With Hair People Want to Touch All the Time
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 racist
Short answer: Don't ask people you don't know well if you can touch their hair. It's obnoxious. It always made me feel like a dog.
When I was a child, I had a very short curly afro haircut because my mother didn't really know how to deal with my hair. When I was fifteen, I started growing it out again, and after getting an unmanageable afro, on my beautician sister's advice, I started to flat iron it. Once a week I would wash it, blow it dry, run a very hot curling iron through it, and then wear it in a french braid the rest of the week. When I was a senior in high school I got upset that I couldn't do anything fun with it for a party, so my sister came over for an emergency cut where mysteriously, my curly hair started to fall, rather than frizz out sideways. In college I kept growing it out, putting very mild hair straightener on After a few years of that I sort of didn't need to do it anymore, and now I have shoulder-length, quite curly hair. Sometimes women-usually black women-ask me how I've done it and I have to answer honestly, "it's just like this," and they say, "you're lucky."
Hair within the black community is incredibly political, because it doesn't behave like white hair, hence the entirely separate culture of black hair salons (and products; take a trip down the aisle in your CVS sometime). Do you leave it natural and short? Do you straighten? Is straightened hair a signifier of wanting to be more "white" or of class? (Because that hair Oprah has? That is some expensive damn hair.) What about extensions, or wigs? What does it mean for a black woman to have beautiful hair? We have a lot of options, but nearly all of them have some kind of political meaning, relative to how accepting or resistant one is to the white standard of beauty symbolized by, well, Hef's girlfriends, at least: long, straight, blonde hair.
So, calling a girl "nappy-headed"? It's a huge political insult with all kinds of "jungle bunny" implications. Yet keeping your hair natural is also a statement of rejection of those white standards of beauty. Yet, straightening your hair doesn't mean abandoning the race. And because so much black hair has been altered in some way, there's been a wholesale abandonment of being natural, an embrace of dyes and crazy hairstyles and the like because you can just make your hair do whatever with enough chemicals. Like so many other things for women, there is no perfect answer.
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 racist
Short answer: Don't ask people you don't know well if you can touch their hair. It's obnoxious. It always made me feel like a dog.
When I was a child, I had a very short curly afro haircut because my mother didn't really know how to deal with my hair. When I was fifteen, I started growing it out again, and after getting an unmanageable afro, on my beautician sister's advice, I started to flat iron it. Once a week I would wash it, blow it dry, run a very hot curling iron through it, and then wear it in a french braid the rest of the week. When I was a senior in high school I got upset that I couldn't do anything fun with it for a party, so my sister came over for an emergency cut where mysteriously, my curly hair started to fall, rather than frizz out sideways. In college I kept growing it out, putting very mild hair straightener on After a few years of that I sort of didn't need to do it anymore, and now I have shoulder-length, quite curly hair. Sometimes women-usually black women-ask me how I've done it and I have to answer honestly, "it's just like this," and they say, "you're lucky."
Hair within the black community is incredibly political, because it doesn't behave like white hair, hence the entirely separate culture of black hair salons (and products; take a trip down the aisle in your CVS sometime). Do you leave it natural and short? Do you straighten? Is straightened hair a signifier of wanting to be more "white" or of class? (Because that hair Oprah has? That is some expensive damn hair.) What about extensions, or wigs? What does it mean for a black woman to have beautiful hair? We have a lot of options, but nearly all of them have some kind of political meaning, relative to how accepting or resistant one is to the white standard of beauty symbolized by, well, Hef's girlfriends, at least: long, straight, blonde hair.
So, calling a girl "nappy-headed"? It's a huge political insult with all kinds of "jungle bunny" implications. Yet keeping your hair natural is also a statement of rejection of those white standards of beauty. Yet, straightening your hair doesn't mean abandoning the race. And because so much black hair has been altered in some way, there's been a wholesale abandonment of being natural, an embrace of dyes and crazy hairstyles and the like because you can just make your hair do whatever with enough chemicals. Like so many other things for women, there is no perfect answer.