With Hair People Want to Touch All the Time

[jlh]

This Is Dedicated to That One Black Kid, comic by Keith Knight
Monday: who lives in that tiny ass town off the highway, in the middle of nowhere
Tuesday: who was not into hip hop in high school
Wednesday: who gets used as the reason why someone isn't a racistShort answer: Don't ask people you don't know well if you can touch their hair. It's

Comments

[misscake]

Your description of feeling like a dog when people want to touch your hair reminds me of how incredibly uncomfortable it was when strangers tried to touch my pregnant belly.

Also, I wanted to let you know I've really enjoyed your posts this week. I wasn't quite in a mind frame to comment on them, but I've read them all.

[jlh]

I thought of that parallel as I was writing this, but I didn't want to put it in my post because I haven't experienced that. So thanks for bringing that up, and for reading the posts this week!

[ecwoodburn]

Oh, the hair thing. As someone with natural corkscrews that my mother never quite knew what to do with? This one I can get. And having gotten into the "Curly Girl" thing a few years ago, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say my hair has more in common with black hair than with white straight hair. And yes, we have our own product lines, too -- but most of them seem to be about controlling frizziness, or "letting" us have beautiful straight hair. Except I can tell you from experience, anything that involves fussing at my hair too much? Will just add to the frizz, not control it, not unless I go for the helmet-head look with tons of product

[jlh]

Still, your and my hair, and the curly hair of other Mediterranean-heritage friends of mine, is very different from the wiry hair of most black folks. I don't know when mine stopped being very afro-like, but it will fall into a curl, while a lot of black women simply do not have that option at all, which is why they're envious of my hair-because it IS closer to that white beauty ideal than theirs is.

That said, it's definitely true that the less I fight my hair, the better it looks.

[poisontaster]

I was over on the Angry Black Woman's blog the other day looking at (IIRC) an archived entry where she'd embedded a video of some girls essentially playing a "pet people's hair" GAME. And it was both outrageous to me and completely unsurprising.

A short time later, someone on my flist was writing a story about Martha, from Doctor Who (the woman in my icon, for ease of use) and asking for advice about what black hair would feel like. She went about it what I thought was a pretty respectful way, admitting her own cluelessness about the topic, but in the comments, someone was advising her to just walk up to a black person and touch. And it wasn't clear at the time whether it was serious advice or tongue in cheek. So I responded and said, "I don't know if you're kidding or not, but I don't recommend doing that. Ever." And her return response was that she'd just watched too much Candid Camera as a child. At that point, I dropped the subject and backed away slowly.

[jlh]

That's so weird, what does candid camera have to do with it? I don't blame you for running from that thread.

Oh, poor Martha, she has caused such controversy. It makes me sad.

Hair!

[millefiori]

I remember hearing a story about that on NPR a while back -- a young black woman transitioning between high school and college dealing with the personal/political fallout around how she styled her hair. If I remember correctly, she'd straightened it in high school, and when she went to college she let it do something more natural. She got approval from black friends, but her family (who presumably taught her about straightening in the first place) was very disapproving.

It seems to me that a lot of black women I see style their hair in ways that attempt to achieve the straight, free-swinging look of (some) white hair, but, not having Oprah's hairdresser, it becomes very stiff and unnatural looking. I think I may be particularly sensitive to this because I have curly/wavy hair, and when I was younger I desperately wanted long, straight, 'swingy' hair, but nothing I did achieved it -- instead I always ended up with a semi-straight, coarse, stiff mess. I eventually embraced my curls, and learned how to work with them instead of

Re: Hair!

[ecwoodburn]

Oh yes! For all that I still have the twinge over not having "swingy" hair, I can still tell fairly easily which people with wavy or curly hair are trying to straighten unsuccessfully. And it's all I can do to not go tell them "No, really, you need to read this book and stop torturing your hair like that!"

Re: Hair!

[millefiori]

Oooh, thanks for the book rec! When I look at old pictures of myself I want to cry at how awful my hair looks. I wish I could go back in time and have a talk with that girl!

Re: Hair!

[dramawench]

*seconds with the book rec thank you!*
As someone whose hair didn't turn curly til puberty and who is STILL looking for the right products and how to deal with it, this is a huge help!

[sistermagpie]

It has always seemed like a huge thing to me, even from where I sit.

It suddenly makes me wonder what it would be like in an AU world where it was reversed with white people using black hair as a standard of beauty, and different things they might do and what the political implications would be and the chemicals etc. My sister would probably be considered lucky for also having really curly curly hair.

[jlh]

And there's this whole other community that I didn't talk about, but a lot of upper middle class Jewish women of my acquaintance who have curly hair get it blown out regularly. A friend of mine liked to keep it curly but her mother very strongly suggested, really almost pleaded, that she get it blown out for her wedding, and so she did, and all day her relatives were telling her how much more beautiful she looked with straight hair. It weirded her out so much that she's never done it since. But that's also applying this, well, very western dominant culture standard of beauty to their own culture.

[sistermagpie]

Wow, I hadn't thought of that. I have a friend from that background and that hair--she wears it curly and occasionally gets it blown out, but for her it's just sort of something to sometimes do with her hair that's not better than naturally.