First of all, I am white, so my voice is not any kind of conclusive statement on this issue. I understand why it feels frustrating to have strangers on the internet insisting you should play your video game a certain way, and why it doesn’t feel disrespectful to use POC hairstyles in a video game—after all, that means you like them, right?
I’m not sure it’s true that white people should literally never use them, and I can’t fathom why a non-black POC whose hair is actually that texture shouldn’t use them. But in my opinion, a lot of these comments are hugely missing the point. Asking white people not to appropriate black hair and culture in a video game isn’t remotely like “saying you can’t wear opposite gender clothing” or whatever. First of all, both masculine and feminine players have access to clothing designers for both sexes, and in real life, men who wear women’s clothing and women who wear men’s clothing both face stigmas and judgment. It’s not a one-sided thing. In my experience black players are upset not because they’re pointlessly gatekeeping, but because it is frustrating to see white people “try on” traditional black hairstyles in a virtual world like “teehee so cute!!! uwu” when actual black people in real life are still fighting for the right to show up to work with their hair looking the way it normally looks. When black hairstyles are stigmatized as unprofessional, unkempt, and even threatening. When modern white people with dreadlocks are trendy minimalist hippies and black pepper with dreadlocks are assumed to be addicts or criminals. When Nintendo has spent the past 18 years catering to light-skinned Asian and European Animal Crossing players with the available clothing and hairstyles, and then the second that an actual black person with braided hair FINALLY gets the chance to look like themselves in the game (in an update added almost a year after the initial release—I mean, looking like Frankenstein was an option before having an afro was an option) and white people are jumping all over the hairstyles like “How DARE you infringe upon my god-given right to have absolutely every single element of this game be for me and about me and accessible to me!!!” I get that AC is about customization and creativity, so limiting options feels unfair and antithetical to the spirit of the game, but maybe remember that POC who have been playing these games actually face real discrimination for these hairstyles and can’t just pop them on for fun for an afternoon and then take them off to avoid workplace harassment, and they’ve had to deal with absolutely nothing in Animal Crossing ever being designed with them in mind for the past 18 years up until this moment. Maybe they would like to have something be black on purpose in the same way that older games’ character design options were white on purpose?
Again, I’m not saying the answer is simple. I personally don’t even consider my AC characters to be any kind of persona for myself, and I enjoy having multiple residents, so I could see myself creating a black character who then chose a traditionally black hairstyle, because I like my in-game creations to reflect real-world diversity. I would not put those hairstyles on a white character because I do think it would not be appropriate, and for what it’s worth, I don’t wear the moccasins or the middle-eastern clothing styles, etc., because that also feels a bit iffy to me. I respect that others will disagree, but at least think critically for more than half a second about WHY this is different than telling somebody they’re not allowed to decorate with a pumpkin table.
. I actually don’t have a problem as long as the reasoning is really sound (like your mentioning the history with cornrows and specific braids that came from black cultures.) We can all definitely do better with researching and understanding the history of certain styles 
. I guess it’s frustrating to see a lot of white players try to gatekeep for the black community, and then say that ALL the new hairs can only be used by black players (when some of those can definitely apply to other ethnicities as well). But this is why I wanted to have a discussion, so I’m glad I got so many replies back!
