For all kinds of reasons I don’t understand, the Interwebs have been burning up over Olympic darling Gabby Douglas’s hair. (Go to Google, type in “Gabby Douglas,” and the Google Gods helpfully add “hair” to the end of that. Sad to know even the Google Gods objectify.)
If you’ve been watching the Olympics — and I have been, obsessively, in a way that’s starting to worry me — you know that Gabby is a gymnastics phenom who defies gravity. She has a killer smile, and she is African American, and somewhere in the manual that means we all get to comment on her hair. I haven’t posted on this because the discussion seemed too stupid for color television, but here: Read what Krissah Thompson has to say at the Washington Post and then, if you feel the urge to comment on anything but Gabby Douglas’s spirit, charm and athleticism, teach yourself this song:
Dating Jesus 
I saw this image on Facebook but didn’t understand the caption. I assumed that someone on Faux objected to her lack of what was referred to in the bad old days as “good hair,” meaning hair that had been straightened.
The headline of the blog post? That caption?
I changed it, just in case. I want to be clear. This is a dumb discussion, hair.
FOX doesn’t like the Americans’ uniforms, either.
They’re not “American” enough.
I always thought one was either born with “good hair” or one wasn’t. And if one wasn’t and that was distressing, one went through all the chemical processing, straightening, torturing.
What rubbish! Her hair? What’s next…the color of her socks?
G-damn! Code for not white? Every gymnast wears what I call a sloppy casual pony. Who CARES!
No, although I only paid attention to this issue for a nano-second earlier in the week, apparently a good bit of the criticism came from African Americans.