Mar 14, 2021
When Grown Folks Are Afraid of Hair
While watching a recent news story, I was truly, truly disgusted at the pride some Southern lawmakers showed at “learning about Natural hair.” While I applaud their effort, is it really that serious? Really?
Just two days ago, I was visiting with my mother (read: sitting at my mother’s house surrounded by children and eating too much junk food), and a news story appeared. Okay, it was supposed to be one of those feel-good local stories in which no one was murdered, killed in a car accident, and no home was burned down. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Quite frankly, I’m tired of having murder with my morning coffee and drunk driving/home fire accidents with my night-cap. Morning homicide totals are not normal and no one can convince me that they are.
But…the feel-good story was about a Black state Tennessee lawmaker chaperoning a white state Tennessee lawmaker as they attempt to learn about Black folks’ natural hair. I sat there, with my daughter, niece, and nephew asking me for one more sugar cookie (I should not have been eating them, either), and became silently enraged. I was insulted. It’s hair. Why does any adult human being need a damn field trip in order to learn about the hair that grows out of my scalp? It’s hair. We are in the middle of a pandemic, over 500,000 people are dead, millions of people are either laid off or underemployed, thousands of small business owners have had to close shop, the Deep South governors went to the conservative class reunion and lost their minds, Memphis has already experienced a race-based vaccine flurb, and hair? Hair? To paraphrase the disgust of Iverson (imagine the tone here, because you can’t “read” tone, but just imagine it), hair. We talking ‘bout hair.
We are not talking about the gains made with the vaccine distribution. We are not talking about the passage of one of the largest stimulus packages ever. In ArkaMemphiSsippi, we talking ‘bout hair. We are not talking about the actual events of January 6, 2021 and the fall-out. We are not talking about things that actually matter. We are talking about hair. And listen, it is unfair of me to blame Memphis. It was not Memphis. It was A STATE LAWMAKER SPONSORING A TRIP TO HELP WHITE FOLKS LEARN ABOUT BLACK FOLKS HAIR.
It’s hair. Why are grown people afraid of hair? If you just read that rhetorical question and are now saying, “that sounds silly,” then you, dear Reader, are right. I can make light of the situation all I want to, but you know what, Reader? It was not about the hair. It is never about the hair. It has never been about the hair. Black folks’ hair carries and has always carried with it political implications. It looks different from white folks’ hair. And for that, we have been historically punished. Personally, I see nothing wrong with the hair that grows out of my scalp as is. That’s the way the good Lord intended for it to grow and if He had wanted it different, He would have fixed it that way. God is deliberate that way, so why should I let people make me feel like God did not know what He was doing when He fixed my hair nappy and painted my behind brown and pointed it toward the ground?
But historically, that has been the case with people of African descent. If we trace the development of scientific racism, and it grew in the shadows of the Enlightenment, we can see how the development of race-based slavery made hair more than just hair. Scientific discourse, which is supposed to be “objective” of the time, linked African intellectual capacity/internal rectitude/decision-making to physical characteristics. Entire scientific books — an entire science (phrenology) — were written to demonstrate how the various physical traits of African people made them more akin to animals intellectually and morally. And these were not things from “lower-class” folk or women or people who would be otherwise inconsequential to European/American society at the time. These were the leading philosophers and scientists of the day.
For example, Samuel A. Cartwright, a leading physician in the United States, published an article entitled, “Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race.” This article declared that draeptomania, a psychological condition, and not white exploitation, made slaves want to run away from the plantation. Some of the same philosophers who championed liberty and reason, put forth race-based diatribes that also carried with them gender restrictions. A perfect example is Hegel’s “Thesis on Africa.” Hegel declares that African men should be made slaves by white men, because they just could not properly subdue those abnormally large, brutish African women who could strangle a king to death with their bare hands.
Even well-meaning thinkers and writers repeated the uneven dichotomy of white/black. William Blake’s “Little Black Boy” is one such effort.
One does not have to possess an extreme amount of perspicacity in order to know that the color of the skin taints but “white” of the soul means purity. Though Blake is considered a towering genius of the Romantic era, he was still a man of his time, and the best philosophers of his time put forth ideas that having skin of color was some kind of marker of quintessential impurity and intellectual incapacity.
So, while I was disgusted at the hair story, when I trace the roots of the obsession with our roots, it’s not about the hair. As a matter of fact, the hot comb is the United States’ first affirmative action program. A development of the United States’ industrial North, the hot comb and bleaching creams are tools in African Americans’ attempt to make white Americans more comfortable with our physical characteristics. We have been trying, for more than 100 years, to make our physical appearance “acceptable” and less of a marker so that we may reap the benefits of the physical labor that our ancestors put in. Here is an advertisement from Colored American Magazine in 1908. Read it.
Now, this little advertisement guarantees that if you purchase the “Wonder Uncurl” and the “Complexion Wonder,” you will advance commercially. These things were advertised at a time when there was large immigration from Europeans. In America’s industrial North, these Europeans, many of them who could not speak English, were given opportunities that used to be for “free people of color.” In order to level the playing field, Black people began trying to bleach their skin and straighten their hair in order to compete economically with people who could not speak English.
Now, I can continue to pout about this news story, or I could look at it like this: I live in a time when African Americans have grown weary of trying to make white Americans comfortable with our physical appearance. And I can say that this is nothing new. In the 1960s and 1970s, Black people began wearing their hair, as God intended, without damaging thermal or chemical straightening.
The “Afro” or “The Natural” became popular. It also became a political statement. For me, as a child of the 1980s, watching reruns of Good Times and What’s Happening, they were just hair styles for me. Because my parents were young adults in the 1970s, I lived much of my childhood watching movies from the 1970s. I don’t think my Dad’s sense of cool ever grew past Earth, Wind, and Fire’s “You’re a Shining Star.” For me, Tamara Dobson, with her height and towering Afro, was the most beautiful woman in the world as Cleopatra Jones. As a child, who was subject to the stings and burns of this torture device:
I dreamed of the day when I could get Sugarfoot’s Afro from the Ohio Players! Oh, that Afro looked like freedom to me.
That’s Sugar Foot in the back with the Afro that covers his whole face.
For most of my life, I’d been chided for my “bad,” nappy hair. While most African Americans with a soft grade of hair would talk about the amount of Native Americans in their family, I could not boast of any such thing. By the roots of my hair, the only tribe in my veins came from Africa. My hair was extremely long, but every six weeks, I endured that torture session. Then, one day in the early 2000s, I just decided to stop chemically burning my scalp. God said everything He made was good. He didn’t say, “Everything I made is good, except Black folk hair. Yeah, I dropped the ball on that. Let me make these chemists to help them uncurl those kinks.” So, just like that, I just stopped chemically straightening my hair. I wore braids for while, then I got tired of that. After six months, I shaved off all of my relaxed hair and was left with an Afro about two inches long. Eventually, I got my Sugar Foot Afro, but my hair grew so rapidly, that it only lasted for about two weeks.
When I first shaved my hair off, I thought nothing of it. It was the early 2000s, and I thought surely, we no longer have to jump through the hoops that we need to in order to make white people more comfortable with our physical appearance. I was looking forward to the days when I could look and dress like Cleopatra Jones. It was a matter of style and chemical burns to me. Reader, I am saddened to write that most of the flack that I got came from Black folk. Some said that I would never find a job with my natural hair. Someone asked me if I had converted to Islam. Only Muslims can accept themselves as God made them? Some said that as an instructor in higher education, I was a bad influence on our young people who would face discrimination in a racist world who hated the way we looked. Why not make it easier on them and teach them how to better assimilate?
Through it all, I maintained that God thinks of my hair, my Black and nappy hair, as good because He made it. And now, I look around and natural hair is EVERYWHERE now. Still, why in the Hell are grown folk scared of hair? Why? It’s hair. Hair. We talking about hair. But then again, it’s not the hair, is it? It never was. The fascination with our hair and even our disrespect of our hair is a relic of scientific racism and its vestiges.
Actually, though this passage may seem intensely personal, I have taught this advertisement in Composition II and African American Studies.
