My first column for Alterati is up:
Maybe ‘you don’t haffi dread to be Rasta,’ but do you have to be Rasta to dread? Or, more directly: is it ok for white people to have dreads? This was one of the questions my local paper, the Oregonian, posed to local dreads. Of course, some black people objected to whites wearing locks. When my friend at the paper told me about the story, I immediately regurgitated the myth that ancient Celts used to have locks. But when I noticed that Celts were omitted from the Oregonian’s dreadlock timeline, I got curious about the truth of this claim.