The hair-raising truth? Dreadlocks don’t belong to one ‘culture’

Hardly a day goes by without some hen-brained millennial student telling us that something that we’ve enjoyed for centuries has suddenly become racist. The Rhodes statue. The bronze cockerel from Jesus College, Cambridge. Sombreros. Kimonos. Native American headdresses.

The Cultural Appropriation Brigade has now decided that dreadlocks cannot be worn by white men.We know this because a video has gone viral, in which a female African-American student at San Francisco State University called Bonita Tindle seems to attack a white man with dreads called Cory Goldstein. In the video – which has been viewed more than three million times  – Tindle says Goldstein cannot have dreads, as the hairstyle comes from ‘my culture’.

Yes, it’s another nontroversy, a microstorm in an unwashed student teacup. But perhaps it’s time to stop this before it mutates into something more dangerous. So let’s get really pedantic: what ownership do African Americans like Tindle actually have on dreadlocks? In the video, Cory argues that the favoured hairstyle of Rastas, crusties and tramps originates from ancient Egypt.