Dreadlocks, Russian Mafia, and Transylvania County and Listening
“No. You do not get to wear dread locks just because you have Viking heritage.”
Cue charges of racial discrimination, toadying, being in jungle fever, being a total jerk, while not knowing what I said started. The truth is, context matters, and they forgot that what I was saying is differently rooted than the controlling bullcrap of Fat Beck, the Southern Baptist Faggot*.
I come from the other side of that coin of the mix of reasons people have or mention “dreads”. Dread means to walk in dread of God. This is to say the Wiccan All, the God of Abraham and Isaac, the Christian God, Allah-without-sectarian bs, the mother-of-Odin, etc when saying you are walking in dread.
Dread does not mean dread as in waiting for a final exam, though it does, and so does the expectation of walking out after to your life.
Dread does not mean total fear, as one would face an execution squad, alone. Yet it is the final meal and offer’s of a cigarette, tea, coffee, water (the approved entheogen list right now) silent promise.
It’s not the fashion statement like a Christian shirt or a hexagram meaning Mother-Father, Self-Other All that is known often as a symbol of religion not a religious symbol. Yet it kind of is. It’s what happens in neglect, yet we expect non-neglected locks. The in-between of knowing the real “this is my time to do holy” is what separates dreadlocks from locks.
Don’t be so quick to correct. Just because a person is one skin tone, and another said “white people need to learn what I say”, doesn’t mean what I am saying is not also something people need to hear — often interlocking. Teachers teach in a team best, and what they say goes uninterrupted when I say what needs to be said from my view too.
Often the truth needs many “let’s get real” moments, often the truth has already had the preconnection between your guru and your friend who also teaches from hen’s side as well. You didn’t see us talking or truth talking, and that’s okay.
To really respect dreadlocks is to hear everyone speaking in honor of them, without racial or origin-bias nonsense. To not do that means you’re hiding from giving that up by kissing up, that is not transformative. Transformative love of the lock, other hair, no hair, and dread of God and the full history means we all say our piece without jockeying for position.
Viking is problematic, too, quite often. I am not a Viking. I do not come from a town named Vik. I do not arise in the morning to reaquire things, and those that hate my religion or teaching or self without even knowing what it is often love pirates, “gypsies”, and freak when I do not agree with everything their brown Nordic-descended friends say — who often are more “Viking” than I — sometimes accuse me of theft or violent ideation without any sort of basis in reality.
Viking is also used, however, to mean exploration without harm, as in a-viking. Fact finding missions, exploration, business development meetings — all are a form of a-viking that reflects the sort of historical class that represents with executive function, able to be entrepreneurial yet on a team.
I am aware as a company consortium owner in the liftoff-stage, that I have to be able to send folks a-viking and make sure the issues of bad conferences through the ages do not happen — yet I still am aware on business trips that this person who has a different role is still a-viking and the history that made that Anglo prefix to a Norwegian city word happen.
This is not to paint brown people as thieves. The time of Viking was a very specific time, specific behavior, and involves such things as myth, story, and separation from now that we’re uncomfortable with but handle by talking about Vikings instead of the issues of what happened last week, last month, and right now. That’s one thing that storytelling does.
Kids get to ask and say:
- “Oh, I HATE Blackbeard.”
- “No, he had to blockade the Charleston harbor to get medicine, he left and got the King’s permission to pirate.”
- “That still isn’t okay.”
- “It kinda was, until the Spanish Armada left Charleston alone and we could get him to quit playing protection games, too.”
- “Why didn’t he get protection in North Carolina? Did all the free folks that made up Carolina agree to British Crown coverture?”
- “Why do we call him Blackbeard, was he Black?”
- “Did Spotswoode lynch him? Or was it legal? Or murder?”
- “What’s the Queen Anne reference?”
- “Why didn’t doctors treat him for free?”
- “Was Charleston in cahoots? What about the King of England?”
And so we go until what we talked about was really not Blackbeard at all but what happened last week when someone was shot for a pair of sneakers that were made in a sweatshop by Colin Kaepernick’s sponsor and then arrested and put away for life at 11.
That’s what we’re really talking about, but it’s easier to talk about Beckies and hair and expectations and “drastic measures” and “difficult decisions” and then to scream at a minister, “you don’t get it”, because oh God… what if sometimes ministry does get it, but every minister can only minster instead of be God Almighty to all?
That’s why I put my toe in the water to talk about other people’s hair. That’s why I said that our hair does not naturally lock until it does, knowing the other “white” folks around me have hair that locks easily. That’s why I mentioned the need to separate “dread” from lock, but not patrol who can say “dreadlock”.
After all, the same Dread of the Lord God people have with Rastafari words and roots is locked in to the same dread of divinity South Carolina left me to while listening as well.
We do not need to perform, preach, explain, divvy up, dole out, dissect or reprove. We need to instead walk more in dread of what we know as the Klienbottle point we only see in shadow or theory, that transcendent “Christ” in my background devoid of any sectarianism and allow the wearers and the defenders of faith to speak.
I have walked analogous to the “Dread of the Lord” some speak of, without fanfare, without much understanding. It is frustrating to the max to hear folks kiss up to some lock wearers, especially atheists, and try to delete my experience and Scanda/Germanic religious roots from their scared brains.
There is enough for all in plenty. Some like a village mama telling and patrolling. I get that. However, my need to walk in and say, “yeah, and let’s get real. The word dread here is talking about religious or spiritual, or coldly meditative experience, and that needs to be honored in this conversation.
Being a Viking or descendent doesn’t naturally give you the right to say you have hair that is meaning “Dread of God” even if you have the right and rooted experience to wear locks — as all do with the first and the second comes with extra entanglement with law” is a true “equal to village mama or Western Civilization” need and benefit that kind of locks in the two with the reality of how much has been hidden. That’s between you and the divine.
*Faggot here means the idea of a bundle of sticks and comes from the tree killing cult historically and now the popular way to insult folks different than you, with the requisite connotation to insulting gay folks, homosexual men, women who are genderqueer, and folks who like butt sex — or people who study in a different field or in a different way.
I am many of these, but they have everything wrong about my value, values, and religious beliefs.
