Black girls, rejoice!
Hoop earrings are back in style again, apparently resurrected by the awesome powers of fashion’s favorite white girls, Hailey Baldwin, Kendall Jenner and the Hadid sisters.
But with all this good news being spread, there’s still one question that needs to be asked: where did hoop earrings go?
Nowhere.
Just look at the aesthetics of black female activists in the Black Panther movement like Angela Davis, the performance wear of black music icons Diana Ross and Salt ‘n Papa, the 90’s black girls with the words “Baby” brushing their shoulders, to the black Instagram baddies on social media. Black girls have been rocking hoops throughout the ages, keeping the trend thriving from our ears. So why is fashion pretending otherwise?
Fashion has a nasty habit of copying Black women and our culture without giving due credit back.
Like how cornrows became “boxer braids” under the Kardashian’s influence, how bantu knots were rebranded as mini-buns on Marc Jacob’s runway, and how full lips became a thing to have after Kylie injected hers, black women’s attributes and aesthetics must be appropriated by white bodies in order for them to become popular.
And while white girls get credit for the creativity of black women, black women deal with the crap.
Synonymous with “trashy,” ghetto is a word most commonly associated with black women, used to describe whatever we do regardless whether or not white women are doing the same thing. But besides being negatively stereotyped, things like our access to education and our access to jobs get cut off from us by society’s attitude towards aspects of our identity. Meanwhile, white women like Kylie get to use us as springboards for their own success.
So, let’s not get it twisted. Hoop earrings are nothing new, just like fashion’s nasty habit of throwing black women under the bus.
