What I forgot to say before has already been said by those who came before me.
One comment I see over and over when many women of multiple races have online discussions about Black women with Black hair is, “It’s just hair!”
I’ve devoted gigabytes of disk space trying to respond to those comments in way that was not overly emotional. As the roots of why it's not “just hair” -- why, for many, many women, this is a subject that moves far beyond vanity and into sense of self and sense of worth territory -- are inherently emotional, I’ve been less successful in this than I prefer to have been.
Over the years, I jumped through a myriad of hoops to explain the historical, sociological and psychological significance of Black hair.
Once, I even dug up a quote from a history book where one “anthropologist” of a century and a half ago said something along the lines of “The hair will always tell.” He was telling other White people how to identify “hidden” Black people.
Another scientist from the same era hypothesized that hair should be the mark of our acceptability. According to him, it was not the dark skin or full lips or large buttocks commonly associated with “the Negro race” that was most indicative of our inferiority. It was “the woolly hair” that we, as race, would need to breed out in order to show that we were becoming acceptable.
I spent a lot of time trying to explain my own feelings and ideas, while recounting the experiences that shaped them.
Some time last week I realized (but forgot to actually write) that I needed to say was one thing, really.
It’s never been just about the hair itself. It’s about everything that kinky hair represented and continues to represent.
Extras:
I found this article copied onto the Hello, Negro web site.
While searching for the two authors of anthropological studies mentioned above, I found, instead, this horrifying excuse for a study called The Negro. It isn’t what I was looking for, but it's worth a look just to give modern readers an idea of the kind of “higher thinking” that was once prevalent in the U.S.
I’ve devoted gigabytes of disk space trying to respond to those comments in way that was not overly emotional. As the roots of why it's not “just hair” -- why, for many, many women, this is a subject that moves far beyond vanity and into sense of self and sense of worth territory -- are inherently emotional, I’ve been less successful in this than I prefer to have been.
Over the years, I jumped through a myriad of hoops to explain the historical, sociological and psychological significance of Black hair.
Once, I even dug up a quote from a history book where one “anthropologist” of a century and a half ago said something along the lines of “The hair will always tell.” He was telling other White people how to identify “hidden” Black people.
Another scientist from the same era hypothesized that hair should be the mark of our acceptability. According to him, it was not the dark skin or full lips or large buttocks commonly associated with “the Negro race” that was most indicative of our inferiority. It was “the woolly hair” that we, as race, would need to breed out in order to show that we were becoming acceptable.
I spent a lot of time trying to explain my own feelings and ideas, while recounting the experiences that shaped them.
Some time last week I realized (but forgot to actually write) that I needed to say was one thing, really.
It’s never been just about the hair itself. It’s about everything that kinky hair represented and continues to represent.
Extras:
I found this article copied onto the Hello, Negro web site.
While searching for the two authors of anthropological studies mentioned above, I found, instead, this horrifying excuse for a study called The Negro. It isn’t what I was looking for, but it's worth a look just to give modern readers an idea of the kind of “higher thinking” that was once prevalent in the U.S.