Talk:Afro/Archive 2

Afro article

The young adult does not have an 'afro', his hair spirals down, not up/outward. God, I am so sick of Black women trying to pretend that wavy, curly,frizzy or any kind of hair which isn't bone straight qualifies as "nappy", anyone can clearly see the distinction between his 'afro' and Michael Evan's afro on Good Times. Whites/non-Blacks can have loosely curled 'Jew fros' but his is not one of them. Blacks have no sense of pride whatsoever, so quick to give their unique heritage away to other people. FYI, the afro was first donned by Black South African women in the 1950s, it only later became popular among Black Americans in the late '60s who wanted to reconnect with their African heritage. No point editing that in, of course, being Wikipedia it will be deleted in a few minutes. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.52.167.235 (talk) 18:45, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Non-African Americans Sporting The Afro Hairstyle

Those of Hispanic descent with curly hair can have an Afro, as can any person with curly-enough hair. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.139.223.172 (talk) 02:56, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

They may be non-African-Americans, but they must have some African in them in order to be able to have an afro in the first place. Afros don't just come out of no where. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.127.179.161 (talk) 06:18, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

This article is an absolute joke.The fact that jewish americans are equated as to having anything to do with the afro hairstyle and lifestyle is absurd.Not to say jews dont have curly hair but its not as though they orginated it or mainted it or its popularighty.More jewish bias on wikipedia I guess.Wikimakesmart (talk) 07:28, 23 August 2010 (UTC)

Care and maintenance section

File:Afro picks.jpg

Various examples of afro picks

I'm think of making a short section on afro care and maintenance. There is a range of products, methods, and accessories related to this. This image would suit the section well. Any thoughts, help, or suggestions? Anna Frodesiak (talk) 05:48, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Afar people

In the sentence which starts with "Similarly, young males of nomadic clans in Somalia..." in the section titled "Fuzzy Wuzzy" User:24.77.65.84 inserted "Afar" (which I assume refers to the Afar people). As far that the existing article for the Afar people states, they are not from Somalia and yet the reference for that existing sentence about nomadic clans does specifically refer to Somalia. I suppose given the Afar people are nomadic and tend to live in that general area of Eastern Africa it is very possible that the existing reference about "nomadic clans" could include the Afar, but we cannot be certain that this was the author's intent. I have posted a comment to that user 24.77.65.84's talk page asking them to provide a reliable source for this info. If anyone else is able to, please feel free to re-add this info to the article along with a cited source.Marchije•^speak/_peek 12:57, 18 October 2010 (UTC)

Ancient Egypt Afros

There are plenty of depictions of Ancient Egyptians wearing "Afros" as well as wigs that resemble Afros.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRlQEmumk5s —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.139.228.30 (talk) 21:28, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

LMFAO

It was not mentioned in here that other famous people known to have an afro would include one of the African-American singers in LMFAO; Steven Kendal Gordy or Redfoo. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.99.4.150 (talk) 01:10, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

Cornrows & Negritos

The Afro is obviously not an exclusively African hairstyle since many Papuans, Aeta, Andamanese, and other Negrito groups naturally wear their hair in this way. Cornrows are also offtopic, as they are an altogether different hairstyle. Soupforone (talk) 21:57, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Alright, I'll remove the part regarding cornrows and the traditional African hairstyle, since you raise a valid point. Latin Wolf (talk) 22:39, 12 June 2013 (UTC)

Well, that was already done. You actually reinserted the cornrow stuff [1]. Soupforone (talk) 20:35, 13 June 2013 (UTC)

RfC: Is the information about the Circassian beauties relevant?

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is no consensus in the RFC. There were not enough replies and those that did are split. AlbinoFerret 14:09, 16 April 2015 (UTC)

---

As an editor who contributed quite a bit to this article, I actually support the removal of the section on the Circassian beauties, as was attempted by User:Tandrea Spain on February 18, 2015, but whose edit has since been reverted.

While it is true that the information about the Circassian beauties is referenced, I would still call into question the relevance of this information in this article. While the Circassian beauties may have had a hairstyle that was "similar to the afro" and while P.T. Barnum and others may have tried to market these woman to their audiences as (and I'm paraphrasing here) "exotic white women with an African-American-like identity" this does not mean that these women had afros.

While they may have had curly hair that arguably resembled afros, in my opinion that doesn't therefore mean that their hairstyle could be called an "afro". In fact, 2 of the 3 images in the existing Wikipedia article on the Circassian beauties that purport to depict Circassian women don't even show them with "afro-like" hairstyles. Even if it could be argued that the majority of Circassian women of that era had hairstyles resembling afros, I still would argue that this doesn't mean that they themselves should be included in the article about the afro.

Truly, the afro is simply curly or kinky hair that is cut at an equal length all around the head and, if brushed or combed and left to do what it does naturally, happens to form a spherical shape due to its natural curliness, but this natural effect was not deemed to be an actual hairstyle with a label, per se, until the 1960s when people in the black American and African-American communities started to move away from trying to hide the natural curliness/kinkiness of their hair, which they had been doing in an attempt to mimic white hairstyles.

The Circassian beauties, however, long predated the afro as an official hairstyle and I would argue that the way in which they wore their hair did not directly affect or inspire the afro as a hairstyle or stylistic statement amongst the black American or African-American community of the 1960s or beyond.

I hope that all makes sense. As an editor I tend to be of the inclusionist mindset when it comes to information on Wikipedia, but I must admit that I didn't really agree with the Circassian beauty information when it was first added to this article, and since the attempted removal of said information and the subsequent reversion of those edits, I felt it was time to weigh-in on the subject.

I would appreciate any other editors who might want to weigh-in on the subject. Cheers! Marchije•^speak/_peek 01:29, 20 February 2015 (UTC)

Hi! I read the article as well as your reasoning behind it's removal and I think I am leaning towards agreeing with you on this and would support the removal of the contribution. Perhaps it would merit inclusion elsewhere in the article, but I think that it's location as of this moment distracts from the overall history of the afro itself. Rotund but Reasonable (talk) 19:49, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

I completely disagree with the removal on the simple grounds that it diminishes the article. The content gives the reader a much with historical and cultural reference thsn the mere 60s-on account would do, and it complicates the history of the style. We are supposed to be an encyclopedia, and that means we should provide a full range of relevant material. Paul B (talk) 20:47, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Thanks Rotund but Reasonable (great username by the way) and Paul Barlow for your contributions to the RfC. I was hoping that perhaps more editors will join in, but since no other editors have responded so far, and since the 2 responses were for and against the inclusion the Circassian beauties info, I decided to do a little digging:

• Given there was only one cited reference in the Circassian beauty article that referred to their hairstyle as "afro-like" I wanted to see if I could find other such references to ensure that the existing cited source wasn't perhaps the point of view of a single author. I did a Google book search to see if other sources referred to their hairstyles as afros, or similar to afros, and I did find this reference in several other publications, such as Secrets of the Sideshows (ISBN 9780813123585), Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (ISBN 9780814782224), Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (ISBN 9780226227436) and Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (ISBN 9780814718865).
• I also did a google image search for Circassian beauties and found that a large majority of the results did contain photographs of these women with very afro-like hairstyles — even more afro-like than in the images in the Circassian beauties wiki article.
• Thinking of another hairstyle that became prominent in the modern day United States (and elsewhere) and which was similarly named in reference to a cultural group known to wear it — namely, the mohawk — I decided to see if that article mentioned other cultures that wore a similar hairstyle that also predated the term "mohawk" to describe the hairstyle. Lo and behold, that article does as well — for example, it mentions a 2000-year-old male body discovered near Dublin, Ireland that was found with a mohawk-like hairstyle as well as other non-native-American cultures that sported that hairstyle.

In conclusion, given my RfC has seemingly only attracted 2 respondents so far and since the voting was split, and since I am also leaning back towards this section's inclusion, I guess we will just leave the Circassian beauty information as is for now. Marchije•^speak/_peek 18:27, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Fiji

What is the politically correct way to describe natural hair that resembles Afro and Afro-textured hair (these articles really don't leave room for non-African hairstyle that resembles them) on non-African people like the Fijians and Micronesian people?--KAVEBEAR (talk) 12:12, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

My first thought is: Do Fijian and Micronesian peoples consider their untreated curly hair to be a hairstyle called an "afro"? If they do, then the challenge would be to find a reliable source to back-up this information. If you have some reliable sources to cite and would like to add them to this article, feel free to leave a message on my talk page and I will help you with what I can.Marchije•^speak/_peek 14:40, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Jewfro: anti-Semitism

Is the purpose of a Wikipedia article to inform in an unbiased way or rather is it to make people feel embarrassed or ridiculous?

The file 'Jewfro.jpg' depicts a man wearing not only a Jewfro but also a hideous facial expression. Holding this grotesque image up as somehow representative of the style of "Jewfro" casts Jews as a subject of ridicule and harkens back to a time when this type of hate mongering was less than reprehensible. Does it strike anyone here as odd that the other men and women wearing Afro styles on the page under consideration have normal facial expressions? I ask that Jews are treated with no less a degree of respect and that is why I recommend that we change the image to the file 'Classic_Jewfro.jpg' a neutral image available in the public domain that dispenses with the past transgressions of the Wikipedia Afro article.

Long Standing Image in "Afro" article

Potential New Change to "Afro" article

Zmenglish (talk) 17:28, 27 January 2016 (UTC)

1. WP:Consensus is not obtained by one user posting in talk then making disputed changes. A discussion should take place.
2. The opinion that one has a hideous facial expression is an opinion. In mine both images have issues.
3. Both images of people could be considered as self-promotion. The subject is unknown and for all we know could be an attempt to insert an image of a specific person. A good-faith approach would be to use a current neutral image. For example see File:Richard Simmons 2007-08-15.jpg or File:SethRogen 7 2007.JPG, both of which are already available on Commons.--☾Loriendrew☽ ☏(ring-ring) 01:28, 28 January 2016 (UTC)

1. The original picture, 'Jewfro.jpg' had been in place for the previous 8 years, is used in multiple Wikipedia articles, is one of the top image results in Google for the keyword "Jewfro", and has been featured on several other articles around the Internet. User Zmenglish's insistence that this picture is "hideous" and "Anti-Semetic" is both ridiculous and childish. The continued switching of the images does nothing to improve the overall quality of the article, which has been at peace ever since the "Jewfro" article merged into the parent "Afro" article. The 'Jewfro.jpg" image has served it's purpose of providing a visual aid to this section of the "Afro" article for quite a long time. Switching the image to "Classic_Jewfro.jpg" or any other neutral image would not serve to improve the overall quality of the article, and I implore the Wikipedia community to leave the 'Jewfro.jpg' in place.--☾Wiki1259☽ [[User talk:Wiki1259|(ring-ring)
2. Please view the Wikipedia article 'List of hairstyles' and see that, in addition to celebrity photos, many articles use pictures of everyday people to visualize various hairstyles. There is no controversy with non celebrity photos across Wikimedia in general, the Afro article should be no different. --☾Wiki1259☽ [[User talk:Wiki1259|(ring-ring) —Preceding undated comment added 04:26, 8 March 2016 (UTC)
3. I don't think there's anything wrong with the original image. It shows the hairstyle concept perfectly. It looks like user Zmenglish is just trying to cause trouble by repeatedly swapping out the pictures. I'd leave it with the top picture.--TheWiz4444 (talk) 02:31, 9 March 2016 (UTC)
4. By not allowing the original 'Jewfro2.jpg' image to remain in the article, the precedent that is being set is that any user, at any time, can replace longstanding images across Wikimedia simply because they don't like them, regardless of the quality of the image and how it contributes to the overall article. This could prove to be extremely disruptive and subject to widespread pranks and trolling. Many other hairstyle articles use pictures of everyday people to visualize their concepts, it is not mandatory that an image of a celebrity be used to represent every known hairstyle as a neutral compromise. A Wikipedia article should not be thrown into turmoil because one user decides to switch out imagery that had been in place for 8 years in what seems to be an attempt to cause trouble and discontent rather than helping improve the state of the "Afro" page. Wiki1259 (talk) 02:04, 10 March 2016 (UTC)
5. I, too, see nothing wrong with the original image. In fact, as a Jewish-American young man I deeply resent User Zmenglish's implication that a natural facial expression made by a Jewish-American youth is "grotesque" or in any way anti-Semitic. In fact, precisely in order to combat any notion of tokenism I find it preferable that the Wikipedia presence for the Jewfro hair style be visually represented by an ordinary Jewish-American male rather than a Jewish celebrity. The original image stood for eight years and seemed perfectly serviceable. It is unclear to me why one user's opinion-based and entirely subjective belief that the image is in some way "anti-Semitic" when there is no concrete basis for that claim should unsettle it. MetsFan1992 (talk) 02:17, 10 March 2016 (UTC)

Politics aside, might I suggest using a more fro-y looking example? The guy in the current picture has curly hair, but it's the droopy kind, not the thick, sphere-forming kind. To point to it as an example of afro-like hair seems a bit much. Something more like this, maybe (Edit: I mean the hair, not the toothpick) (except it's not free): [2] Rosekelleher (talk) 01:29, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

I also wish some effort was made to find an actual open-source picture of a Jew with type 4 (frothy/fro-y) hair worn as a fro. First a mop of curls is not really a "fro". Second, in the USA and Europe a mop of curly hair is viewed in a very different social light than actual fro-y hair. The picture in the article reinforces the idea that Jews only have curly hair and feeds into on-line bullying whose theme is that Jews are claiming undeserved sympathy when they talk about their struggles with type 4 hair rather than curly hair 2A02:ED0:5F59:5400:D401:C7F2:189F:1D9A (talk) 16:06, 20 January 2021 (UTC)

p.s. I don't see anything wrong with the original guy's appearance or expression. He's smiling, and he has nice hair. It just doesn't scream "fro" to me. Rosekelleher (talk) 01:40, 17 June 2016 (UTC)

For Christs sake

Popular with "African Americans"? So not with African Africans, African Europeans, African Asians, African Australians? Just African Americans? It's always about the Americans with some people. Bataaf van Oranje (talk) 08:29, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps you may want to re-read the article: The afro is not a "hairstyle" per se, it is simply the way that people with curly or kinky hair look if they choose to let it grow out and not straighten it. But the term "afro" was adopted to describe this a chosen hairstyle by African Americans, who up until the 60s had by and large been styling their hair in such a way as to try to mimic white hairstyles. In fact, it is stated in the section about the 60s and 70s that "contemporary African society of the mid-20th century did not consider either hairstyle to denote any particular 'Africanness'; conversely, some Africans felt that these styles signified 'First-worldness'." Then in the "Similar styles internationally" section it goes on to mention how this hairstyle was received by Africans in the Carribean, Tanzania and South Africa after the 60s ressurgence -- which either was not adopted at all or outright banned.

Truly people all over the world with afro-textured hair have always had afros; it's the natural state of their hair. But given African Americans had been trying for so long to minimize the natural tendency of their hair to puff-out because "wooly" hair was seen by the predominate white culture as undesireable. When African Americans started to go back to letting their hair do what it did naturally this was seen in part as an expression of their "Africanness". Granted, this may very well be a self-centred view on the part of African Americans, but let's face it, we can say that about many aspects of American culture in general.

Mind you I think this is a great discussion point and if you can find information you can cite about the history of this hairstyle amongst people of African descent outside of America and Africa then please do add it to the article. I personally put a lot of work into finding reliable sources to cite in this article and had I found such information I would have added it, but I only work from sources that are freely accessible via the web that are in either English or French and unfortunately I did not find much in the way of how this hairstyle was received internationally as most sources I found about this hairstyle appeared in American publications.

But that's the great thing about Wikipedia: If you feel that information housed within an article is inaccurate or incomplete and you can find reliable sources to cite for the correct/missing information then you can add it to the article. I noted that your user page mentions that you speak other languages, so perhaps you can find reliable sources in those languages. If you can that would be great and if you require any assistance I would be more than happy to help. Cheers! Marchije•^speak/_peek 14:28, 20 February 2016 (UTC)

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Typo

Thanks for the fix AcidSnow. However, it seems part of the jileec vs. jareer traditional distinction that Mouton actually touches on [3] [4] and which we discussed was accidentally lost in the typographical shuffle. That is not a problem, though, as I've fixed it. Cheers-- Soupforone (talk) 16:59, 15 August 2016 (UTC)

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Conspiracy: the word "jim" (Jacobus/Jesus/God hints) meaning "Afro" has been left out

Seen the byywording of "Jim Hendrix" yet notwithstanding, somehow no mention of the word "jim" to mean "Afro". How can that be? jim, blackjack, Jacobus, United Kingdom, James Bond, James 1st, Jackdaw, Golliwog, Merowig, Jim Crow, Saturn, Black Sun, jinn, Stuart/Stewart/swarthy, Joan d'Arc, dark, and so on...all have divine meaning. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.0.183.116 (talk) 15:09, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

A West African view

In west Africa, the hairstyle usually referred to as Afro appears to be significantly different from what the article describes. Should this other style be included in this article? TEK1 (talk) 21:51, 4 June 2019 (UTC)