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It doesn’t take much to make a New York Times story these days.

On Friday, the paper ran a piece about how women fighting frizz should consider wearing shower caps in public. It profiles a 35-year-old woman, Aly Walansky, with self-described “coarse, curly, Jewish” hair, who protects her freshly blown-out tresses between meetings with shower caps.

In the accompanying photo, she is seen walking jauntily down the street in her cap, not caring how “ridiculous” she looks — happily breezing past multimillion-dollar Brooklyn brownstones that Joanne The Scammer would describe as New York’s versions of The Grand Mansions On Caucasian Lane.

The article reads:

Ms. Walansky spends about $30 a week on blowouts and $400 a year on treatments that keep her hair sleek and smooth. So, even if it’s just really humid out, she will wear a shower cap.

“I’d much rather embarrass whomever I’m with than arrive where I’m going with bad hair,” said Ms. Walansky, a 35-year-old writer who lives in Brooklyn. “Blowouts are expensive.”

Hair-straightening processing like keratin treatments and blow-dry salons are highly popular among women with all types of hair, and this is a summer that at least feels even hotter and more humid than usual. So shower caps and other impermeable head coverings that shield follicles from frizz-inducing elements are coming out of the shower, appearing in social-media selfies, and sometimes even on the streets.

Listen, we’re not going to judge Ms. Walansky’s struggle to protect the blowout. We get it — it’s real out here in these humid streets.

But what in the holy “White People White Peopling And Making News For It” hell is this? From “boxer braids” to calling North West a natural hair icon to Kylie Jenner inventing wigs, this year should just be dubbed “The Year Columbusing Became The New Norm.”

Let’s just say that when Black folks do this in public, they get a lot of reactions, but New York Times articles aren’t one of them.

We’ll stop short of calling this cultural appropriation because, well, you can have this one. But if folks are so interested in taking on the things we get criticized for, we can certainly think of a few things we’d like to happily pass along.

Carry on.

For 2024’s iteration of MadameNoire and HelloBeautiful’s annual series Women to Know, we knew we wanted to celebrate the people who help make the joys of film and television possible. To create art is to create magic. This year, we spotlight Hollywood Executive’s changing the face of cinema.