Teacher Sparks Dreadlocs Debate over TikTok

November 09, 2021

A viral TikTok video shows a teacher explaining to her students the history of the term “dreadlocks” sparking a debate throughout the app in the Black community.

Dreads vs Locks Debate Sparked

The video gained over one million views with more than 400,000 likes, but why did this cause such an uproar? The video starts with TikToker @ladiimomochanplays exclaiming to her class, “Please stop calling Josh’s hair dreads they are locs.” Then going on to explain the reason behind why they are called “locs” is because people of African descent and their ancestors wore their hair in locs for very spiritual reasons. Those reasons then changed when they came to America because the European standard of beauty was forced on them. Making them feel that their hair and locs were not beautiful, but ugly. The beauty standard forced on the Black community to the point where the white community then proceeded to call locs “dreads” deriving from the word dreadful that is connected to negative annotations. Proving her final point to the class that every time someone uses the word “dreads” to define the hairstyle from the Black community is essentially calling the Black community’s beauty ugly and perpetuating the idea that it will never be beautiful.

Why Debate in the First Place? 

In the comment section, you see those questioning her saying that the term “dread” is not what she claims to be used for when referencing a hairstyle popularly worn by men in the Black community.

Another TikToker replied by looking up the term dread, and dreadful in the dictionary proving that this term was to bring down yet another aspect of the Black community by attaching it to a common Black hairstyle. Causing most to use the term almost daily and yet not know where the term came from or the true meaning behind it.

Even still the term “dread” is used to describe the hairstyle and appearance of someone from the Black community.