Message from Mr. Freiler: 'Can you stop by my room before school?' I gulped. Mr. Freiler was “the scary teacher”. I’d only had him for AP European History for a few months, so I had no idea what I was walking into. I stuck my head in through his door like it was a guillotine and quietly said 'Hello?'. Turns out he wasn’t kicking me out of his class or any of the other million bad scenarios I had dreamt up in my head. He just wanted to apologize. At first I was confused, until I remembered what we had done in class the previous Friday. We were looking at interactions between the Dutch and the Japanese during Imperialism, and Mr. Freiler had shown us some Japanese engravings. I remembered finding them fascinating– they gave an insight into how Japanese people viewed Europeans. He had pointed out that they were fixated with how exotic these Europeans were. All the Dutch in the painting were tall, ghostly pale, and- oh. Ginger. That’s what he wanted to apologize for- calling red hair ‘exotic’. I couldn’t help but laugh a little at the thought of it. I had been called much worse things for being ginger, and even my friends teased it for me more than Mr. Freiler ever could. Despite being told I didn’t have a soul or that I was a loser simply for having red hair, I did believe it was unique and beautiful. And yes, maybe exotic (to the Japanese in the 1800’s). I mean, that's one of the best parts of art. We can see unique perspectives through how people choose to portray the world or the people around them. And red hair is present in quite a fair share of it. In my art history class, we learned that Augustus of Rome was ginger, we recreated the Birth of Venus by Botticelli (guess who was Venus), and we saw Van Gogh's famous self portrait with his wild red hair. We almost celebrated red hair, and by proxy, myself a little bit. It felt nice to, for once, be special and not weird. So now I’m a bit obsessed with art, and more broadly, culture. Especially the way it creates community. Without art that celebrated red hair, and other media that stigmatized it, would we really feel like a community as much as we do today? I don’t know, but I’d love to study how we got here. Popular culture (like those Japanese engravings or the clips of South Park making fun of gingers my friends send me) isn’t stupid, or irrelevant, but tells us what actually matters to people. It should be celebrated, documented, and respected. That’s what I endeavor to do in college. By studying the media of the past, and the groups it created, maybe we can help address the censorship and polarization of today. After all, it wasn’t always common knowledge that gingers don’t have souls. That’s just part of a long history of the way we’ve chosen to document such a unique trait. A history that I intend to map out.