Hair and cultural appropriation
I'm doing a deep conditioning treatment right now (I have a very exciting and glamorous life), so of course my fancy turns to thoughts of hair.
I have very, very curly hair. For those of you who know from the general curly categorizations, it's 3B with some 3C thrown in and some 3A in the front. But mostly 3B. For the rest of humanity--i.e. normal people who do not obsess about gradations of curliness in hair--that means that I have spiral ringlets about the diameter of a Sharpy marker. When I was a teenager, I had no idea how to treat my hair, none at all. White people just didn't know how to do curly hair. We didn't have the internet; none of the teen magazines for white girls offered any solutions besides blow-drying it straight, which I had no intention of doing, because I was proud of my curls and how they connected me to my ethnicity; I developed a habit of glancing at women's magazines that proclaimed that they offered "10 hot new styles for every type of hair" and sneering "I don't think so.
I had a sense that I should probably be using the products marketed to black women, but I had no idea which ones or how I should go about using them, and being the social and political genius that I am, I recognized that going over to a black schoolmate and asking her to teach my how to do my hair would be weird and rude and entitled. Looking back, I'm not sure why I didn't begin buying
Essence or something; probably a combination of not seeing it displayed in my neighborhood and general white blindness.
Seven years ago or so, my mother found Lorraine Massey's Curly Girl book and I had an awakening, which was awesome. I revamped my entire hair routine and everything hair-related got easier and better. Last year, my sister pointed me toward the Naturally Curly website, which is even more awesome. Its message boards feature participants of all races and ethnicities swapping tips and pointers (there is of course racial clustering, with the boards specifically for 4A-4C hair being mostly populated by black participants. I am learning even more, and although my hair is 3B, as I say, I find the most helpful info on the 3C and 4A boards, mostly from black women (silk sleep bonnets, where have you been all my life?).
I've been experimenting with different ways to put my hair up as well as protective hair styles (for those of you not in the know, again, curly hair is very dry by nature (many of us apply oil to our hair--these days I'm using coconut oil); that makes it very easily broken. Protective styles are ways of styling the hair that minimizes that kind of damage), and I am thinking about trying twists.
But then I remembered how I felt about white people with dreadlocks.
Ugh, is how I feel.
And those little blonde white girls whose families take them on vacation to Jamaica and get their straight hair braided. I see them in airports, and I cringe with contact embarrassment.
Dreadlocks and braids/cornrows are traditional black hairstyles that go waaaaaay back; they represent community, history, family, and in some cases, religion. They're not just a cool fashion choice for white people to use a political symbol or for a change of look. When many members of one group, in this case, white people, has spent hundreds of years murdering, exploiting, enslaving, profiting from, demeaning and raping members of another group, in this case, black people, I find it morally repugnant for members of the first group to walk around all "Hey, we're all members of one race, the human race, so I totes get to use your cultural traditions, right, bro?" Particularly in the case of hair, which is such an important topos for women in general and black women in particular, as I understand it. It's certainly massively important to me, and it is tied up with my ethnic identity. Curly/kinky hair has been mocked and denigrated by white people and described in inhuman terms for far too long for it to be OK now for white people, no matter how good their intentions, how genuinely admiring they are of black hairstyles, to walk in like they own the place and use those styles.
Is the same true of twists? In my excitement about learning new things about how to do my hair, am I overlooking my own potential for cultural appropriation?
On the one hand, this stuff works for my hair, and what white people do with their straight hair does not. Point blank does not. I already use sleep caps on the recommendations of various black women posters on the Naturally Curly forums. I use oils--argan, olive, coconut. I use a cleanser specifically marketed to black women, as well as a shower cap, a deep-conditioning treatment cap, and various other tools. If I feel comfortable doing that, what would make twists so different? Why stop here? Particularly if using twists does protect my hair from damage and I am using them for their function as much as for their look? And if I don't use black hairstyles, what hairstyles will I be able to use?
On the other hand...I'm white. And this isn't about getting "permission," because it's not about what my friends think. It's about what the black woman on the subway who doesn't know me, and therefore doesn't know that my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure, or whatever, thinks when she sees me--am I one more white insult to her cultural traditions and people (any more than I already am) that she has to deal with on her way to work? And would I be exploiting her culture by using twists, claiming membership and belonging that is not mine by right? Or am I over thinking this, because she has 100 goddamn problems due to racism and couldn't give two shits about my hair?
I'm not sure; I'm leaning toward not using twists at this point. But I'm not ruling them out entirely just yet.