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Dread Not
A few weeks ago I was waiting for the bus on San Francisco’s iconic Haight Street when an ebony-skinned man with short dreads carrying a bag of aluminum cans passed in front of me. He paused, looked me in the eye, and shook his head in disgust before passing me by. I couldn’t hear him clearly, but I was able to string together something along the lines of:
“You wearin’ dreads ‘cause it’s a hairstyle, not ‘cause your life is right.”
On my ride home I thought about why his words felt so intrusive. Was he right to pass judgment? Was I part of a new generation of youth who blindly appropriated cultures I had no historical appreciation for?
I’ve worn my half-black, half-white, fiercely curly hair in one natural style or another since I got out of high school. But it wasn’t until I spent a summer in Costa Rica that I finally just let my hair turn itself into dreadlocks. I decided to grow dreadlocks two years ago after a decade of admiring them on other people. I’m not religious, but even if I was, my hairstyle would be the last thing my faith would affect.
For followers of the Rastafarian faith, wearing dreadlocks is a complex statement of political and spiritual autonomy. Their dreadlocks are their “crowns.” Rastas wear them in accordance to the biblical injunction in the pre-King James version of the Christian bible to never cut their hair.
Yet aside from religious freedom, dreadlocks have also historically been symbolic of Black Nationalist struggles against racism.
Mop top, shit locks, dreads, locks – today’s nicknames for dreadlocks are as varied as the people who wear them. They originally got their name in Jamaica back in the ‘30’s. White landowners were said to dread the sight of them because those who wore them stood in stark defiance of the British Colonial system. Back then, and even after Jamaican independence, the hairstyle was a barefaced political statement against the white dictatorship in Jamaica.
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Failure To Launch
May 23, 2006 was an unusually hot day in San Francisco. The graduating class of San Francisco State University (SFSU) was sweating it out under itchy, Barney-purple robes and ill-fitting cardboard caps. As my journalism colleagues and I passed bottles of Hennessy and champagne amongst ourselves, we fantasized about the glory that would be the freedom of life after college.
As I stumbled across the stage, shook hands and took pictures with random SFSU board members, I remember thinking to myself that my ideal life was just beginning. Everything was going to fall into place somehow; I wasn't worried about a thing.
Had I known then what I know now about life after college, I would have been a little less drunk, and a lot more worried.
Suddenly, after 18 years of an institutional regime, there are no limits, no means of self-assessment, and nothing to fall back on. It leaves a certain feeling of emptiness that's both refreshing and anxiety-ridden.
The best way to sum up my experience this past year-and-a-half after graduation is to say that I must have missed something. I must have been absent on the day when they handed out manuals entitled, "How to Make Good Decisions for the Rest of Your Life Starting the Very Next Day After Graduation."
The fear of not making the right decision kept me from going anywhere, or doing anything new, for months after school ended. It felt like I was in a race, my feet were in the blocks, the starting bell went off, but I just couldn't take off because I didn't know where I was going.
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Summer Sewell is a recent SFSU journalism program graduate. She is a contributing editor to Oh Dang! online magazine, and has written for Juxtapoz magazine.