What Cornrows Mean
Of all the history made when the Toronto Raptors defeated the Golden State Warriors in the NBA Finals last month, perhaps the most impressive was that for the second time in history, the person hoisting the Bill Russell MVP trophy had cornrows. Both times that person was Kawhi Leonard.
The somewhat eccentric, famously understated 27-year-old whose 2019 playoff run all but cemented his legacy as one of the greatest players of his generation has also become a hair icon, such that when Toronto victory paraders stopped to take selfies with a lookalike, much of what made the doppelgänger convincing were his six, evenly-spaced straight-back cornrows with machine-cut edges.
Leonard’s immaculate rows seem to embody the all-business mystery of his personality just as tribute photos of the late Nipsey Hussle make his plaits seem like a hood halo. The cover of The Carters’ album suggests that the very act of braiding can be a metaphor for Black love and the labor it requires, just as the Celtics’ Marcus Smart reminds us that undoing them can be an act of self-care as mundane as it is important.
Cornrows are older than capitalism. The term—applied to an endlessly malleable African braiding technique that survived the Middle Passage—was coined for its resemblance to a field of indigenous American crops and is even “a relatively new word for something ancient, as examples of the style have been found on statues from as early as 3500 BCE.”Cornrows have never gone anywhere, but for the sake of argument, let’s say we’re in the midst of something like a Cornrow Renaissance, part of the more generalized Natural Hair Renaissance, inspired in large part by Black women vloggers, as Collier Meyerson recently catalogued, wherein natural hair needn’t carry any monolithic meaning on a Black person’s body.
There’s a strong argument for the turn of the millennium as a Cornrow Golden Age. The late ‘90s and early ‘00s gave us Queen Latifah in Set It Off (1996), D’Angelo in nothing but cornrows for the video of “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” (2001), and Mario making hair-braiding the subject of a romantic single. This was also when Alicia Keys was a one-person style reference for braid shops of the African diaspora.
Before long, cornrows became synonymous in the white imagination with a style that came to be known, not especially favorably, as urban—a geographical euphemism bespeaking the persistence of housing segregation and histories of white flight. Despite a long cultural existence dating back to the early sixties with Cicely Tyson and carrying through to Stevie Wonder’s Talking Book album cover, it was this turn-of-millennium Cornrow Golden Age that helps us better understand the current Cornrow Renaissance and why it has provoked a long overdue effort to uplift the creativity and labor of Black people—and, specifically, Black women.
“Hair is something we see, but we don’t understand what’s behind it, kind of like race. It’s the same way that something seems obvious, but it is really complicated and complex,” the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in a 2016 interview. Adichie wove the complications and complexity of natural hair into her bestselling novel, Americanah, devoting the bulk of its nearly six-hundred flash-backing pages to a single set-piece at the braid shop, a loving structural joke. In Eritrea, birthplace of Nipsey Hussle’s father, cornrows carry an entire taxonomy of social meaning: there is a style worn by unmarried women, and another by veterans of war. And during slavery in America, the unseen meanings of cornrows could be literal tools for liberation, as they were for Afro-Colombian women who designed maps to freedom in plain view on their scalps.
Then in 1979, something miraculous happened: white people discovered cornrows. They were on a twenty-three year-old actress featured in a movie named 10—ostensibly for the highest score that a woman’s body can receive from a man. For a long while, the only thing about this movie that mattered was the body of that young woman, a California surfer named Mary Cathleen Collins, who was just sixteen when she began dating her soon-husband, middle-aged Hollywood actor-director John Derek. Blonde, tanned, and jogging slow-mo in a swimsuit, Bo Derek became a generational sex symbol, and the running-on-a-beach concept became a Hollywood thirst trope as well as the premise for an entire beach-based TV franchise.
The part of Derek’s body that would outlive the era was her hair: Fulani-inspired braids fashioned by the Black hairstylist Ann Collins, into parallel lines tight across her scalp, fanning out from a center part and continuing down to shoulder-length tendrils capped in white and gold beadwork. Though Derek has tried to deflect credit, she became, nevertheless, a Cornrow Columbus for white women.
“The thing about appropriation,” the writer Lauren Michele Jackson told me recently, “it means to take possession of, to seize, to take one thing and move it someplace else. While the term itself doesn’t necessarily imply malice, obviously there’s a million ways it can be applied to malicious acts.” In Jackson’s forthcoming book of cultural criticism, White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue… and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation, cornrows serve as “more or less a synecdoche for the broader ways hair patterns and practices are emulated by people who don’t grow up with or come into cultural awakening in the kinds of communities that these practices are native to.”
Jackson has fond memories of sitting on the floor while her mother braided her hair on the couch—as well as less-fond memories of white girls at her suburban high school returning from resort vacations with “braids all up and down their sunburned scalp.”
Cornrows are “evidence of touch, evidence of effort, evidence of know-how,” says Jackson, adding that they are—as was the case with Bo Derek and basically every other person you have ever seen in cornrows—evidence of the labor of Black women. “It’s not just something you can go to the store and buy. It is a craft. It is hard to do.” For Jackson, who has been trying to improve her own braiding technique of late, cornrows are “a very visible example of a pretty prevalent phenomenon.”
When I think about how cornrows have become a freighted site of cultural appropriation, yes, I think about Bo Derek, and neologisms like “boxerbraids” that seek to whitebrand, and I think about the countless designers and influencers who have profited financially from ancient Black hairstyles that, until two years ago, were forbidden to be worn in the US military and which New York City only this year acknowledged as a cause of unchecked discrimination. But I also think about the hair of Emperor Tewodros II.
In April 1868, 13,000 British and Indian fighters overwhelmed his mountain fortress in central Ethiopia, and rather than bend the knee, the regent put a bullet through his own head, an act of defiance that people still write songs about. When I first read about him in the patriotic coffee table books my Ethiopian-American parents kept, the idea that cornrows could be a symbol of defiance was already established in my mind by turn-of-millennium Black popular culture. My parents had Tewodros II and his crispy-rowed successor, Yohannes IV; I had The Answer and Snoop, part of what felt like a continuous lineage that stretched back across space and time.
When news broke earlier this year that the National Museum of the Army in London had been in possession of two locks of Tewodros’s hair, scalped in 1868 after his death and now finally returning to Africa, it opened old wounds about the costs of Black defiance. The British went on an epic looting spree of Ethiopian art and artifacts, ransacking homes and churches, plundering untold hours, weeks, and months of labor and creativity, even kidnapping the Emperor’s seven-year-old son. Tewodros II’s curly black-gray locks serve as more than a reminder of brazen colonial pillage. (How many other locks of his hair are, today, secreted away in safes across Britain?) They also made uncomfortably literal the violent taking—supported by white supremacist systems—that’s shadowed Black creativity and progress whenever it has flourished.
That holds for our Cornrow Renaissance, too. Take the high school in Houston that recently celebrated something called “Thug Day,” where white students donned sports jerseys, gold chains, do-rags, and cornrows. Or how the cornrows of Akai Gurley, an unarmed 28-year-old Brooklyn man, circulated in the wake of his murder at the hands of police, as if to say: thug. Clearly, the endgame of a tradition like “Thug Day,” which attaches stigmas of dysfunction to Black cultural production, is and always will be the devaluation of Black life and subsequent plunder of Black labor. Even the ghost in the machine can be a ghost of slavery: the TSA’s millimeter wave scanners disproportionately flag Black women passengers for additional, humiliating hair pat-downs, complaints the TSA has ignored for years.
But seen in the long, shifting light of Black aesthetics, one wonders if it’s even possible to truly appropriate Black style, which is not static, but ever changing. “How can you take away an adaption?” Jackson says. “You can’t. That’s not the thing you can actually grab.” The Brits may have a keepsake off Tewodros II’s scalp, but they never got the surrender they wanted, and we still have no idea who braided his hair that day.
For the Cornrow Renaissance to be a true renaissance, it must help shift the focus from those who wear to those who make, from the novelty of a moment to the vast catalogue of Black aesthetic history and the labor that enabled it. We must move beyond thinking strictly in terms of hair as shallow metaphor, but as a medium, a site of play and experimentation in itself, like Ohio designer Magnus Juliano’s send-up of Fulani beadwork—braids capped with oversized Louis Vuitton emblems, or the breathtaking designs of artist Shani Crowe, rooted in traditions that also suggest futures, like her luminescent gloriole for Solange Knowles. When I think about Crowe’s work, I wonder if the Carters were on to something: that maybe someday soon, there will be someone braiding hair in the Louvre.
Originally Appeared on GQ
