She said vs. She said.

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.

A convert to the Church of Our Lady of the Satin Cap

i am ready to admit it: despite my research and the numerous blogs i've read, i can admit that i have found myself behaving as if my hair is invincible in its natural state.

confession time: i don't really pay that much attention to the ends of my hair and i do NOT sleep in a satin cap.

now, to my defense i've never used a satin cap. i've been lucky that my hair when relaxed was still pretty manageable after a full night's sleep so i never really bothered. and vanity caused me to decide that i did not want to go to bed looking like Miss Jane Pitman. and by go to bed, i mean "go to bed," ya feel me?

but an incident happened this morning while showering that made my blood run cold and quickly reminded me of the benefits and prudence of wrapping one's hair at night:

i fought the terrible fight with a  pretty tenacious fairy knot.

what's that? you say you've never heard of a fairy knot? well pray you never experience it. in my mind, i imagine the fairies responsible for this hair abomination look like this:

having experienced this (and the sensation of breaking out into a cold sweat while standing in a hot shower), i am convinced. Miss Pitman was a strong, proud, and most likely fairy knot free black woman. I'm praying at the same church she prayed.

but she can keep the water fountain.

FAIL

dear woman,

even before you went too daggone far with the hair, you were committing felony fuckery with the eyelashes. I sentence you to 9 semesters of black literature studies with a concentration on The Bluest Eye and a lifetime prescription refill of Latisse.

sincerely,

everybody

When your Conditioner Tries to Give you a Complex

one of the challenges women with natural hair have is finding that *perfect* mousturizing product that's going to help fight back the frizz without leaving a greasy residue. there are various notion and potions from bargain basement prices to sell a kidney prices.

and as fall begins to settle in and winter in at the back of my mind, i'm already thinking about hot oil treatments and deep conditioning treatments. i've already gotten a recommended leave-in conditioner, but i don't understand why it has to talk to me this way....

you see that? right up there...look!...."frizzy...dry...unmanageable hair"

now listen, despite what some may say, i am not a glass is always half empty type of chick. i can totally see the flip side of the coin: you buy a product for dry hair because it's going to give you crazy moisturizing.  but that word unmanageable pushes a button.

the same button that gets pushed when, in the new Starbucks commercial, they show the people who look like their pets and the natural hair sporting black woman owns a black poodle.

some may say i sound paranoid and i'm making mountains out of molehills. but that's the funny thing about being fed a constant stream of overt and covert negative messages about your hair: after awhile, you just start seeing it everywhere.

so, while i will gladly own the descriptor "frizzy" because there are definite moments in which i look like Angela B. Davis....like now.....


i REFUSE to be labeled UNMANAGEABLE! yeah, i'm looking at you, Garnyay!....you're lucky your product is amazing and you smell so nice.

otherwise, i'd totally quit you.

A little ditty for the stranger on the bus.

there is a sort of solidarity one feels when you see another woman wearing her hair natural. maybe it's because you know not too many women choosing to no straighten their hair are receiving positive feedback. when you see other women "doing them" and being completely confident in that, it's an awesome thing.

and that is why i basically wanted to turn into a blathering fan-girl when i saw another woman on the morning express bus with some of the most amazingly spoingy, moisturized, shiny curls i have seen!! I wanted to ask her what she uses, how long she's been natural, what's her care routine, does she wrap her hair, what kinds of reactions have you gotten.....but you know, she was talking to someone and i didn't know her like that.

or at all.

But since i didn't ask these questions, i will instead devote this song to the curly stranger on the bus. Work It, Girl!

Shingling: a technique that may make your heart sing.

poking around on the youtube this evening, i decided to drop Miss Jessie's Silkening into the search box. i love watching youtube videos because there are so many women who have created helpful videos sharing their tips on styles, care, and how to choose the best products for hair texture.

i happened across a video which illustrated a technique called shingling, which apparently is one of the signature styling techniques used by the ladies at Miss Jessie's salon.

let's just say i cannot wait until i have enough hair on my head to try this out.

it.looks.AWESOME!

additional instruction can be found at the Miss Jessie's website as well. Go check it out!


* that's not shingling but i included the pic because her hair is gorgeous.

The Instyler hates your kinky hair, sis.

If there is one thing my friends no about me it's that i have a stupid weekend obsession with infomercials. i love watching these mini-tv shows, where they try to sell you cheaply made items dirt cheap (or not so dirt cheap) with the promise of satisfaction.

Most of these infomercials rope me in pretty easily, but the main thing stopping me if i'm broke: how can i buy a $290 vacuum cleaner when my water bill is late??? and everyone i've told is quite relieved to hear that i've given up my dream if making a Thanksgiving turkey in a Nu-wave convection oven.

That being said, i must admit that the infomercial for the InStyler rotating flat-iron has really, really, really, REALLY harshed my buzz. and i was finally driven to my keyboard by the cosigning of Kimberly Locke of the wonders and magic of this $300.00 $89.00 $45.00 $14.95 for 30 days hair tool.

when i started this blog, i made it clear that i'm not part of the "if you relax or straighten your hair, you're lost" movement. i believe we should make the choices that make us happy with ourselves, but that we should also we aware of the history behind why certain beauty standards prevail and what kind of messages we received about our natural selves, which originally drove the straightening of hair in African American women. if you want straight hair, fine.

just understand that straight hair is NOT more beautiful than natural hair. don't fall for the oky-doke.

yet, the people shilling the Instyler apparently didn't get this message. throughout the infomercial, naturally kinky hair gets the slam. and I mean slam! Cue Kimberly Locke:

as she sits in the chair, about to have her hair styled with the tool, the stylist talks about how her natural hair is dry and very difficult to manage, saying he has spent hours in the past trying to get her hair straight. and then he proceeds to link straight hair with hair that is pretty, shiny, and healthy. he takes one section of her natural hair and says "look how when i drop it, it just falls in a clump!" but the hair he's straightened with the Rod of God? "it falls beautifully and softly! and look how healthy* it looks!!"

and the whole time he's dogging out the hair that grows naturally from her head, she's sitting there grinning like a mook! and camera shots of the other black women (yeah, both of them) in the audience showed them shaking their damn heads in agreement. for a second, i thought the one with the extra long hair was going to get the spirit and start doing the jesus dance around the stage!

sure, sure, i know what you're saying: "doesn't it make sense for someone selling a flat-iron to speak highly of straight hair, helllloooo?"

yeah, yes it does. but that doesn't mean you have portray hair that is not naturally straight as dry, lifeless, unruly, and hard to manage. that's the same message black women have been receiving about our hair since forever and frankly, i'm over it. and i'm really irritated they found a black woman willing to put her limited star power behind the message that straight hair is better hair.

there's an 80s song that i have been caught singing on more than one occasion that has a lyric line saying "just because you're right doesn't mean i'm wrong."

there's enough room at the Beauty Bar for everyone, quit trying to elbow me back.

*if anyone can show me actual proof that applying heat directly to AA women's hair makes it more healthy by changing the structure of the curl pattern, i'll tell you to quit smoking crack. applying direct heat like that over long periods of time is damaging, period.

Ps: duh.