The significance of black women’s hair is nothing new. In many West African cultures, hair possesses a spiritual, aesthetic, and sociocultural importance. During the fifteenth century, many tribes, such as the Wolof, Mende, Mandingo, and Yoruba used hairstyles as a communication system through which they carried messages. The comb was a special implement, too. Men would carve symbols into combs that indicated their religion, family history, and class. As Africans were transported to the New World, their hair became defiled by perspiration, blood, sweat, feces, and urine, and so slave traders shaved their heads, justifying this practice for sanitary reasons. However, many writers and researchers believe it was also intended to dehumanize them and strip them of any legacy from their respective cultures.3
When they finally arrived in the New World, Africans had no palm oil, combs, and herbal ointments with which to treat their hair. Instead, they made do with cornmeal and kerosene for scalp cleaners, coffee as a natural dye, and butter to condition. Field slaves especially were not encouraged to invest in hair care, and the women wore scarves for both aesthetic and comfort purposes. But scarves were also enforced as a means of repression. In 1786, Governor Esteban Rodríguez Miró of the then-Spanish provinces of Florida and Louisiana, passed restrictions affecting black women, called the tignon laws. These mandated that women of African descent, either enslaved or free, cover their heads with a knotted headdress so that they would not compete with white women in beauty, dress, and manner, or confuse white men who might otherwise make inappropriate advances towards them.
Over three hundred years later, our culture is still grappling with how to control black women’s bodies and identities through their hair. Before 2014, two-strand twists were not accepted in the US Army, Air Force, or Navy. In that same year, both the Army and Air Force decided to remove the words “matted” and “unkempt” from their grooming guidelines. In 2013, the Horizon Science Academy administration in Lorain, Ohio, sent a letter to parents outlining a ban on afro-puffs and small twisted braids. That same year, seven-year-old Tiana Parker of Deborah Brown Community School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was sent home for having dreadlocks because they did not look “presentable” and would “distract from the respectful and serious atmosphere it strives for.” In 2016, the administration of Butler Traditional High School in Louisville, Kentucky, sent home a list of guidelines mandating that hair be kept “clean and neat at all times” and banning dreadlocks, cornrows, and twists because they are “extreme, distracting, or attention-getting.”4
In pop culture, we don’t take kindly to black women with natural hair. When I was growing up, the only black female characters whom I saw regularly with natural hair were Moesha and Maxine from Living Single, although their hair was always styled in braids, not in an afro or twists.5
When we straighten our hair with chemical products, we are surrendering to the dominant white culture. We do this to appear more docile; we do this to get jobs, move in and out of various social circles. This is not to say that every woman who gets a perm is subjugating herself. For many it is truly an aesthetic choice.
Around age fifteen, I’d had enough of the creamy crack and so I stopped, cold turkey. I didn’t realize until my hair broke off that you cannot quit any drug cold turkey. You have to be weaned off it. I hid my hair’s damage with braids, weaves, ponytail clips, and full wigs. I flinch now at photos from that time. My thick hair puffed out from my scalp underneath straight dark brown hair. Anyone could see where my real hair ended and the weave began. In the summer, the difference was far worse. If I flat-ironed the hair left out of the weave, I had to make sure I didn’t make too sharp of a movement in windy weather, or engage in too much activity, because my hair would puff out again. I wore wigs that aged me, but at least my hair then was entirely straight, an ideal I was still chasing; I could be less picky about the length. Braids gave me length but not straightness. In both cases, I was never satisfied because I never fully accepted what came naturally out of my own scalp. It was not worth adding onto what brought me shame; no genuine happiness could come from any extension of my hair.
In the summer of 2015, news broke that Rachel Dolezal, the president of the NAACP Spokane chapter and former professor of Africana studies at Eastern Washington University, had been masquerading as a black woman when she was, in fact, born to two white parents. Dolezal predicated much of her racial identity on outward appearances. She wore bronze foundation and traditionally African-American hairstyles, such as micro braids and kinky wigs, in her effort to “be” a black woman. When asked about her race, Dolezal first said, “I don’t understand that question,” and in a later interview, she said, “I wouldn’t say that I’m African-American, but I would say that I’m black.” And then she explained she was “transracial,” which is not only bullshit but an insult to people of color who are not afforded the privilege of a malleable identity. I do not condone what Dolezal did. I abhor it, actually. But interestingly enough, she caused me to turn inward, to consider my experiences, my looks, my ideas, and piece together what black womanhood means. And believe me, it is more than naps and brown skin. I may not be able to fully articulate that thing, but that’s because I’ve never been asked how and who I imagine myself and other black women to be.
Since slavery, black womanhood has represented the perverse, the grotesque, the ugly. Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin defined a grotesque image as one that is frightening and funny at the same time, and there is no more acute example of this than Hottentot Venus, whose large body was a source of entertainment for white people.
Born in 1789 in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, Sara “Saartjie” Baartman experienced great hardship at a young age. Both of her parents died before she reached adulthood, her fiancé was murdered by Dutch colonists, and her child also died. Because Baartman had steatopygia, or extremely large buttocks, she drew the attention of Hendrik Cesars, in whose house she worked as a servant, and Englishman William Dunlop, who sought to capitalize on her body. Legend has it that although Baartman was illiterate, she signed a contract that she would travel with both Cesars and Dunlop to Europe in order to participate in shows. Promoters nicknamed her “Hottentot Venus,” “hottentot” being a derogative term used by the Dutch towards the Khoisan people, an indigenous group of Southern Africa. Besides gawking at her onstage, wealthy people could pay for private exhibitions of her in their homes where they were allowed to touch her. After Baartman died at twenty-six, naturalist Georges Cuvier not only preserved her skeleton, but also pickled her brain and genitals, containing them in jars and displaying them at Paris’s Museum of Man. They remained there until 1974.
We as black women are not afforded ownership over our own identities, our own bodies, the color of our skin and the texture of our hair, and yet white women can appropriate our bodies in order to suit their own selfish desires. bell hooks writes in “Eating the Other” that “. . . ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture.” White women’s privilege allows them to do this with little, if any, reproach.