So basically, animal crossing added hairdos from black culture, and white people put them on their character in game, and people are genuinely going nuts about it.
Twitter is going nuts? like 2% of people use Twitter and like half of that 2% is generating most of the comments and retweets. People need to stop thinking Twitter is real life because i guarantee most people of any skin color don't give a fuck. We are all cursed with being terminally online but what the fuck else do i have to do lately
I don’t think the internet needs any help to be this stupid
Yeah imagine having your view shaped by a conservative strawman in 2020
like it is a game though i think that is the bigger disconect for me like on real life i can understand the reason why to have this discussion but like people wanting to play the game and use the cool hair that is new and stuff because it is a game and it is a big part of animal crossing is about being able to look how you want to look and deal with animal friends it doesn't seem the same, like i don't know i might be just not be taking this seriously enough if so i am sorry i just really think it is a game
I have no background on what the twitter drama is nor have I played Animal crossing. Usually though these cases are like one black person on twitter being like "Hey, these hairstyles have a cultural significance to them and we had to fight to have them be acceptable in white spaces. Please don't use them as a cool costume". Then a bunch of outraged gamers pile on blowing it up into "OMGZ, it's just a game I should be able to do what I want, DOES IT OFFEND YOU? ARE YOU TRIGGERED? stupid SJWs".
How would you know in game the difference between someone celebrating an afro as a symbol of black culture, and someone having one as a "cool" hairstyle divorced from any context? The internet and games have never been good on questions of racism.
That's a good question, my thoughts are that symbols have power, and people don't want to see them divorced from their context. Why does an afro look cool? What caused the cultural shift that allowed black people to wear their hair in a natural way in the 60s and 70s? There is a lot of context of struggle, overcoming racism, and experiences there. So what are you celebrating if you don't know the context?
Like I said above I think this was just someone trying to add that context which then got blown up.
That's pretty much exactly what happened. Honestly if that shit hadn't blown up/that conversation had taken place in DMs, all the original people involved might've been able to have a productive conversation about it. None of this started with malice on anyone's part.
Having afros, dreads, and cornrows as hairstyles in video games, regardless of the character's skin color or the player's race, is nothing new.
dreads are the least offensive because for most of humanity people didn't bathe everyday so dreadlocks arent specific to one culture. They can be used as a religious thing but it doesnt have to be.
The issue with dreadlocks is that very curly hair will naturally form them far more easily. They are a great low maintenance hairstyle for Black women with the right kind of hair. But if someone mentions dreadlocks the first image that pops into mind for many is normally a white stoner guy and "people didn’t bathe everyday". So that association makes them "unprofessional" and against uniform policies for many jobs.
Think if your default hairstyle was co-oped by a group of people that then made it harder for you to get a job, and resulted in you having to spend money to keep your hair in a different style.
I should back this stuff up with some theory, so here is a bachelors thesis that I think reading the introduction for would help many people here. It's nicely written and not overly academic, if you want to go deeper you can follow the links in that text.
and a quote from that text.
Tiana Parker was banned from wearing her hair in dreadlocks at her Oklahoma charter school. According to local news outlet KOKI-TV, Parker’s father (who is himself a barber) was told by school officials from the Deborah Brown Community School in Tulsa that his daughter’s hairstyle wasn’t “presentable,” and felt her hair could "distract from the respectful and serious atmosphere [the school] strives for"
i know and understand what has happened to black people and their hair, especially at work and school, and that's wrong but i dont think it necessarily makes the other wrong. It's weird to want some blended society but then also say some things are exclusive. It's a hair style and it's natural for some people but not a religious symbol for most. This sort of topic loses everyone except at the most extreme end where people say they are anti racist but then say WHITE STUFF IS WHITE AND BLACK STUFF IS BLACK. And it's ridiculous and it's an extension of the bubble known at Twitter.
Also black culture has never been more popular than it is right now and we have a lot of different people here. It's literally unavoidable for this to happen.
I feel like it's Aimee Teresee or who ever sticking her nose in stuff.
I think it's great, i still wish they added more curly hair styles so I can get the massive curly mop i had when i was a kid.
Imagine growing up being told your hair is ugly and messy. You have to constantly work to make sure it's "presentable" for a culture that's overwhelming white making it harder to get a job because you are worried it's not professional. Imagine having a hairstyle which people will reach out and try to touch without asking permission. This is a constant in your life because it's your hair and it's another mark of how you are treated differently in society.
Then some white people decide it's cool to dress up some characters with it, and just swap it out whenever.
Worst part is how fallacious the framing of the argument is. Black and other PoC are either saying "don't do that, that's insensitive" or making fun of yts being yts while it's being exported as basically "SJW outrage culture over HAIR!?!?!" in the other corners of the internet.
You can't win with these people smh
But who do I listen to? There's as many POC saying they don't give a shit as there are people saying it's insensitive. (I mean I don't have stats to back that, but in the twitter threads that's how it looks)
Black people have been struggling to make space in gamer/nerd spaces for decades. It's not even acceptance from white people, just a space where they can exist without being attacked or appropriated. Nintendo going out of their way to include both darker skin tones and textured hair is basically throwing black people a bone, but the response from non-black gamers has been either complete indifference or outright hostility at the notion that black people are being acknowledged and respected enough to have their features included in-game. This manifested in the whole scramble that's being alluded to in OP.
Obviously, listen to black people on this and remember that there's a whole lot of bad faith going around, especially when race is the discussion. It's not "just about AC hair xDDD", it's about the wider discussion of black people in gaming spaces, the general cultural power imbalances between them and non-black gamers, and whether they should exist in them.
If one side says they don't care and the other says it bothers them, then you should er on the side of not doing the thing that's bothering people.
Is it though?
There will almost always be at least a small group that finds something offensive, should we really be listening to them 100% of the time? I'm sure there are at least a couple people out there who think that white people shouldn't listen to hip-hop, should we 'err on the side of caution' in that case too?
Just because a very small amount of people find something offensive, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's anything wrong with the thing, it just means that a few people are offended by it.
But hip hop also isn't inherent to someone's appearance. You can listen or not listen to hip hop and literally no one would know unless you told them, but the way that someone's hair grows or the color of their skin is immutable and shouldn't be treated like some sort of costume or aesthetic choice that can be discarded at will.
That was just an example, the point is that if you want to 'err on the side of caution' then you can always find a few people who are offended by something. If 99% of people (within a certain minority group) say "yeah this is fine it's really not a big deal" and less than 1% are offended, it's not necessarily a good idea to act like it's offensive just because some people say it is.
And what if by acting like it's a big deal you're actually weirding out the 99% of people who don't think it's offensive?
It's not like it's always better to view every controversial thing as offensive.
It's a very, "this issue doesn't affect me and I don't want to make the effort to understand it" attitude.
But this issue does not actually affect me, and I actually don't want to make the effort to understand it.
Yeah but this is a online avatar for a video game, and there's probably at most like 2 people actually talking about it. With one side being a polite black person telling people to stop using that hair, and the other being an epic gamer telling them to go die in a tire fire, and six million people talking about that discourse. It is so far beyond my point of reference that I cannot meaningfully engage. Like how would I engage? Try to scold people for using black hair, when I myself am not black and can't meaningfully contribute to that discourse? Join the people hollering on twitter about the discourse?
Edit: I mean I guess I could say gamers are bad, but that's really just not engaging either way.
You don't have to engage the twitter discourse, and I wouldn't. Working to have an understand why it's a thing and being able to correct the record if it comes up in personal conversations (i.e. on chapo.chat) is what makes someone a good ally.
Think of it like understanding the woman suing McDonald's for hot coffee. The popular narrative of that case is very different to the actual facts.
The silliest part is the actual "outrage culture" is these clowns getting fed "they said WHAT!???" clickbait nonsense of intentionally misquoted arguments from conversations they aren't a part of.
IDK, I am African and have exactly the kind of hair that you can make into those hairstyles (but I don't because I don't care enough about my appearance), and I don't think it's that big of an issue to apply it to a video game character and swap it out.
Everyone has a different experience, are you African in a predominately black culture or a white one?
Like I said everyone has a different experience, and how racism exists within a culture and becomes internalized depends on how and where people grew up and who they interacted with. As I said in a different comment, I imagine this was someone trying to give some education about systemic racism to gamers, which then got blown up because, well gamers.
I understand that argument, that being said structurally it could be applied to almost anything. I kind of understand the other argument about having to fight for black hairstyles to be accepted in white spaces, but I just can't see that it does a sufficient amount of harm for it to be worth fighting about.
I think that the US context for these things is very important. I also think that fights for acceptance and understanding are ones we should have.
Interesting. I'd never considered that it would extend to video games.
So can you put black hairstyles on white characters in game? Or is it just white people playing as a black character in animal crossing?
Ah yes, because a white guy who permed his hair in the 80s had an Afro no one should discuss the interplay of hair and race discrimination.
low key thought we better than this. There's still so much work for us to do.
It just shows how twitter is basically tumblr now. Very annoying to see that stuff but oh well, people literally go insane online
