The second thing you might notice about David Diamante is his intimidating height. He stands 6'9'’, with broad shoulders and impressive straight posture. Or the second thing you might notice is his booming voice, which he has made his livelihood as the former public address announcer for the Brooklyn Nets and current ring announcer for Broadway Boxing. Or perhaps the second thing you’ll notice is his striking facial features, chiseled bone structure, angular, deep set piercing eyes, a face both spectacular and haunting.
But David Diamante is also a white guy with some of the longest dreadlocks I’ve ever seen. That is certainly what caught my attention.
I’ve never heard of him before. David Diamante is not a household name. He’s barely a public figure. I was just in a bar that was showing local boxing and I saw him on the screen and thought, who the hell is that? Here is a towering caucasian gentleman in a tuxedo with dreads nearing five feet long.
I did a quick google search, found his personal website, and a smattering of press about the guy. Otherwise, there isn’t too much information about David Diamante online. His bio on his website says that he’s announced for professional boxing for 15 years, he had a cameo in the boxing movie Southpaw, he’s a motorcyclist, a world traveler and he even owns a cigar lounge in Brooklyn. There’s an interview on a boxing website where he discusses being a troubled youth growing up in Washington, DC, overcoming drug addiction, bouncing in strip clubs, watching a guy get stabbed in the heart. In his google results at least, he comes across as a deep-thinking, gentle, generous, respected and thoroughly interesting guy.
But what’s up with the dreads?
I guess you’ll have to ask him. It doesn’t seem like he would be shy to discuss it, but in the material I found online, he talks a lot about boxing, Brooklyn and cigars, but he rarely mentions his hair. In the aforementioned interview with Seconds Out Boxing, he tells claims that he hasn’t cut his hair since 1988. In a sparsely viewed youtube clip vaguely titled “David Diamante Interview”, David is sitting in a friend’s office and answers a question about his hair by saying, “It feels right…It’s not about how you wear your hair, but what’s inside your head”.
There’s something about the guy that makes it hard to just look at his skin tone and his hair-do, and stop there to make a judgment on the appropriate relationship between the two.
I started thinking about the world of this mysterious David Diamante. I wonder what kind of conversations he has about his hair, especially in relation to the debate about dreadlocks and cultural appropriation. David has worked professionally in two sports where the participants, at least in America, are predominantly black athletes. Do they call him out? Has anyone told him pulled him aside and explained that dreadlocks on a white person is wrong? Or is the debate about white people with dreads being cultural appropriators louder in think pieces and twitter feeds than it is on the streets?
Maybe he has a spiritual relationship to his hair, maybe he has some crazy origin story about them, maybe they are empowering to him in some sort of dreadlocked Samson kind of way. One thing is for sure, this is not a guy just following a trend, or wearing one of those novelty rasta hats with fake dreads sewn in them. This is 30 years of hair. I would bet that he wouldn’t give the same answer Justin Bieber gave when he was roasted for his white dreads: “It’s just hair”.
It all begs the question: are all white dreads the same?
I imagined David’s life as his house. In his house — a private property and communal reality that is simultaneously beyond and behind the world outside of it — he is visited by all the people in his life. His family, friends, co-workers, etc. I’m sure they all don’t ignore his un-ignorable hair. Maybe one of these people in his house is even Jeremy Lin, an Asian-American basketball player who has had his name announced by Diamante while playing for the Brooklyn Nets. Lin sported dreadlocks in 2017 and in response to criticism on social media, Lin posted a lengthy and thoughtful — albeit sometimes confusing — response on The Players Tribune. Lin emphasized the number of conversations with black teammates, friends, hair stylists about his decision, who were all supportive. Although he defended his own choice in getting dreads, he wasn’t so sure that everyone should feel free to get them. He was even reluctant to let himself off the hook: “I may not have gotten it right with my idea to get dreads. But I hope that this is a start, not an end, to more dialogue about our differences.”
As in Lin’s case, perhaps those close to Diamante — including a number of people of color — are complementary of Diamante’s hair. Personally, I would never wear dreads (I would look so awful), but I can certainly see how people might look at David’s hair as some sort of impressive personal artwork of commitment, at the very least. Some would have no problem with a person wearing a hairstyle that was worn by every culture that predates the comb. But to others he is a walking meme, the dreaded white guy with dreads, appropriating a look made popular in his country by a minority culture that he doesn’t belong to. So how can this white guy with giant dreads walk around so confidently? Where are all his twitter haters? Where are all those voices advocating for the cease and desist of locs on whites? If everyone is saying “white people can’t wear dreadlocks”, can a white person still wear them anyway?
The fact that I don’t know much about David Diamante, that he is outside of my own house, is important. David could very well be a big sweet mangy teddy bear with a connection deeper to his hair/his body than I can understand, who regards this connection as a place from which we can cut across cultural difference to find a place of common ground. He could be a guy who loves life, is loved, who lives his own life, who is caring and listens to the sensitivities of others when he should, and not caring about what people think when he shouldn’t. But I don’t know if any of that is true. If I wanted to find that out, I would have to enter his house, and take the time to know a person better.
Likewise, if I were offended by David Diamante’s hair, or felt like it was important to let him know that it is offensive to others, then that perspective needs to enter his house. A house can have really good insulation, keeping people from being touched by what is outside of it. But even if that perspective has made its way into his house, it doesn’t mean he has to subscribe to it.
Despite the interconnectedness of it all, it’s still a huge world, and there are a lot of houses in it.
Houses full of people who hate the idea of white people wearing dreadlocks; houses full of white people with dreadlocks who just wear them because it’s cool; houses full of white people wearing dreadlocks and loving it; houses full of rastafarians who think white people wearing dreadlocks are perfectly fine in doing so.
No matter how right you feel you are, not matter how loud you are about it, and no matter how informed you think you are by the validations of your own opinion, there will always be houses full of people you don’t agree with surrounded by people who agree with them.
Regardless of whether dreadlocks on white people is right or wrong, there is this guy with what looks like a hundred pounds of naturally occurring matting phenomenon who feels more comfortable with them than he would without them. He walks around with them all day, every day, not just during the few seconds I caught a glimpse of him on television. And for now, all the noise of the past few years about who is allowed to wear dreadlocks don’t seem to be bothering Diamante. He looks happy onscreen, things seems awfully cheery in David Diamante’s house. Perhaps I should leave my own house, see if he’s around his cigar lounge next week. I’m curious what he has to say about it.
As I sit here over-thinking it, I see him on youtube staring right into me with his soulful gaze as he lays it all out: “If you look good and you have that swag you can rock just about anything”.
