The Root of the Matter

One day, my habitually late professor was later than usual arriving to class. My classmates and I spent the time catching up with one another. One student, we’ll call him “Joe,” walked in and settled down in a seat a few desks away from mine. After a moment Joe turned to me and asks "Z, is that the real deal?" waving his hands around his head. "I like it."

It took me a moment to realize that he was referring to my hair, and after my initial shock dissipated, I hesitantly answered "Yes… it is.”
I could tell that he did not, could not understand the gravity of what he’d just asked me. At what point did it become socially acceptable to ask someone whether or not some part of them is natural? I would never have dared to ask if a woman has made some sort of augmentation to her body or if a man is wearing a toupee, especially in a public setting.

Joe, a white male, blundered into what many would consider a social faux pas. There was no way that I could effectively show him how his clumsy question had exposed the liberties that people of privilege take when making assumptions at the expense of others. After a rather palpable awkward silence, I asked, “What if it wasn’t my hair? Would you really expect me to answer that?”

For so many women, hair is powerful. It carries weight, meaning, and definition. It can be the source of one’s self-esteem, or the root of self-loathing. It is linked to some western women’s level of confidence in both social and professional settings. It is a statement, an expression, an opportunity to communicate to those around you without saying a word. Whether it is closely cropped or long and flowing, midnight black or platinum blond, straight as rain falling or coiled as the graceful curls of smoke from a lit candle; hair is identity for so many women. With it, one can do everything from flirt to seduce, punctuate to intimidate, acquiesce to outright defy. And it is the cornerstone of the multi-billion dollar beauty industry, an industry that women of color spend the most in and yet profit from the least.

I recently watched Chris Rock’s documentary “Good Hair” where he explores the lengths to which some women in the African American community are willing to go to style their hair, from chemical relaxers to the different types of weaves. While informative and hilariously entertaining, it left me wishing for deeper examination of the psychosocial implications of hair in communities of color. It did touch on them, but superficially at best, and at times ran dangerously close to sacrificing cultural respect in exchange for a few laughs. While it provided a look into the dynamic of hair in black communities, it did so without real context (in my opinion), and made trivial what women of color spend fortunes trying to understand and gain control of. The concept of “good hair” and “bad hair” in African communities is itself, a testament to the years of degradation that our great-grandmothers underwent, and the multi-generational aftereffects that women of color today continue to suffer from. In essence, we are born with “bad hair.” And through processes of heating, dying, neutralizing, relaxing, chemically burning, beating hair into obedience, we achieve at last what is believed to be “good hair.” Good, bad, good, bad… just about hair.

So there we were, his rapidly growing embarrassment matched only by my equally growing delight in seeing him backpedal. He mumbling something about "Beyonce’s song...pat your weave..." then he started saying how fake hair is the same as his color contact lenses, as though that should be some consolation. I did not allow him any reprieve by responding, just let him dangle over the abyss of social awkwardness he’d dug for himself.

Though his ignorance irritated me, what stung the most was the fact that it highlighted the significant pressures placed on African women to fit in with society’s standards of beauty; one that does not include us, our hair, our skin, our lineage. When it’s all said and done, a woman’s hair is her own. Whether it’s hers because she grew it or because she bought it is inconsequential. And if she decided on curls tomorrow, flat-ironed the next day, a G.I. Jane cut, or a full weave she should celebrate it as an art, a form of self expression, and not the definition of who she is.