I remember the first time the thought of dreadlocks crossed my mind. It was 2002, and I was seventeen and running along our concession road deep in rural Ontario at the start of October. The colours of the maples and birches were fire; the sky was as grey as elephant skin. And then it happened: with my ponytail flapping against my back—the long hair I have always cherished as uniquely me—I imagined it suddenly in dreads. I smiled and picked up my pace. I pictured myself strolling my high school’s halls with the confidence of a celebrity, as my peers looked on askance, their perplexed white faces hiding the jealousy they surely felt. What courage, they would whisper.

Like most white boys the world over, I liked Bob Marley, in the sense that I recognized his voice, knew the words to “Redemption Song” and “No Woman, No Cry,” and had a vague appreciation that his long, famous dreads represented a connection to Rastafarianism, whatever that was. But it was his dreads’ association with, at least in my mind, the subverting of the status quo as well as the upending of social norms that grabbed my attention. With dreads, I could distance myself from the cultural monotony of white, rural Southern Ontario. I could take something truly different and make it mine.

And just like that I got them.

The first day back at high school, roaming the halls with my dreadlocks, I felt exposed, out of place. But if those strangers did have issues or insults to direct my way, they kept them largely to themselves. None of my friends questioned my right to get dreads; they only wanted to know why. “Why not,” I would simply reply, and they would smile at my cocky nonchalance. Yes, why not? Wasn’t adolescence the time for little rebellions? In essence, though, I was simply terrified of becoming another ordinary white boy with nothing of interest to show other than my good marks and equally good behaviour. The commonplace scared me, as did the fear of missing out. The dreads made me stand out. The dreads made me special.

*

I never heard the phrase cultural appropriation when I had dreads, and no one ever accused me of it. If someone had, I would have said my dreads are about appreciation and respect. My dreads signify an understanding that all cultural practices and traits have inevitably been borrowed, reshaped, and then recast as something new, unique, and beautiful. There is no such thing as a pure culture; everything has been corrupted, contaminated, and enriched by everything else. A boy from Banjul or Conakry has just as much right to claim a cultural connection to the works of William Shakespeare as a boy from Oxford or Cambridge. A girl from Asuncion or Arequipa can enjoy the works of Mozart just as much as a girl from Salzburg or Vienna. The idea that a cultural practice can pass undiluted from generation to generation—that a certain boundary or border can contain its spread—without the practice travelling to other places and becoming influenced by other, similar practices belies what we know about cultural formation: Nothing is pure. Nothing is essential to just one group, as if born from their blood and experiences alone. Everything is a beautiful, bastardized version of everything else. Life is nothing if not hybrid. 

I would have said all of this in complete earnestness. And I still believe that the history of a cultural practice is the history of a cultural highway linking peoples and places and times all across the globe. Yet because of who I was and who I still am, because of my standpoint of a white man from southern Ontario, I missed one essential point that would have disrupted my utopian vision of cultural exchange: power. And power is everything.

*

In my first year of university, with my dreads, I drank a lot. Given my rather perfunctory high school resume in terms of partying and romancing, I desperately needed my university experience to be different. I religiously subscribed to the fraudulent and dangerous idea that college was the time for experimentation, where experiences would flutter and float to you, as if you were the light and they the moth. And consequences were things that happened to other boys—not to me.

So with my dreads, I drank and then drank some more.

One night in November, 2003, my friend and I were returning to his apartment from a bar in downtown Toronto. Around 2:00 a.m., we were staggering up Yonge Street when my friend spotted a kind of parking stand—a long metal pole attached to a block of cement. We decided it would make a remarkable coat rack for his room, so we proceeded to drag it northbound on Young Street. We lugged it for several blocks and past curious onlookers, some of whom in an equally intoxicated state wished us the best in our efforts. Taking a break near Gerrard St., we noticed a car slow beside us and the rear passenger window drop to reveal a white man in a suit, who wanted to know what we were doing. We eagerly explained to  him our endeavour in fits of laughter, but when he showed us his badge and told us to leave the pole and be on our way, we ceased giggling, nodded in submission, and walked north, without the pole.

Once the car had driven away, however, we decided that to abandon the pole at this juncture, after working so hard to get this far, would be tantamount to leaving a fallen soldier behind. We formulated a new plan: we would return to the pole, pull it across Young St., and finish the journey to my friend’s apartment by the way of side streets, since we felt a little exposed, too conspicuous, hauling a cement block up Young St. After waiting a few minutes and deciding the cops had more pressing things to accomplish on a Friday night than worry about what a couple of drunk teenagers were up to, we returned to our pole, pulled it across the street, and manoeuvred it along the side street. The lights of the car erupted and blinded us. The plain-clothed officer from before, as well as two of his colleagues, leapt from their car and directed all their energy towards us. Realizing that the cops had known we would return and that they would not be so gracious and understanding in dismissing our slight indiscretions this time around, I told my friend to run. I bolted up Young St. as fast as my legs could carry me, but before long, I realized I was running alone and my friend had remained fastened to the sidewalk, under the glare of three recriminating officers. I stopped running and slouched back to the scene, head downcast and hands in my pockets. Upon my arrival, the officer in charge told me in a not-so-way subtle way to get my fucking hands out of my pocket and then proceeded to search my body. They checked our identification and asked where we had gone that night. While the officers conversed among themselves, I looked at my friend, and in his eyes, I saw the same fear that had taken hold of me: what would happen to us? Yet after only a few minutes of interrogation and gentle scolding, layered with threats of arrest if we did not go immediately home right this instance, the officers released us to the world. They just let us go.

The next morning, in a bout of hungover paranoia, I scanned the websites of Toronto’s daily newspapers, convinced that some freelance journalist had snapped photos of us being interrogated by the police next to a pole. But, of course, no such story appeared in the papers. I had to make no shameful confessions to my parents about my juvenile, nay infantile, transgressions. Yet when we realized that nothing that serious had actually befallen us—we would not be scarred for life because of our actions—something remarkable happened: we laughed. It became one big joke. And even more remarkably, we even started to share the story with our friends, as if the tale represented a source of pride and not an example of privilege. The pole story simply became one of those drunken yarns white boys get to tell with impunity. It did not become a source of shame shadowing me forever; rather, and much like my dreads, the story became a reality I could exit in and out of with great freedom. I could take bits of it to show friends how rebellious I was, how I took life by the horns, how I ran from the cops. I had run from the cops drunk and with dreads and they had just let me go.

And they did not shoot me.

Of course, they did not shoot me.

*

It was only towards the end of master’s degree on the history of slavery in Jamaica, four or so years after cutting my dreads, that the idea of a white person in dreads gave me pause. I learned that from the first days of slavery on the island, enslaved Africans rebelled against white hegemony, against its efforts to reduce a human body and mind to a mere tool of exploitation. In the agony of slavery, in the unyielding and unforgiving ways white overseers pushed and punished the Black body to produce the sugar, the wealth, that would inevitably finance the industrial revolution and birth modernity, enslaved Africans still managed to perform cultural practices that provided them a semblance of familiarity in conditions that resembled hell. In the transplantation of certain African rites to Jamaica, and the syncretism they underwent with other African practices, whether from West Africa or Central Africa, and eventually with Christian ideas, enslaved Africans refused to surrender to the supposed cultural superiority of the white man, much to the frustration of Christian missionaries, who often lamented how their African charges still adhered to curious burial rites and worshipped their ancestors as if they were gods themselves. It was this white obsession with their own superiority and the resultant desire to turn everything around them as white as themselves—Jamaica after a snowstorm—that the Rastafarians would call Babylon and would rebel against with, among other things, the dreadlock.