbi pins glistening with the classroom light.
Yet, the doobie wrap became the hot topic of the day because Rihanna, pop ultrastar, decided to break the “code” of wearing a non-hairstyle out to an awards show with a studded pin to boot. I didn’t think it was that big a deal, especially since I see women wearing it in public so often. A neatly-placed doobie to an awards show is a natural progression in hair style, akin to how a few rappers have worn doo-rags to similar awards shows. Yet, men don’t get the same type of attention women do for their hair choices, or the heightened blowback if someone sees a fashion faux-pas.
This conversation extended into classroom today when Vanessa VanDyke, a student at Faith