Nothing Is Safe From Their Endless Bitching
The New York Times Goes To Canada To Find A black Girl Being Oppressed For Her Voluntary Hairstyle Choice Impacting Her Voluntary Recreational Activity
I’ve been saving this one.
The tweet itself is absolutely ridiculous but you have to go to the full story to get the real flava, Black Equestrians Want to Be Safe. But They Can’t Find Helmets. Notice it is a matter of safety, the message being that the White supremacist equine helmet industry is LITERALLY KILLING bLACK BODIES! by not designing helmets to fit over “natural hair”. From the full article, emphasis mine:
Chanel Robbins has been riding horses most of her life, ever since her grandmother traded a cow from their family’s farm in Ontario for a pony when she was 7.
Galloping through the fields on her pony, Star, offered an escape from thoughts that weighed on her — that she didn’t have a relationship with her biological parents, for instance, or that she was the only Black girl in the neighborhood, aside from her sister.
About eight years ago, she reconnected with her father, a native of Jamaica. As the two grew closer, Ms. Robbins decided to style her hair in locs, like her dad. But there was a problem: Her riding helmet no longer fit, and she couldn’t find one that did.
“I finally freaking feel like myself, and now society is asking me to change,” Ms. Robbins, 27, of Alliston, Ontario, said as she choked back tears. “I just want to be able to ride.”
Let’s break this down a little bit, utilizing a little of that racist maffs.
Chanel Robbins started to ride when she was 7 years old. She is apparently adopted into a White family, as we are told that Ms. Robbins and her sister are the only black girls in her neighborhood. That might explain why she was riding horses in the first place, living in Alliston, Ontario, a town of around 20,000 that is about 45 minutes to the north of Toronto and probably a lovely place to live. Her father is from Jamaica but she is fairly light complexed so I am guessing she is mixed race. She is as of the time of this story 27 years old. We are told she “reconnected” with her Jamaican father around 8 years ago, so when she was 19. By my calculations that means she was able to ride horses for at least a dozen years without any issues until something happened.
The something? She decided to change her hairstyle as a result of her absentee father, who apparently abandoned her for around 20 years (“she didn’t have a relationship with her biological parents”), showing back up in her life. The problem is one of her own creation as she was seemingly able to ride wearing a helmet for a dozen years until making a conscious decision to change her hairstyle to one that would not easily fit under a standard riding helmet. That doesn’t stop Ms. Robbins and the good folk at the New York Times from turning this into yet another contrived racial grievance controversy and it is another example of black people demanding others accommodate their choices.
A few additional problematic facts about this “controversy”.
Despite the silly term “natural hair”, dreadlocks are not “natural” in any sense. You have to put in a fair amount of effort to get your hair in dreads, unless you cheat and use extensions which are also not “natural”. Letting your hair grow long and then forming it into bulky “locs” is not “natural” in any sense, nor is it unique to black culture. Even Wikipedia admits that dreadlocks are found in cultures around the world and have been for thousands of years, all the way back to 1600 BCE in places like ancient Greece, Australia and the Aztecs of Central America. Somehow as they often do, blacks have latched onto dreadlocks and declared them to be the property of black culture, and charging anyone else daring to wear dreadlocks to be appropriating their “culture”.
It is also a matter of physics. Riding helmets are part of the equestrian aesthetic as well as being for safety. Women riding in “English equestrian” events have long worn helmets like this…
…along with the distinctive boots, riding breeches and jackets. Helmets are a container, designed to fit over the head to reduce the chance of head injury in a fall, something that happens to even the best riders. Actor Christopher Reeve went head first into the ground when his horse balked at a jump, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. But a container can only hold so much volume. In general a milk jug will hold about a gallon of fluid. It will not hold a gallon and a half of fluid. Likewise for a helmet to properly function it can hold a limited about of hair and still fit on the head in a way that will protect the head in the event of a fall. By intentionally growing and styling your hair in a manner that makes it exceptionally bulky, you are choosing to make it nearly impossible for a riding helmet to fit on your head.
It isn’t as though hair length is an issue only faced by blacks trying to ride horsies. When I was in high school I was on the wrestling team and even though I liked to wear my hair longer back in the 1980s, the rules stated your hair had to be fairly short so I wore it short because those were the rules. Some times a wrestler would have hair too long and got it cut by their coach using tape scissors. I didn’t like it but the rules exist for a reason. You will be shocked to learn that there are cases of black wrestlers who want to wear long “natural hair” being forced to cut dey bootiful blaque hair by evil White people.
But why can’t helmet manufacturers just make helmets to fit “natural” hair?! Must be racism, after all the NFL figured it out…
Companies that make equipment used in other sports have taken steps to adapt helmets and other gear to accommodate Black athletes’ natural hair.
Riddell, one of the leading manufacturers of helmets used by N.F.L. players, has developed a helmet with customized “precision-fit” padding, ensuring that any hairstyle will fit. And last year, the International Swimming Federation approved the Soul Cap, which accommodates thicker, curlier hair, for use in major competitions.
The second one is stupid, a stretchy cap worn by swimmers that doesn’t protect the hear isn’t even in the same category as a helmet. As for the NFL, those helmets are much larger, covering more of the head. There is an additional factor, namely that blacks make up around 60% of NFL players in a sports league that makes billions in revenue per year and is played by millions of men from Pop Warner through high school, college and the pros. Equestrianism on the other hand is much smaller sport and even the NYT story admits there just aren’t many blacks involved…
More racist math. Half of the members of the USEF disclose their race and half of 447,000 is 223,500. Of those 223,500 only one half of one percent are black, or around 1,117 members. Of the just over one thousand members, how many wear their hair in dreadlocks or some other intentionally bulky style that would require a major helmet modification? Don’t know but it certainly wouldn’t be all or even most of them. Not all riders are USEF members of course but then again not all riders wear helmets for shows. Western riders, as opposed to English as seen in the picture above, traditionally don’t wear helmets for shows. So in general you are talking about a small fraction of an already small number of riders nationally that need an accommodation.
In another accidental admission, the NYT article admits that it isn’t really a major problem.
Laura Qusen, chief operating officer at Tipperary Equestrian, said she was not aware of the challenges Black riders faced in finding helmets until Ms. Robbins, the rider from Ontario, wrote to the company in January.
In an interview, Ms. Qusen acknowledged that it was “clearly not a one-person problem” and committed to investigating it further. But she worried that developing a new helmet would require new safety standards, potentially driving up the cost of a product for which there might not be much demand.
“If it’s truly a manufacturing problem, anything is possible, but we’re talking years of development,” Ms. Qusen said.
The exchange with Ms. Qusen left Ms. Robbins in tears. She wondered if it was time to find a new sport, one that would make her feel like she mattered.
Oh shit, a black girl in Canada cried!
It left her in tears because a company that didn’t even realize there was an issue pointed out the very real problems with solving this problem that Ms. Robbins brought on herself with her completely voluntary hair style choice. For a company to design a product that appeals to a very small percentage of an already small and specialized customer base would be hugely expensive and time consuming and again, it wasn’t a significant enough problem to be on the radar of helmet manufacturers.
But the riders’ concerns have yet to reach Back on Track, a market leader that makes equestrian products, including helmets in a variety of shapes and sizes, with removable liners. In an interview, James Ruder, the chief executive, said the company’s helmets can accommodate most riders. He added that he had “never once heard” about a Black rider struggling with helmet fit.
“If you have an ‘oddity’ — and I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the people who have weird hairstyles — but if you have a hairstyle that impacts the functionality of the helmet, you might just have to change it,” Mr. Ruder said.
In a follow-up interview, Mr. Ruder stood by his view that riders need to be aware that their hairstyle choices can affect helmet safety, and added that he intended no offense with his comments. “I’m bald, and some people find that weird,” he said. “It’s all relative.”
Of course as is usual with the media, the New York Times completely misquoted Mr. Ruder to make it seem as if he just didn’t give a shit about this issue and as as a result Back on Track issued a statement on their website: Helmet Safety Article
Few people will see their statement while millions will read the article and come away convinced that Back on Track is somehow “racist” for not accommodating a small fraction of potential customers. That makes me want to buy a helmet from Back on Track. On the other hand, James Ruder should have known better than to speak candidly with the media about an issue of race as “reporters” like McKenna Oxenden will gleefully lie and misrepresent to push their agenda. To be fair to Ms. Oxenden, apparently an equestrian herself, if you want to get published in major media in 2023 you have to write bullshit race-baiting stories. The editors of the New York Times have no interest in actual news and journalism, that is why Ms. Oxenden on behalf of the New York Times went to Canada to find some whiny oppressed black chick who is having a tantrum because her voluntary hair style is impacting her voluntary recreational activity.
Companies design and sell products to make money. That is how they work. If there was a market for a helmet sized for ridiculously bulky “locs”, then companies would make them. There isn’t and they don’t. Companies don’t make money producing one-off products unless they are so ridiculously expensive that no one could afford them, and that of course would also be racist.
I would be remiss if I also didn’t ask: why doesn’t some strong powerful don’t-need-no-man black woman start a company to design and market helmets for “natural” hair? The Small Business Administration trips over itself to loan money to women and blacks, so a blaque wahman that wanted to start a helmet business that caters to other blaque wahmen? That would be approved and funded in the blink of an eye. Why doesn’t Chanel Robbins start her own company rather than crying uncontrollably and demanding someone else fix the problem she caused for herself in the first place?
It does seem a bit odd that blacks haven’t invented a 13%er-friendly helmet, we are told over and over that blacks are these amazing, creative people who have invented all sorts of things like peanut butter, the automatic transmission and traffic lights! Of course none of that is true…
The bigger issue is that blacks and those that stir up and create out of thin air racial grievances in the media don’t want to solve problems, they want someone else to fix it for them and will have a tantrum if no one leaps up to take a huge financial loss to placate them. The charges of White fragility are so amusing because there is no group in America that is more emotionally fragile and prone to holding their breath and kicking their feet like blacks.
No matter where you go, no matter what you do, there will be some leftist media agitator, probably a White girl or a “fellow White people” type, that will find some way to declare that an entire industry, institution or group needs to be changed at great expense to accommodate blacks. Even when you they get what they want, they will still bitch about it and demand more.
It never ends.