back in the day when i was in college, i participated in a day long women's conference which focused on black women and issues affecting us. on a condition of attending for free, the conference organizers allowed students to volunteer to assist in some session (checking in attendees, scurrying about with microphones for the q&a sessions, etc.)
one of the sessions i attended was about black women and hair. and i am pretty sure that of all the women in the room, i was one of the few who had relaxed hair.
during the question and answer sessions, i noticed that a common theme kept getting aired by the attendees: natural was way better and relaxed hair was a huge indicator of the state of mind of the wearer.
and that state of mind was a disaster.
i got my turn at the mike and i asked if it didn't seem a little hypocritial to assume that a women who had relaxed hair was brainwashed when we JUST got finished talking about how women with natural hair are assumed to be angry, militant, and political.
the answer i received in return was the sound of crickets.
so here we are a good 12 years later and i'm now wearing my hair natural. and, when i think about it....i only have a few people i know who chemically relax their hair. my mom was natural and a few of my aunts have stopped relaxing their hair as well. and you know what?
none of us give a hot damn about how another woman decides to wear her hair. not even enough, really, to see Chris Rock running his trap about wigs and weaves.
yet, i'm noticing something going on amongst we black ladies out here: it feel like we're getting line up to fight about something stupid like hair texture and how we got it.
that all being said, there some i'd like to try to communicate without making people go all crazy:
there is a historical basis behind why black women started relaxing their hair in this country. am i saying a woman who relaxes her hair wants to look white? nope. i'm aware that she's a black woman who wants to look like a black woman with straight hair. but i am also aware of WHY having straight hair was so very important not so long ago in our collective history in this country. take a look at
racist memorabilia in this country and see what was done to us. any one of us can tell you of an instance in which the word nappy has been used in our lives, and not in a good ass way.
i recall overhearing a white classmate in middle school who lamented, while staring in the bathroom mirror at her straight hair, "ugh! my hair looks so
nappy and gross!"
while many of us can agree that you don't have to have straight hair to be considered attractive, professional, or feminine,
the messages about beauty and acceptability in this country that all women receive almost constantly don't honor this idea. we get the same treatment with body type and skin tone.
that being said, I found some blogs that address the opposing sides of the Hair Texture coin and one that happily lands smack in the middle.
She Said: Can I Touch Your Hair? Black Women and the Petting Zoo
She Said: Natural Elitist: Please Sit Down and Shut Up
REF!!: Who cares if you have a perm? I don't.
i completely agree with Assertive Wit in that we all have WAAAY too much to do than to sit around scrapping and biting at each other over our hair. like raising our children, fighting for equity in pay, getting our educations, lifting one another up, and holding it down for ourselves and ours.
we don't know each other's stories. let's just keep open minds instead of coming up with yet another false construct by which to justify our bad treatment of one another.
