Hello and welcome to the Appropriation Hour! On today’s show we have the editors of Marie Claire magazine. Let’s hear a little bit about their story, shall we?
The lovely people over at Marie Claire tweeted a picture of Kendall Jenner rocking a very small section of cornrows.
Nothing wrong with that, right? Of course not!
Except that the accompanying caption was “Kendall Jenner takes bold braids to a new epic level.”
Ummm, what?! Excuse my profanity, but you have got to be fucking kidding me. I am clearly having trouble articulating myself without cursing, but this more or less sums it up:
I understand that when writing and/or tweeting for a publication, it’s all about getting eyes on the page. For this reason, many people resort to making the most mundane things seem extraordinary. If you are going to engage in this practice, at least have the decency to be mindful of what you’re saying. I mean, come on! You referred to her braids as “bold” and “new” and “epic”.
“New” and “bold” are somewhat synonymous so we’ll just start with bold because thinking of the fact that they used the word “new” makes my head hurt. Bold is defined as something daring or revolutionary. People have been rocking cornrows for hundreds of years. Please explain to me why Kendall Jenner’s 5 braids are so groundbreaking. I’ll wait. To say that this hairstyle is bold is just so utterly irresponsible that I cannot even fathom how that adjective, of all of the many descriptive words in our vocabulary, is the one that you settled on. If anything, your decision to tweet this was bold…and stupid. It’s an insult to the bajillion women who have rocked cornrows for centuries. I’m not even singling out black women here because there are plenty of women who aren’t of color who have thrown cornrows in their hair way before Ms. Jenner was a thought.
Now we come to “epic”. I will concede that epic has lost much of its original meaning due to rampant overuse in recent years. Even given that point, you’re not using the word correctly. She has all of a quarter of her head in some straight-back braids. There aren’t even any designs in it! Nary a zig-zag or anything. How in the world does this merit anything beyond a simple, “Oh, that looks nice.”
I’m pretty sure it’s virtually impossible for someone to have never seen cornrows before, but that theory is the only way my brain can seem to process this whole thing.
Marie Claire later came out with a weak non-apology:
Of course you didn’t mean to offend anyone, but you did. To offer up a lame ‘it was poorly worded’ without a hint of an apology is really the worst part of this whole thing. Your tweets were like short asides.
The only good that came of this fiasco is the reaction from Black Twitter. If you get a chance, just check out the hashtag #EpicBraidLevels and laugh the appropriation pain away.