So, ex-Dallas City council member Sandra Crenshaw is throwing her wig in the trash on Sunday. She wants you there. Better yet, if you're a black woman with a Korean-made wig, she wants you to join her. (The video you see above is not about wigs, exactly. It's just something we had lying around in the archives.)
"The 25th is going to be an announcement," Crenshaw said over the phone, because of course I had to call her when I heard about her de-wigging. "It's going to be an announcement of what our strategy is going to be to target the Korean beauty supply industry."
If you're late catching up, some black residents of southern Dallas aren't too happy with Korean people. (Here's looking at you, Nation of Islam Student Minister Jeffery Muhammad.) Following a racial slur-slinging incident between Muhammad and a Korean store owner named Tommy Pak down on MLK Boulevard, Muhammad got some of the southern Dallas black community powers together to protest Pak out of business -- then eventually kick all Koreans out of business in the neighborhood because they "didn't deserve" to make money in the black community.
Crenshaw was kind of a late adopter to the cause, not joining until Muhammad spoke at a conference saying that Koreans in particular "have sucked billions of dollars out of the black community every year, because you're taking money away from women who have been taught that their nappy hair is ugly. "
Anyway, Crenshaw wanted in, but she thought the battle against Koreans was too Pak-centric, and that blacks "don't want to embrace the larger issues." Two issues top Crenshaw's list: Koreans have a lucrative monopoly on the South Dallas beauty supply industry, and to rub it in, they're really rude.
Instead of targeting specific beauty supply stores owned by assholes, Crenshaw's rallying black women -- and men when applicable, one supposes -- to trash their wigs at the South Dallas Cultural Center. On Sunday, Crenshaw's going to introduce her plan to expose southern Dallas Korean beauty supply owners for the abusive exploiters that they, as a people, supposedly are.
"We want to do a documentary," she said. "We want to ask all the people who've had experiences, so we can show the depth of it. Let the women tell the experiences they have in the Korean shop." She told me a story of a woman who had her wig ripped off her head in a store, and of Korean owners acting disrespectful to black patrons.
Don't believe Crenshaw? Well, maybe you'll believe her spy network. Crenshaw wants to amass a legion of black volunteer mystery shoppers throughout southern Dallas to weave their way into beauty supply stores carrying hidden, miniature cameras to record their encounters with Koreans.
Still not sold on how awesome this will be? There's more.
"We're going to encourage shoppers to wear Mace to protect themselves from them," she said ("them" being Korean beauty store people). "We're going to ask police where we can readily buy Mace."
Now, before you dismiss Crenshaw's project as absurd, imagine videos of black women and Korean shop owners fighting it out in a fog formed of Mace and floating hair. Yeah, "perfect for Bravo" is what Unfair Park was thinking too. It could be TV goldmine.
But what about the poor souls who need their wigs, or like wigs, or collect wigs, or get squeamish with talk of spy cameras and police-grade weaponry?
"The Indians are now marketing their hair," Crenshaw said. "They seem to be nicer."
