News Flash! Blonde Hair Does Not Solely Belong To White Folk

Blonde hair is beautiful; it has the effect of taking years off your face, resulting in a more youthful and lifted appearance. It’s a color trend that can ramp up your style in many ways, such as ombre and balayage to give a soft, feminine look, or even platinum, which is fierce and edgy.

Yet no matter how well executed these color trends are on black men and women, there always comes a point in time when someone has to put their two cents in, saying something along the lines of, “Why do you have blonde hair? Are you trying to be white?”

This ignorant comment not only places claim to this particular genetic trait as belonging solely to European Americans, but also seeks to shame the black man or woman who chooses to wear their hair in this particular color.

Well, next time you hear this ignorance you can let that person know that the word is out: Black people also have naturally blonde hair, as evidenced by the naturally blonde haired Melanesians and Aborgines.

Certain physical traits do not belong solely to one particular racial group, they are determined entirely by the beautifully random nature of genes, which are subject to mutation and can create an array of attributes within any race that account for the diversity of the human race.

A single gene is the difference

The Melanesians of the Solomon Islands, just east of Papua New Guinea and north of Australia, have ancestry that can be directly traced to Africa, yet a good portion of them are naturally blonde.

The percentage of the population that exhibits this trait is about ten percent, and the trait, though not limited to them, has a higher prevalence in children. For quite some time their blonde features were attributed to past imperial rulership by European countries like Germany and the UK.

The popular claim at the time was that this trait was a direct result of Europeans breeding with the native islanders. This theory, although widely accepted, was greatly disputed by the islanders themselves, who insisted that the blonde hair was a trait innately belonging to their people.

None of their disagreements were given any clout until years later when Dutch geneticist, Stephen Myles, from the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, was studying the islanders and took notice of the fact that there was very little variation between the shades of blonde that the Melanesians exhibited.

He ruled out the idea of genetic variation by inheritance and sought to prove his hypothesis. He and a team of colleagues collected saliva and hair samples from 1,200 Solomon Islanders. Out of this large sample, 43 blonde and 42 dark haired islanders were chosen for DNA comparison.

What they discovered was that the gene that determined hair pigmentation had a single protein difference between the two groups.

The exchange of this protein was the single determinant of the outcome of either blonde or dark hair. The gene is found only in Melanesian people, proving that their naturally occurring blonde hair is not an inherited European trait, but an outcome of random genetic mutation over time.

Isolated from Europeans

Although not much is known about the origins of the blonde hair that is also displayed by the Aborigines, especially in the west-central part of Australia, what is known is that this trait is definitely not due to European interbreeding.

Examination of a lock of hair collected as a sample by a British anthropologist over a century ago proves that the Aborigines are direct descendants of Africans who migrated from the continent, and have no genetic mixture with any other race.

This makes them one of the oldest continuous populations outside of the Sub-Sahara, and their dark skin and features are reflective of their African ancestry. This conclusion indicates that blonde hair is a gene, much like any physical attribute, that can appear in any race—even those isolated from European intermingling.

Genetic Mutation: Random and Beautiful

Aborigines and Melanesians are isolated examples of this particular gene, but black albinos are a perfect example of the occurrence of genetic mutation which can result in not only blonde hair, but also pale skin and blue eyes.

This also has nothing to do with European ancestry, and often black albinos are born to parents who have no prior genetic indication of European ancestry.

This just shows that truly anything is possible when it comes to genetics, and any person who claims a particular physical attribute as belonging to their race is sadly ignorant of how genetics works. Random genetic mutation is the culprit of the wide spectrum of genetic display that exists in our beautifully diverse world.

So, ladies and gentleman, wear your blonde proudly, knowing that rather than denying your ethnicity and ancestry, you are giving others a glimpse of the beautiful variety that also exists within black people, and armed with the knowledge in this article you can put to rest the objections to your self-expression by spreading awareness to those simple-minded and uncultured folks who would dare try to shame you out of their own ignorance. Blonde is black. Black is beautiful; and blonde blacks are just as real, as any European blonde there is.