What’s up with your hair? How did you do that to your hair? These were just some of the questions I found myself faced with a lot after I first went natural, which seem like ridiculous questions to ask. I mean it’s my hair, this is what it does, it grows up and out. I don’t need to do something to it in order to make it this way. Even my own family seemed wary of me when I first showed up to the dinner table wearing my fro. As if they expected me to shout “black power” and declare myself a Pan-African activist. The compliments I received were along the lines of: you look soulful; you look like one of them nubian queens; and I bet you’re really deep. Which made me wonder, how come black hair is met with so much mystery and politics? Why is black hair important, and why should people be aware of it? To answer this, let me start by telling a story.
Imagine that from the moment you’re born, sunglasses are placed over your eyes, giving the world an off, pink tint. You live your entire life like this and you have absolutely no idea why. All you know is that everyone else does it, so why not you? The only times you have ever truly seen the world is when you needed to replace your lenses. But even this is done indoors, in a dim room, while the world lies just beyond the walls. This seems ridiculous, right? A person may just say, why not take off the glasses? You clearly don’t need them, they don’t do any good or bad. This was me with my hair. I had spent years perming it, and...for what? It wasn’t until my mom suggested I stop perming my hair that I realized this idea was alien to me. All I had ever known was my chemically straightened hair. The same way if you had lived your entire life with tinted glasses, the world as you see it, is what it literally is for you.
I had no idea what to expect when I stopped perming my hair. It didn’t even occur to me that by just taking a look at the top of my dad’s or brother’s head, I would get a clear view of what my hair was really like. I know for a fact that I’m not the only black girl in America who realized they had no idea what their hair is like. This is because blacks have spent so many years suppressing this part of their culture and in return being oppressed. What astonishes me is that the American media is so ready to embrace many aspects of black culture from hip hop to jazz to dance styles and clothing. Yet, the very thing that grows on top of a black person’s head is something the media has met with resistance. This is why I am doing an ELI on the politics and culture of black hair, and this is why it is important.
All of this is about culture. It’s about discovering black identity and trying to muddle through where it all went wrong. If America is this big melting pot that we all claim it is, why was it not until the 21st century that there was even a slim chance of seeing a black person with a fro in the media who wasn’t tied to some radical movement? Why is it that if you were to flip through a high end beauty and fashion magazine, the only blacks featured in it would have straight hair? Why is that black women as a demographic spend almost half a trillion dollars on hair care and weaves per year? How can you not want to know the answer to these questions?
My ELI goes beyond the racial, political, and social aspects tied to hair. I’m seeking identity. Somewhere along the path through slavery, civil rights, the black power movement, to now, our identity has been misplaced. It seems as if blacks are teetering between standards put forward by the media for White America to gobble up and the pain and oppression that saturate our past.
I’m going to be looking at the history of beauty standards and the residual effects on black hair culture. This means I’m going to be hitting on a lot of raw, unspoken subjects from colorism to the lily complex. It’s going to be all laid out. I’ll also be covering the black power movement and the politicization of the afro during this time period. Finally, I plan to tackle good hair vs. bad hair, an ideology that seems prevalent in many minority groups. I don’t know how this journey will end, but I do know that it is one that has been long overdue.
~Ivonne
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