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‘Glamour’ magazine forced to delete hilariously bad ‘Becky with the good hair’ article

This is not a good look.

 

Miles Klee

Internet Culture

Posted on Apr 28, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 9:11 pm CDT

Amid the glut of thinkpieces surrounding Beyoncé‘s massively viral album-event Lemonadeessays that pick apart her imagery and lyrics, primarily “Becky with the good hair,” which may be a cryptic reference to her husband Jay Z‘s paramour—white people are still struggling to understand what’s going on. And talking about it even if they don’t.

Glamour magazine’s U.K. imprint, for example, tried to capitalize on the Becky mystery with this… well, I hesitate to call it an article, really.

Glamour UK

Glamour UK

Glamour UK

What follows is a fairly random assortment of GIFs somehow related to hair, perhaps the most disastrous of which depicts a young Justin Bieber inappropriately touching jazz artist Esperanza Spalding’s poofy curls.

View post on imgur.com

Perhaps nothing else published in Lemonade‘s wake so hilariously misses the context and deeper meaning of its most personal dig. “Good hair,” as a simple Urban Dictionary search would have revealed, is a loaded term in the African-American community, typically applied to black people whose hair is closer in texture and appearance to white people’s hair. The term has little, if anything, to do with two white British fashion magazine staffers.

And Twitter let them hear as much.

(Sorry, this embed was not found.)

https://twitter.com/EustaciaLondon/status/725720730118311937

https://twitter.com/KuiKihoro/status/725725389134286848

Meanwhile, even USA Today picked up on the fact that “Becky” is more an epithet than a direct call-out, tracing artistic usage of the name back to William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1847 novel Vanity Fair, which charts the social climbing of a Becky Sharp, up through the “white, somewhat basic, and mildly racist” Becky (and friend) of Sir-Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”  

Glamour swiftly deleted its tweet promoting the piece—and, eventually, the piece itself. The magazine also half-apologized for being bad and dumb.

That didn’t exactly help, however.

https://twitter.com/XObryana/status/725731276850909184

https://twitter.com/JasonDike/status/725742999142019074

https://twitter.com/J_Manasa/status/725746529210867713

Doesn’t seem like there’s much hope for the magazine, but we’re guessing the Beckys can go by “Rebecca” until this whole thing blows over.

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*First Published: Apr 28, 2016, 3:54 pm CDT