Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about what I look like. I certainly make sure I’m neat and clean when I walk out of the door, but you will never find me amongst the ranks of women who spend hours on hair, makeup, and other cosmetic diversions. This is partly due to my feminist ideals and partly due to practicality and partly due to just plain laziness. I shouldn’t have to spend more than 15 minutes to look good. I shouldn’t have to spend *any* time conforming to society’s (read: white men’s) notions about how I should look or worrying about first wrinkles or young-looking teeth or any other damn thing cosmetic companies want to make up to make you feel inadequate. I shouldn’t be concerned about how other people think I look, only how I think I look.

That said, I do believe there is a difference between chasing unrealistic beauty standards and making informed decisions about your health and well-being. For example, advancements in dental care today are often focused on improving function, comfort, and long-term oral health rather than simply appearance. An interesting discussion of these developments can be found at https://www.dentaltown.com/channel/post/25750/the-latest-advances-in-dental-implant-technology-what-practitioners-need-to-know, which highlights how modern dental implant technology is helping people restore confidence and quality of life in practical, meaningful ways. In that sense, taking care of yourself doesn’t have to be about meeting someone else’s expectations—it can simply be about feeling healthy, comfortable, and confident on your own terms.

For the most part, I’m not. The most part.

Right now I’m very much stuck on hair. For the past few months I’ve been noticing other people’s hair and wanting desperately to comment on it, give advice, and other such things one doesn’t do to perfect strangers. The reason is that I’ve become more aware of my own hair lately due to my job.

I write and do web-work for an online fashion magazine. My friends find this incredibly funny due to my aforementioned not caring about fashion and cosmetics and other such things. To me, it’s just a job. I make the web pages and don’t have to know my Manolo from my Prada. But when my boss gave me some shampoo and conditioner for curly hair and told me to write about their effectiveness, I started to really consider my hair for the first time in years.

Obviously, I’m a black woman. And, like most black women, my mother started relaxing my hair at an early age. Five years old, I believe. This is something black people do. As soon as that hair gets long enough or too hard to comb, off to the hair dresser you go to get those kinks stamped out like the evil bastards they are. If you’re not a guy and you’re not sporting a ‘fro, you need to have your hair straightened. Then, of course, it’s up to you to spend hours blow-drying it and using every different kind of curling iron on the planet to curl the ends under or something more complicated. The point is that one’s hair is straight or regimentally curled – like a white person’s.

This is how I related to my hair in childhood. I spent long hours trying to get my hair perfectly straight only to have genetics and humidity foil me over and over. Then I tried to get my hair curly, which required mad curing iron skills or painful nights in rollers. And then there was my father. Dear God, there was my father.

My father is one of those black people who, due to his skin color and ‘good hair’, can pass quite easily for a white man. His genes + my mother’s genes gave me my own brand of ‘good hair’. But my father was obsessed with giving me, at 7, complicated hairstyles and cuts I could not possibly maintain. I, stupidly, allowed a hairdresser to cut my hair like my stepmother’s when I was 11 because my father insisted. I should have known better, but I adored my father and listened to him against my better judgment. I would live with that mistake until I was 17 and finally grew that evil cut/mullet business out over a summer.

All through this trauma, of course, was the relaxing and recurling and other frying of my hair. I did all of these things even though they a) hurt and b) never came out the way hair dressers promised/I envisioned, because this is what most black people do. This is The Way. Thou shalt not deviate from The Way.

The summer before my senior year in high school I read a book called Every Good Bye Ain’t Gone for a special class. In it there was an entire chapter about the (black, female) author’s struggles with her hair and trying to find good people to do it. One of my classmates, a black female with very close-cropped curly hair, wondered why the author wasted her time with a whole chapter on this small topic. I was completely surprised to hear this coming from that particular student. I was only 17 at the time, but if I’d written about my life up until that point, there would definitely be a whole chapter on hair. Now? Maybe two.

After all, talking about black people’s hair isn’t just a matter of finding a good style or a good dresser or a good product. It’s also about how we as black people feel about how our hair looks in its natural state and what we do based on those feelings. It’s also about how American society and culture (read: white folks) feels about what black people do with their hair. If you don’t think that black people’s hair isn’t a battleground for issues of race and culture and assimilation and bigotry, you haven’t been paying attention to the news.

When a U.S. Congresswoman can be called names because of her hairstyle (or lack thereof) and people can be denied/fired from jobs for not wearing a hairstyle that makes white people feel comfortable, there is a serious, serious problem. Even in the black community, straight hair is considered more acceptable because it emulates white people’s hair. It doesn’t emulate white hair well, but it’s closer to assimilation than braids or dredlocs. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard black people praise a woman’s straightened/fried hair or go on and on about the merits of ‘good hair’ while remarking on how much of a shame it is to waste long hair on dredlocs. Braids are more acceptable to blacks than dreds, perhaps because they are considered ‘cleaner’ and can be undone easily if one wants to go back to relaxer. Dreds must be cut completely.

And Lord help the poor woman who wants to go without braids, locs, or relaxer and have a natural hairstyle. Everyone and their mama will talk about her like a damn dog. That is, unless she’s got hair like mine.

When I went off to college in New York City I knew maintaining my hair was going to be a challenge. Everything in NYC was more expensive, including the salon. I couldn’t afford $80-$300 relaxers, even if it was only every 3 months. I had to eat. I embraced baseball caps and scarves until I could go home for holidays.

One day during my sophomore year I stepped out of the shower, looked in the mirror, and noticed something extraordinary. Half of my hair was wavy. Really wavy. Trying to be curly. This was the top half, the bottom half was straight – leftover from my last relaxer, so many months before. I never knew that my hair was wavy/curly, I always thought it was just bushy, kinky, and untamable.

What else was I supposed to think? I had black people’s hair.

Good hair, certainly, because it was thick and styleable. But certainly not that good.

I decided to let my natural hair grow out to see what it really looked like. The result: I have fabulous hair, y’all. I have, naturally, the hair I always dreamed of having. It curls in coils/ringlets and will either curl in big locks or small sections, giving me a modicum of control over the amount of body it has. I have white girl hair.

Now wait a damn minute, you’re saying. Didn’t we just go over black people’s hair esteem issues and didn’t you basically express an opinion that wanting hair like white people’s is bad? I did, yeah. But that’s an intellectual view of the situation. Emotionally, I was so happy to have white girl hair I flaunted it all over the place. I found the perfect product to keep it from going over into frizzyness and proceeded to flip, play with, and highlight the merits of my hair every chance I got. I went a little crazy for a while.

I’ve come to understand that my hair is actually more typical of black people than many realize. After all, most blacks in this country have some white blood in them, and that affects the relative kinkiness of the hair. There are still many of people with a nice, tight kink, but there are plenty of us with this medium kink as well. (They don’t know it, though, because they’ve never gone without a relaxer.) White people also possess this medium kink, though they tend to call it ‘ringlets’. This is the kind of curl most women are trying to get when they get perms. Jewish people, as far as I can tell, have it in abundance.

The understanding came when, under the auspices of the magazine, I visited a salon in Brooklyn dedicated to natural, curly hair. They can work with people of any ethnic background, but most of their clientele are black women. Going to Miss Jessie’s Salon opened my eyes to just how many black women out there are dealing with hair similar to mine and fighting against the same kind of indoctrination I did. The women who own the salon are doing something – Dare I say it? Dare! Dare! – radical. They’re telling women with kinks and curls that their hair can be beautiful and natural and easy to maintain.

The end result is that I am lucky in that I know I possess such hair and that my natural hair style is acceptable to mainstream white society. I am even luckier in that I now know how to keep my hair looking wonderful and curly with a minimum of fuss (thanks to my testing products for the fashion magazine). My long hair odyssey is over. I have wash & wear hair.

But I can’t help feeling as if this is a bit of a cheat. I’ve resolved my hair problems without resolving my hair problem. I haven’t addressed that part of myself that wants to have long, flowing, shiny hair because that’s the standard of beauty American culture has shoved down my throat since I first started watching TV. Every now and then I still get the urge to straighten my hair (which I did once, about 18 months ago, with a flat iron and a very patient hair dresser) because I know it will look good that way. I have two reactions whenever this desire crops up: 1. If you relax your hair it will take you hours to do every day, make our hair unhealthy, and it will take years to get it back to curly. 2. If you go straight you will be denying your heritage, your racial background, your individuality, and your right to be a proud black woman with proud black hair.

I feel my priorities may be out of order on this one.

The issues surrounding black folk’s hair will continue on and on for the foreseeable future. Especially if black people keep giving each other shit about their choices. Even with hair like mine I still get crap from my family. The same women who raised me to be proud of my skin, my ancestors, and my heritage will take one look at my curls and say, “Why don’t you let me take you to Ms J’s and get your hair straightened? It would look so pretty…”

When you’ve got militant traditionalists handing you pamphlets about the evils of relaxer and assimilation on one side and black colleges like Hampton University banning ‘unusual’ hairstyles like braids on the other, it’s hard to know what to feel or think.

I’ll get militant for a moment and say that any hairstyle requirements outside of being neat, manageable, and not an unnatural color are damn stupid, possibly racist, and fueled by ignorance. It’s true that people will make assumptions about you based on how you look and how you choose to wear your hair, but we as black people are completely falling down on forcing American society to accept that our hair, in any state – natural, relaxed, braided, loced – is just as legit as any of the crazy shit white people do to their hair. And we should force them to recognize this.

Black folks allowed the media to obsess about Cynthia McKinney’s hair and probably won’t protest Judge Mablean’s absence from Divorce Court because, deep down, we feel that hair styles that reflect assimilation attitudes are better, more desirable, and culturally correct. Personally, I’m more for individual preference and expression. If you like the way your hair looks when it’s relaxed, even if outside forces are at the heart of that feeling, then wear your hair that way. If you prefer a natural style, from locs to curls like mine, even if it means the loss of employment or respect, then wear it. There are advantages and drawbacks to either choice.

I have no conclusion to offer. However, I do have further reading. Check out these books:

Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America
Naked: Black Women Bare All About Their Skin, Hair, Hips, Lips, and Other Parts

And these articles:

The politics of hair – Neal Boortz edition
Still Trying to Kick the Kink (the comments are very interesting)
On The Road: American Writers and Their Hair

Here we are standing at the intersection of politics, race relations, and hair care. Who knew that all three could be so intertwined? And yet, they are.

Crass Commercialism

Unpaid Pimping: I love the Love Your Curls t-shirt from NaturallyCurly.com. I’m honestly in danger of wearing it out.

Pimping: I made a Zazzle store so I could make a shirt telling people not to touch my hair. I figured other folks might want one. Also has the Guide to Hair Etiquette on the back.

Tags: Cynthia McKinney, black+hair, dredlocks, dredlocs, braids, relaxer, natural+hair, black+peoples+hair, curly+hair, kinky+hair, kinks, race, culture