I Love My Hair, Too. ... Now.
I’ve written about hair here before. I didn’t really think I had much more to say, although my thoughts and ideas on the subject continue to grow and evolve.
Yesterday, a story about a Sesame Street writer who wrote a song to help his adopted daughter feel better about her hair led me to speak out about it again.
Last night, I went to work wearing an afro-puff on either side of my head. The style wasn’t meant to be a political statement of any kind - I’ve worn my kinky hair short and natural for many years - but rather the result of a desire of a change that didn’t involve spending more than an hour with a hair dryer or cramping my fingers while weaving crooked braids (I’m just not that great at braiding my own hair). I wanted my hair pulled back from face, wanted my face framed different, actually, and separating my hair into pigtails with elastic bands was the easiest way to achieve the frame I wanted. And since wrapped the hair into buns (yes, Princess Leia style) as I normally would have done took time I didn’t really have, I let my ‘fro dry into puffs, instead.
One of our newer reporters stopped by my desk soon after he arrived - actually stood behind me and sort of whipped the top half of his body around so he could peer into my face.
“Tara,” he said. “I didn’t recognize with those… with your hair like that.”
I think I might have grunted in response.
He went back to his desk, which is only about fifteen away from mine and called out, “What do you call those things anyway?”
Huh?
Even though the kneeholes in our desks are angled, and I barely need to shift to sit with my back to this guy, he must have realized I was pissed. Steam didn’t shoot out of my ears as a warning bell rang. I don’t think my shoulders suddenly went tense. As I searched for an answer that wouldn’t lead to more questions, the lack of even a grunt is what tipped him off.
Whatever it was, he started babbling something about Sesame Street, and I halted my search for smutty fanfic and decided track down whatever the hell it was he was going on about.
It quickly became evident that his over-explaining had less to do with my reaction than a sudden realization that, “Oh, hey! Some Black women have or have had issues with hair so maybe ‘What do you call those things anyway?’ isn’t best thing to yell out across the newsroom.”
I answered him, anyway. “Pigtails,” I said (afro-puffs tends to be one of those answers that leads to questions), my eyes glued to the brown monster on my screen.
Reporter Guy continued to babble in the background. Once it became clear he was just talking because he was nervous about possibly having made a PC-blunder, I actually started feeling pissed. But, I wasn’t up for a discussion on race and perception, so I tore him apart for his lack of Sesame knowledge, instead.
Then I started dissecting my ire and analyzing it and rolling it around and polishing it and all around getting to know.
And I realized something that I must have known all along, but I’m unsure I’ve ever clearly articulated.
For some people - for me, in particular - Black hair has always seemed like more of a defining and dividing trait than skin color.
I’ve never wanted to be White. I’ve been in love with the skin I think of as the color of dark honey (but which I’ve heard called everything from “yellow” to “café au lait”) for as long as I can remember.
As a kid, I rarely dreamt of having pink-cheeked cherubs, and even when I did, it was for the shock value I hoped a Black woman could get from birthing a White baby. I knew for damned sure I wanted my kids to turn brown during their infancy - my aunt and her twin, my mother, never did turn brown and said that neighborhood kids used to throw rocks at them while demanding “What are you?” I didn’t want anyone lobbing stones at my future progeny.
But I didn’t want to have to comb a nappy1 head, while my tender-headed2 kid secretly devised elaborate and diabolical schemes for revenge.
And I didn’t want to have a nappy head, myself.
For a little while, I wanted to be an actress. I knew damned well I wasn’t a cute kid - one of my big sisters had cornered the market on beauty in our family - but I thought I was reasonably smart and, well, if not talented in the thespian department, I figured I had a good enough handle on mimicry and faking emotion to get by.
“Seriously,” I said to said sister one day, “how many cute-but-talentless kids can Hollywood take?”
“A lot,” she told me, nodding with the sage wisdom gained from living on Earth nearly two years longer and being an incalculable measure more adorable. (When she was a baby, she was stolen on the boardwalk, she was so cute. Later, she and I would play “commercial”; unless we were pretending to advertise a product that had been recalled, I was always the “before” and she the “after.” My sister’s beauty was and is indisputable.)
But for all her beauty, my sister had one obstacle she knew she’d have to overcome in order to be the model so many people said she should be.
Her hair was even nappier than mine.
Lucky for her, the extreme naps came with extreme strength. So even though her first relaxer had to be super-strength3 and left on for the maximum amount of time4 in order to have the desired effect, her hair was long and strong and not especially prone to breakage. This should have been concrete evidence that her naps were a better option than my hodge-podge of fine hairs that grew sported a variety of textures, and yet on more than one occasion I’d overheard comments like, “She’s so pretty. If only she had good hair5, she’d probably be famous already.” The “good hair” proponents were almost always other Black women.
And my sister wanted “good hair” as much as I did. I was jealous of her long sweep of straightened locks, even as I trembled at the thought of having the coarse hair that made it easier to achieve on her head than (I’d later learn) it would be on mine.
This record is far from a full recounting of the stories that swirled through my mind last night - I’m not going to detail my experiment with unprocessed hair in the eighth grade and the White teacher who embarrassed me into ending it, and I’ll only mention the Black editor who more recently told me I’d never get a job outside of newspapers if I insisted on wearing my hair both natural and lose. But those encounters and my experiences with my sister all ran through my mind as I read the comments on an ABC News story about the Sesame Street song the reporter had used to explain his comments about my what-do-you-those.
It took me a long time to get to the point where I not only realize that I’m one of the many Black women who look better with natural hair (although I figured that out years ago), but also to like that fact. Not all women know themselves, or their hair, well enough to have figured out what suits them best.
One of the very first comments was from a woman insisting that Black women aren’t the only ones who hate their hair, and she recounted her own unhappy relationship with what’s growing on her head.
I responded:
@soulangeana -I doubt you intended to diminish the experience of those women. You no doubt meant to show that you somehow share our pain. You can’t. Not truly. It’s one thing to wish you had different hair. It’s quite another of that desire (to have different hair) to be symptomatic (consciously or unconsciously) of wanting to be accepted by the “powerful majority” -- or even to belong to a different people. Your hair-envy is different from what African-American girls and women experienced over the hundreds of years we’ve been in this country. There is a missing cultural aspect to your envy. The idea that our African ancestry made us less-than across a variety of criteria became so ingrained, many Black Americans accepted and then internalized European standards of beauty that eschewed any traits that marked us as what we are. No matter how awful your personal relationship with your hair is, it pales in comparison to several generations of women being bombarded with messages (subtle and overt) that their hair was a sign of what made them less than human. TeaOli
Later in the evening, after reading another user’s response to yet another user’s comment, I tracked down user #3’s comment and then responded to user #2:
Lovecritters: Yay! However, I think it’s also important to remember -- and to point out -- that the message that "White Is Right" has become far less overt, and so many might not notice it. Oddly enough, this message was driven home for me tonight while watching that new Eliot Spitzer show: Someone asked (in reference to White males in politics) something to the effect of "If you’re sitting that tradition seat of power, how likely are you to notice the limitations of those who are [sic] there?" or "... how likely are you to notice how much power they don’t have?"
The point I’m trying to make, to anyone who thinks some of us shouldn’t be looking at The Hair Issue from an Af-Am perspective, is: Some of us don’t have the power NOT to. That doesn’t mean that we don’t also have the power to look at a broader picture. It simply acknowledges the fact that most African American women with kinky hair have an experience that is unique to us. It’s something that the majority of Black men can’t even appreciate. And the experience is negative in way that isn’t easy to express to someone who hasn’t lived it. But it’s real and, for some of us, what this man did for his daughter is a wonderfully touching strike against it.
So, I wholeheartedly agree with Lovecritters. "Please let us finally have our moment!" And write this as a woman who thinks Dad needs to do more than let his daughter know that her hair is beautiful, too. Hopefully, he and Mom also know how to properly care for it. Because Mom and Dad’s love isn’t the world, and eventually this little girl is going to be a young woman living in the world and dealing with the world’s opinions.
And, just like that. I’m back into the fray.
Only this time, I think I know exactly what I want to say.
___________________
1. When I was in high school, for a very short time, the term "nappy' was co-opted by students who were not of African descent and who had no idea of the words connotation. I'd rather not repeat the stiffly controlled speech I delivered in my tenth -grade U.S. History II, so look here if you honestly don't know what “nappy” means.
2.Possessing a scalp that is sensitive and easily irritated during hair-styling procedures.
3. When I was a kid, chemical hair relaxers generally were available in four strengths: kiddie, mild, regular and super. (Kind like tampons.)
4. Relaxers are left on the hair for differing amounts of time, depending on the manufacturer instructions. If memory serves this was usually anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour. My sister tended to need forty-five minutes to get truly straight hair.
5. For decades, the term “good hair” simply hair that was not kinky or nappy. Hair that did not have the tight curl that is widely consider characteristic of natives of sub-Saharan Africa and of the area's diaspora.
Yesterday, a story about a Sesame Street writer who wrote a song to help his adopted daughter feel better about her hair led me to speak out about it again.
Click to viewLast night, I went to work wearing an afro-puff on either side of my head. The style wasn’t meant to be a political statement of any kind - I’ve worn my kinky hair short and natural for many years - but rather the result of a desire of a change that didn’t involve spending more than an hour with a hair dryer or cramping my fingers while weaving crooked braids (I’m just not that great at braiding my own hair). I wanted my hair pulled back from face, wanted my face framed different, actually, and separating my hair into pigtails with elastic bands was the easiest way to achieve the frame I wanted. And since wrapped the hair into buns (yes, Princess Leia style) as I normally would have done took time I didn’t really have, I let my ‘fro dry into puffs, instead.
One of our newer reporters stopped by my desk soon after he arrived - actually stood behind me and sort of whipped the top half of his body around so he could peer into my face.
“Tara,” he said. “I didn’t recognize with those… with your hair like that.”
I think I might have grunted in response.
He went back to his desk, which is only about fifteen away from mine and called out, “What do you call those things anyway?”
Huh?
Even though the kneeholes in our desks are angled, and I barely need to shift to sit with my back to this guy, he must have realized I was pissed. Steam didn’t shoot out of my ears as a warning bell rang. I don’t think my shoulders suddenly went tense. As I searched for an answer that wouldn’t lead to more questions, the lack of even a grunt is what tipped him off.
Whatever it was, he started babbling something about Sesame Street, and I halted my search for smutty fanfic and decided track down whatever the hell it was he was going on about.
It quickly became evident that his over-explaining had less to do with my reaction than a sudden realization that, “Oh, hey! Some Black women have or have had issues with hair so maybe ‘What do you call those things anyway?’ isn’t best thing to yell out across the newsroom.”
I answered him, anyway. “Pigtails,” I said (afro-puffs tends to be one of those answers that leads to questions), my eyes glued to the brown monster on my screen.
Reporter Guy continued to babble in the background. Once it became clear he was just talking because he was nervous about possibly having made a PC-blunder, I actually started feeling pissed. But, I wasn’t up for a discussion on race and perception, so I tore him apart for his lack of Sesame knowledge, instead.
Then I started dissecting my ire and analyzing it and rolling it around and polishing it and all around getting to know.
And I realized something that I must have known all along, but I’m unsure I’ve ever clearly articulated.
For some people - for me, in particular - Black hair has always seemed like more of a defining and dividing trait than skin color.
I’ve never wanted to be White. I’ve been in love with the skin I think of as the color of dark honey (but which I’ve heard called everything from “yellow” to “café au lait”) for as long as I can remember.
As a kid, I rarely dreamt of having pink-cheeked cherubs, and even when I did, it was for the shock value I hoped a Black woman could get from birthing a White baby. I knew for damned sure I wanted my kids to turn brown during their infancy - my aunt and her twin, my mother, never did turn brown and said that neighborhood kids used to throw rocks at them while demanding “What are you?” I didn’t want anyone lobbing stones at my future progeny.
But I didn’t want to have to comb a nappy1 head, while my tender-headed2 kid secretly devised elaborate and diabolical schemes for revenge.
And I didn’t want to have a nappy head, myself.
For a little while, I wanted to be an actress. I knew damned well I wasn’t a cute kid - one of my big sisters had cornered the market on beauty in our family - but I thought I was reasonably smart and, well, if not talented in the thespian department, I figured I had a good enough handle on mimicry and faking emotion to get by.
“Seriously,” I said to said sister one day, “how many cute-but-talentless kids can Hollywood take?”
“A lot,” she told me, nodding with the sage wisdom gained from living on Earth nearly two years longer and being an incalculable measure more adorable. (When she was a baby, she was stolen on the boardwalk, she was so cute. Later, she and I would play “commercial”; unless we were pretending to advertise a product that had been recalled, I was always the “before” and she the “after.” My sister’s beauty was and is indisputable.)
But for all her beauty, my sister had one obstacle she knew she’d have to overcome in order to be the model so many people said she should be.
Her hair was even nappier than mine.
Lucky for her, the extreme naps came with extreme strength. So even though her first relaxer had to be super-strength3 and left on for the maximum amount of time4 in order to have the desired effect, her hair was long and strong and not especially prone to breakage. This should have been concrete evidence that her naps were a better option than my hodge-podge of fine hairs that grew sported a variety of textures, and yet on more than one occasion I’d overheard comments like, “She’s so pretty. If only she had good hair5, she’d probably be famous already.” The “good hair” proponents were almost always other Black women.
And my sister wanted “good hair” as much as I did. I was jealous of her long sweep of straightened locks, even as I trembled at the thought of having the coarse hair that made it easier to achieve on her head than (I’d later learn) it would be on mine.
This record is far from a full recounting of the stories that swirled through my mind last night - I’m not going to detail my experiment with unprocessed hair in the eighth grade and the White teacher who embarrassed me into ending it, and I’ll only mention the Black editor who more recently told me I’d never get a job outside of newspapers if I insisted on wearing my hair both natural and lose. But those encounters and my experiences with my sister all ran through my mind as I read the comments on an ABC News story about the Sesame Street song the reporter had used to explain his comments about my what-do-you-those.
It took me a long time to get to the point where I not only realize that I’m one of the many Black women who look better with natural hair (although I figured that out years ago), but also to like that fact. Not all women know themselves, or their hair, well enough to have figured out what suits them best.
One of the very first comments was from a woman insisting that Black women aren’t the only ones who hate their hair, and she recounted her own unhappy relationship with what’s growing on her head.
I responded:
@soulangeana -I doubt you intended to diminish the experience of those women. You no doubt meant to show that you somehow share our pain. You can’t. Not truly. It’s one thing to wish you had different hair. It’s quite another of that desire (to have different hair) to be symptomatic (consciously or unconsciously) of wanting to be accepted by the “powerful majority” -- or even to belong to a different people. Your hair-envy is different from what African-American girls and women experienced over the hundreds of years we’ve been in this country. There is a missing cultural aspect to your envy. The idea that our African ancestry made us less-than across a variety of criteria became so ingrained, many Black Americans accepted and then internalized European standards of beauty that eschewed any traits that marked us as what we are. No matter how awful your personal relationship with your hair is, it pales in comparison to several generations of women being bombarded with messages (subtle and overt) that their hair was a sign of what made them less than human. TeaOli
Later in the evening, after reading another user’s response to yet another user’s comment, I tracked down user #3’s comment and then responded to user #2:
Lovecritters: Yay! However, I think it’s also important to remember -- and to point out -- that the message that "White Is Right" has become far less overt, and so many might not notice it. Oddly enough, this message was driven home for me tonight while watching that new Eliot Spitzer show: Someone asked (in reference to White males in politics) something to the effect of "If you’re sitting that tradition seat of power, how likely are you to notice the limitations of those who are [sic] there?" or "... how likely are you to notice how much power they don’t have?"
The point I’m trying to make, to anyone who thinks some of us shouldn’t be looking at The Hair Issue from an Af-Am perspective, is: Some of us don’t have the power NOT to. That doesn’t mean that we don’t also have the power to look at a broader picture. It simply acknowledges the fact that most African American women with kinky hair have an experience that is unique to us. It’s something that the majority of Black men can’t even appreciate. And the experience is negative in way that isn’t easy to express to someone who hasn’t lived it. But it’s real and, for some of us, what this man did for his daughter is a wonderfully touching strike against it.
So, I wholeheartedly agree with Lovecritters. "Please let us finally have our moment!" And write this as a woman who thinks Dad needs to do more than let his daughter know that her hair is beautiful, too. Hopefully, he and Mom also know how to properly care for it. Because Mom and Dad’s love isn’t the world, and eventually this little girl is going to be a young woman living in the world and dealing with the world’s opinions.
And, just like that. I’m back into the fray.
Only this time, I think I know exactly what I want to say.
___________________
1. When I was in high school, for a very short time, the term "nappy' was co-opted by students who were not of African descent and who had no idea of the words connotation. I'd rather not repeat the stiffly controlled speech I delivered in my tenth -grade U.S. History II, so look here if you honestly don't know what “nappy” means.
2.Possessing a scalp that is sensitive and easily irritated during hair-styling procedures.
3. When I was a kid, chemical hair relaxers generally were available in four strengths: kiddie, mild, regular and super. (Kind like tampons.)
4. Relaxers are left on the hair for differing amounts of time, depending on the manufacturer instructions. If memory serves this was usually anywhere from ten minutes to half an hour. My sister tended to need forty-five minutes to get truly straight hair.
5. For decades, the term “good hair” simply hair that was not kinky or nappy. Hair that did not have the tight curl that is widely consider characteristic of natives of sub-Saharan Africa and of the area's diaspora.