Metathought ramble about dreadlocks

File under slow feedback:  a friend told me this week that my locks look much better than when I started them.  "They looked horrible," she said.

That is the tricky thing about perception in the early 21st century.  Nobody-but-nobody was afraid to treat blacks poorly when Black Like Me was being written, but now we're much more subtle about how we treat people.  We can't judge a book by its cover . . . or admit to it, anyway.

You can get a little paranoid about this stuff.  You look for non-verbal cues that suggest they're distracted by the hair, but it's harder to find clues that someone is negatively impacted by it.

What I don't want to do is get sucked up into a thoughtcrime cycle - some of the most egregious examples of racism are (over)reactions to a perceived racist threat from whites.  Can't they see that they're inciting this, I rant as I'm following the news.

Well, maybe they can't.

If I allow myself to think about it (which is pretty much when I'm blogging, but rarely else), I can definitely see the difference in how people treat me.  The friend who said, "People won't take you seriously," meant, "I won't take you seriously."  The man who suggested I don't hide them during my political campaign is treating them more like a scandal to be managed than a personal style choice.  The friend who just told me how bad she thought they looked felt that way for months, and probably still does.

Or does she?

When I don't plug my hair into the analysis, I find that I remain as I always was - sometimes puzzled by how people act.  It makes us feel safer if we know what motivates other people.  Since we can never be sure, it's much easier to just ascribe a motivation of our choice.  If the one you pick doesn't feel very sensible, give it time:  you'll find plenty of evidence of your theory once you're thinking about it.

Thing is, I can walk around expecting people to treat me differently because I have dreadlocks, or not.  Whether I do or not, some number is going to discriminate in some way because of my hair.  Others will not.  At the end of the day, I can be all pissed off about how I was treated, or I can not even remember it.

If I go looking for a fight, I'm sure to find it.  If I don't, one might find me anyway.  The former keeps me stress-free and positive, but the latter will probably give me more to write about.

I will never possess sufficient curiosity to write a convincing fight scene.