Nothing is more alternative than being Black
- activateeditor
- Mar 27
- 3 min read
By Goitsimang Moshikaro
If alternative means pale skin, straight hair, and expensive band tees... that's not alternative that's white!
Alternative stands for what it opposes: unconventionality, considering that society self-imposes the criteria for "unconventionality".
Every community, from family to a whole country, has a personalised vision of what's expected, and it's when foreign norms cross that two positives make a negative. Alternative as a category involves the artistic, musical and fashion, including punk, rock, goth, etc., stylised with/as dark, bold, and sharp mixed with a sense of surrealism.
When the alternative genre seeped into mainstream platforms like TikTok, the ideal internet love interest, the "e-girl" or "e-boy," emerged. As the trend created another new form of aesthetic self-expression, it still leaned into desirability, and that's where white kids would be plastered all over the hashtag. This enters the dilemma for people of colour unable to attain the look, yet altering it to fit ethnic hair, features, skin tone, etc., would deviate almost entirely from the image.
Black Africans are spread worldwide, from Asia to the Americas to Australia, and they have different experiences and ranges of expression and identity that are moulded by the norms of their countries. Whether it's being darker than people without tanning, not being able to do certain hairstyles, or not getting jobs with curly hair. Distant from Eurocentric Western beauty, the alternative space is known for the unfiltered, pure, and raw self-expression against conformity. Long-lived the irony of being a vast non-conforming umbrella category but gatekeeping and nitpicking how and what it means to live the alt. life. It's a war within a war where women and queer people fight to be recognised and respected, and black people fight, refusing to erase their blackness to fit in.
The way liberty spikes (spiked up hair) rebel is the same in which Rastafari dreadlocks rebel, non-conformity to the Western beauty. The range of femininity welcomes cultural integration, it welcomes drag, and it welcomes Muslim femmes to incorporate religion; it opens for intersectionality.
What people accept is what they want to see, yet how can there be range when the core of the alternative genre is so masculine, so manly? At her time, Jada Pinkett Smith was the lead vocalist of the metal band Wicked Wisdom, and as Willow describes it, the audience reception wasn't the best. Willow Smith’s performance of a cover of her mother's song was incredible, yet looking at it again, it's almost symbolic, showing how far she was going to herself in the alt scene. Diversity has developed in mainstream media, yet colourism, racism, and misogyny prevail in the entertainment industry up to the modern day, which is where alternative as a genre brings a more significant challenge to confront. This widens the area of palatability taken in for those wanting to enter the space yet narrows it for individuals with intersecting identities. Willow's beauty makes me wonder, “Wouldn't light-skinned black girls have it easier entering the alt. scenes?” yet the racial issue would be when it comes to expressing the alt. attitude.
"You know that you are a black girl, right?
Your hairs 'sposed to be sowed in, not spiked up
I do what I want, not whatever gets the likes up."
- Rico Nasty in Jawbreaker by Injury Reserve
The problem with blackness doesn’t help the problem and the need for black rage. The “angry black woman” is a trope across all media, deriving from reality, of course, where black women are at default interpreted as more fussy, violent, and overall complicated to deal with because of the “savage” and “barbaric” image of Africans. As Natelege Whaley puts it: "This harmful typecasting gaslights black women and dismisses the rational anger they feel as they navigate across a sexist, racist world. It makes embracing your own right to rage, after being taught to suppress anger for the sake of other people's comfort, that much more difficult." The vocalization of misogynoir in music goes against the non-confrontational manner and goes beyond not wanting to see Black women in the mainstream platforms nor having a voice.
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