white guys with afros

The concept of white guys with afros first entered my consciousness when the rock band The Strokes released their first album, Is This It, in 2001. At this point Albert Hammond, Jr., a guitarist in the band, was introduced to mainstream music listening audiences, along with his natural looking, devil may care, afro-inspired hairstyle. At the time, I hadn’t thought much about Albert, or his hairstyle. Flash forward to the year 2006:

In the past few months, no matter where I find myself in the New York metropolitan area- on the street, in the subway, at a museum- I will inevitably see at least one white guy, usually in his 20s, sporting an afro, or some semblance of one. Where are they picking up the memo?

According to the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, “the afro is a hairstyle in which hair extends out of the head like a halo or cloud.” To acquire an afro, Wikipedia recommends having coarse, curly hair. It also offers the following historical context: The afro style gained popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, in connection with Black Pride and Black Power and as a repudiation of the use of hair straighteners to mimic the straightness of Caucasian hair. During the later half of the 1970s, the style passed into the cultural mainstream and for many people became simply a fashion that sometimes even Caucasian men (and women) with looser, less curly hair adopted.

The afro faded out of the mainstream pop cultural picture by the 1980s, only to be replaced by more stylized hair statements (see insert to right) that fit the sensibility of new wave fashion. I do not have a clear answer as to why, now, the afro seems to be making a comeback, at least amongst the population of Caucasian males in their 20s in New York City. As with every movement, there is likely a multitude of drivers grounded in both the past and the present that have set the stage for the afro to make a resurgence. But, I do have some thoughts:

For the past two years, there has been much press over the emergence of a metrosexual movement, in which males are starting to spend as much time primping and grooming themselves as do women. Recently, an article featured in the New York Times Style section announced a countertrend has has emerged, in which men are adopting beards and scruffy, unshaven facial appearances in rebellion of the emasculating metrosexual lifestyle.

At first blush, I thought- eureka! The afro has always been about rebellion against norms. Today's afro movement must be part of this metrosexual countertrend. Afros are scruffy, unkept, and appear to be virtually maintenance free. It is everything that a cleanly-kept, product infused male hairstyle is not. Then I thought about it a little further. What it seems to me, is that this “neo” afro look, is a culmination of both the metrosexual movement and its countertrend. Yes, it is anti-product, anti-stylized, anti-”give a s%@t”. But it is also perhaps culminating out of the feminization of our culture, which is a factor driving the metrosexual movement. It is a statement about men being able to make a statement when it comes to their personal aesthetics and to put thought into the way that their hair looks, even if that look appears to be primp-free. Big, long hair essentially becomes ornamentation, and a concept that is more often than not associated with women. This is in contrast to beards, which have always (for the most part) been in male domaine.

I would be remiss not to mention the irony of white guys starting to re-adopt a predominantly black hairstyle of the 1960s. But then again, perhaps it is not so ironic after all. That is, in our culture more than ever before there is a blurring across the demographics that previously drove lifestyle choices. 40 is the new 30. Kids are growing up in a melting pot of cultures. And, boys are pretty comfortable with wanting to look good, whatever that means to them, without their masculinity being threatened. So, perhaps a hairstyle that was once “black” does not now have an ethnic delineation, as it is now owned by no one ethnicity, gender, or age.