Ever since Patrick Mahomes was drafted in 2017 by the Kansas City Chiefs, he has sported his light-brown, curly Mohawk. He even refused to cut his hair believing it provided good luck for his decorated NFL career, including three Super Bowl championships. But the quarterback has switched things up, chopping off his curly ‘do for a low-cut and a line-up. But it’s what he called his hair that has Black Twitter in an uproar.
During an interview with Kansas City local news station KCTV 5 on April 23, he spoke about why he changed his hairstyle.
“I’ve wanted to do it for a while, but it was kind of one of those superstitions. I kept winning the Super Bowl, which is a good thing, but I didn’t want to cut the hair while I was doing it,” he said. “I told everybody during the season that win or lose, if we win three in a row or if we lose, I’m getting a haircut like that’s enough.” (The Chiefs lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LIX by the way, cutting their dreams of a first-ever NFL three-peat short.)
He expressed how “excited” he was to cut his hair after he “looked at some videos from last year, and I can’t believe all you guys let me keep that nappy hair for so long, like I look way better now with the short hair, so I’ll be keeping this going forward.” The word “nappy” made viewers come to a full stop, cause... what was that supposed to mean? The term, deemed derogatory by Dictionary.com, referred to Black peoples’ textured hair dating back to the first slave ships, NPR reports. “The likely origin of the term is the word nap, which was used to describe the frizzled threads raising from a piece of fabric. There is a lot of speculation that nap was redefined as a disparaging phrase for the coils and kinks in the hair of the African enslaved,” they added.
The internet felt especially weird about Mahomes, who is biracial with a Black father and a white mother, who is married to a white woman and whose an unapologetic Trump supporter, using the word “nappy” when describing his hair type.
“He actually look more black now,” one X user wrote in reply to the viral clip. A second added, “Brittany [Mahomes] told him he’s starting to look like his daddy side of the family,” while a third poked. “What did y’all expect he is married to a White Nationalist…of course he thinks his hair is Nappy when it’s actually just CURLY.” Other comments included: “I watched the full video. My impression is that he’s using nappy as a synonym for uncombed or tangled as opposed to a particular hair texture. I get the negative connotations of the word but I don’t think he meant any harm by it,” and, “Black man can’t say nappy? My son has curls. They get nappy.”
In 2022, the Senate passed the CROWN Act, a law introduced to prohibit race-based hair discrimination, “which is the denial of employment and educational opportunities because of hair texture or protective hairstyles like braids, locs (dreadlocs), twists, or Bantu knots.” Many Black folks had been discriminated against for their natural hair in the workplace, leading to the passing of the CROWN Act.
As of this writing, Mahomes has not responded to the backlash.