No Hairdo, No Story - Shaggy Journalism Strikes Again
By John David Powell (07/18/03)
A colleague sent an email of a story from the ABC News webs site (www.abcnews.com), that carried the following headline:
No hairdo, No dance - Four-year-old dancer with corn rows is removed from recital.
The story told how Amari Diaw of New Bedford, Mass., sat out the Backstage Dance Academy (www.geocities.com/backstage_dance) recital earlier this month because “the corn rows in her hair did not satisfy” the dance school’s requirement that all recital performers wear their hair pulled back straight into a low, tight bun and parted on the right side. We also learned how Amari’s mother, Marie, and other folks marched in protest outside the recital hall.
Nowhere in this tale, however, is there mention that it was the mother’s decision to remove her daughter from the recital rather than undo the do as required. And, the reason for the ado? Marie Diaw says it is because she believes the hair requirement insults her family’s African-American heritage.
A little background is needed right now.
Marie Diaw enrolled her daughter last fall because about 80 percent of the students are non-Anglo, as we say here in Texas. Children of color is how they say it out in Massachusetts where this story got so much play that it caught the attention of the big-city media and someone at ABC News.com. Diaw admits she read the rules and signed the registration form, but claims she never imagined her daughter would get all tangled up in the hair part. Maybe she should have combed through the regulations a little better, instead of brushing them aside.
A longer, but no more balanced story in The Standard-Times (www.southcoasttoday.com) quotes Diaw as asking why “embracing our natural hair” is grounds for penalizing her family. In the weeks leading up to the recital, Diaw kept her daughter out of the group picture because she did not want the girl subjected to an unspecified confrontation by a nebulous malefactor. The turning point, she told the paper, was when her daughter awoke hating her hair, pulling at it, and asking when she was going to wake up white.
Readers of The Standard-Times recognize Diaw as an after-school program director, as the person who convinced the local postmaster to set up a Kwanza display at Christmas, and as the junior high teacher who had her students make a quilt as part of Black History Month.
New Bedford residents also know Amy Fernandez and her award-winning dance academy. On May 15, the Cape Verdean News (www.cvntv.com) ran a front-page story about the academy’s dancers competing in New York City. The accompanying group photo showed at least one set of corn rows and one head of wild and crazy (yet fashionably hip) hair, along with lots of smiling faces and a host of trophies.
Fernandez, in her side of the story, told a reporter many other members of her school, “black and white,” straighten their hair before a performance. The recital is not mandatory, she said. She added that the New Bedford area has more than 50 dance schools, some with hair requirements different from hers.
“Why is this a lengthy news item?” my friend wrote. “Can you see someone wanting to join the Houston Ballet (www.houstonballet.org) and saying: “But I want to wear my hair long, rather than in a chignon like the other 30 dancers?’”
He also noted that ABC News would not have a story if it changed the subhead to read: “Four-year-old who would not follow rules is removed from recital.”
This opened the way to the inevitable exchange of what-ifs. What if a Moslem co-ed joined the famous Kilgore College Rangerettes (www.rangerette.com), and insisted on sporting a burkha or hijab to honor her Islamic heritage? Or what if a Bavarian gal felt the need to honor her alpine ancestors by donning a riegelhaube instead of the traditional Kilgore cowgirl hat? Or what if a Pentecostal miss was moved to wear a long skirt, sensible shoes, and a high hairdo while performing the acclaimed Rangerette Stomp?
Indeed.
These scenarios of the absurd miss all the points, however.
First, regardless of how much Mother Diaw wants to see racial overtones in dance-team conformity, the reality is that private dance schools can set their own rules. Second, these stories were nothing more the aiding and abetting of a thinly disguised attempt to promote racial animosity.
We learn to hate ourselves, thanks to the unkind tutelage of those around us, which many times includes close family members. Tell a child often that the child is not good enough, not pretty enough, not smart enough, not talented enough, or not (fill in ethnicity) enough, and pretty soon the child will believe it.
The same is true with adults who hear the same hollow harangues from the poverty pimps and handout whores, also known as the darlings of shallow editors.
It is true that little Amari is the victim in this story, but not of a private school’s regulations. She is a victim of her mother’s social agenda and of the media’s addiction to racial discord.
Mundus vult decipi
First published at www.EtherZone.com
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