Vikings did stop wearing them because they're dead (assuming they did, we have people in here saying there isn't even any firsthand evidence that they did wear locs).
But okay, let's back up a little bit since people balked at the first post of my sentence. I'm not saying you can't do whatever the fuck you want with you hair, even if it looks silly. I'm not one for trying to physically police how people wanna express themselves. I'm not truly gatekeeping anything; if you wanna look like a fool and damage your baby fine-ass hair, go on ahead. But a lot of people up in here are acting like dreadlocks, in the year of our lord 2020, are not an extremely visible and somewhat intrinsic part of black (and I don't just mean black American) culture. People responded by saying "Bu-bu-bu My white metal friends wear them" and in general people are pointing to how the Vikings and other cultures wore them hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago.
Okay. So basically, unless you are part of a specific subculture like metal, or your are expressing a relatively niche historical culture, white people aren't usually wearing dreads. Meanwhile, dreads are just a normal part of black people's hairtstyling repertoire. We wear them in blue collar settings, and in white collar settings. We wear them when we're young, and when we're old. We wear them using our own hair, or we style them using wigs. We wear them for secular reasons, and we wear them for religious reasons. They are part of our modern language, our art, our music, and our representation, even when that representation is in the hands of non-black people (see my avatar). Black people wear dreads because it's now, today, a normal part of black culture to wear them.
If we're going to acknowledge that culture shifts with time, if we're going to acknowledge that things get appropriated all the time, if we're going to acknowledge that culture and identity is fluid and changes decade by decade, era by era, century by century, then you cannot balk at the argument that customs and practices that may have once been part of one culture, or may have just been culturally ambiguous because everyone was doing them, can in time become adopted by and moreso associated with a specific culture more than others. You also cannot argue that customs can become sociopolitically charged depending upon how they are tied up in larger conversations regarding how certain peoples are treated, hence the issue with black hair politics- the stories you hear of our dreadlocks just getting cut the fuck off by some racist who thinks they know better- and why black people get pissed about this shit.
So, when people- particularly white people- talk casually about dreadlocks in modern times, and they face grievances from black people who are living in modern times where dreadlocks have been far more of a custom for us than it is for them, despite the fact that wearing them comes with racial animus, saying "well, the Vikings wore them" and "But metalheads" or "It's just a hairstyle; who cares?" is fucking irrelevant, misses the point, and is dismissive.
The way this situation is treated on the forum when black people get upset is appalling, which is partly hilarious because- again- 99% of non-black people wearing them look absolutely fucking foolish even trying.
