Style: Black hair, still tangled in politics

2009/10/24

When it comes to straightening hair or letting it be natural, the choice pushes deep emotional buttons for many African-American women, writes CATHERINE SAINT LOUIS

SILKY straight hair has long been considered by many black women to be their crowning glory. So what if getting that look meant enduring the itchy burning that’s a hallmark of many chemical straighteners. Or a pricey dependence on “creamy crack”, as relaxers are sometimes jokingly called.

Getting “good hair” often means transforming tightly coiled roots; but it is also more freighted, for many African-American women and some men, than simply a choice about grooming.

Straightening hair has been perceived as a way to be more acceptable to certain relatives, as well as to the white establishment.

“If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed,” the comedian Paul Mooney, sporting an Afro, says in the documentary Good Hair, which won a jury prize at the Sundance film festival and comes out this month (see page Y4).

“If your hair is nappy, they’re not happy.”

Tyra Banks and other celebrities use weaves to go “from short to shoulder-length and back again”

The movie, made by Hollywood actor and comedian Chris Rock, explores the lengths black women go to get long, straightened locks, from a US$1,000 (RM3,500) weave on a teacher’s salary to schoolgirls having their hair chemically relaxed.

In the face of cultural pressure, the thinking goes, conformists relax their hair, and rebels have the courage not to.

In some corners, relaxing your hair is even seen as wishing to be white.

“For black women, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” said Ingrid Banks, an associate professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

“If you’ve got straight hair, you’re pegged as selling out. If you don’t straighten your hair,” she said, “you’re seen as not practising appropriate grooming practices.”

Anyone who thought such preconceptions were outdated would have been reminded otherwise by some negative reactions to President Barack Obama’s 11-year-old daughter, Malia, who wore her hair in twists while in Rome this summer.

Commenters on the conservative blog Free Republic attacked her as unfit to represent America for stepping out unstraightened.

Although legions of black women in America straighten their hair (including First Lady Michelle), hair salons specialising in natural styles have proliferated, and more black women are working with their virgin hair.

Many wear their twists, locks or teenie-weenie Afros (known as TWAs) with an attitude — proud to have not given in to the pressure to straighten hair.

In Good Hair, Nia Long, the actress, describes the conventional wisdom that straightened hair is more desirable: “There’s always a sort of pressure within the black community, like ‘Oh, if you have good hair, you’re prettier or better than the brown-skinned girl that wears an Afro or the dreads or the natural hairstyle.’”

For some, the battle lines are drawn.

But in recent interviews, a number of people of colour expressed weariness with the debate.

They asked, essentially: Why can’t hair just be hair? Must an Afro peg a woman as the political heir to Angela Davis? Is a fashionista who replicates Michelle’s clean-cut bob really being untrue to herself?

“I am who I am regardless of how I wear my hair,” said Tywana Smith, an owner of Treasures Locks, a website devoted to upkeep of relaxed and natural hair.

“I want my kids to be seen for who they are, not for how they wear their hair,” she added.

“Whether they walk down the street with twists or braids, they aren’t making any other statement other than ‘Today I felt like twists.’”

Assumptions about the motives for straightening or wearing hair natural aren’t as easy to make as they once were.

During the last presidential campaign, Noliwe M. Rooks, the associate director of the Centre for African American Studies at Princeton, had many conversations about what it meant when the hair of Sasha and Malia was pressed straight.

“Unlike earlier times, the conclusion wasn’t ‘clearly she had sold out’, or ‘she’s saying straight hair is better’,” Rooks said.

“There’s a complexity to who we are now. There wasn’t an easy answer to why.”

Afua Adusei-Gontarz, 30, of Brooklyn, wore her hair natural for five years in a French braid, two-strand twists or a puffy ponytail.

But she doesn’t think those looks made her more authentically black.

“If you have natural hair, you’re considered more real, or in touch with your African-ness,” said Adusei-Gontarz, an assistant editor at Columbia University Press.

She rejects that thinking: In Ghana, her older relatives relax their hair — as she does now but for convenience — and “it’s more the newer generations who have natural hair.”

Last year, sales of home relaxers totalled US$45.6 million (excluding Wal-Mart), according to Mintel, a market research firm, a figure that has held steady in recent years.

So many African-American women use relaxers or a hot comb to get a straight look temporarily that not doing so can require courage.

Online, where black women discuss hair, commenters may support the natural look for strangers but don’t adopt it, said Rooks, the author of Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women.

“I’m not brave enough,” they write — “it’s so wonderful that you can accept yourself as you are.”

The “good hair” issue has almost always skewed toward women. Black men with highly textured hair have long had a convenient, socially acceptable option: a close trim.

Many black women get into the habit of relaxing hair as girls — when the choice is made by their mother or another relative — so changing the status quo as an adult can be difficult.

For many people no matter their race or hair texture, accepting yourself “as you are” is a high bar. The history of beauty is one of dissatisfaction and transformation: brunettes become blondes; white women get their curly hair Japanese-straightened.

To go from short to shoulder-length and back again, celebrities from Britney Spears to Queen Latifah use weaves, which require a stylist to sew or to glue someone else’s hair into tracks on the scalp.

So why, asks Brian Smith, who runs TreasuredLocks.com with his wife Tywana, is a hairstyle a “political or social statement” primarily among African-Americans?

He has had customers implore him to stop giving hair care advice to people who use relaxers because “you’re helping these women sell out”.

But he and his wife, who now twists her hair herself after years of relaxing it, don’t take sides.

The term “natural” is itself problematic, said Banks, the author of Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness.

She recently spent 14 months in black-centric salons in five cities researching a future book. Natural hair salons don’t offer chemical straightening or weaves.

But she found “a great deal of colouring in natural hairstyling, thereby challenging the ‘chemically free’ label.”

Oddly, Patricia Gaines, the founder of Nappturality.com, a pro-natural website, points out that dyeing one’s Afro puffs or double-strand twists blond isn’t viewed as conforming to a Euro-centric look.

“It’s never been about colour with black women,” she said, referring to the tint of one’s hair.

“If it’s blond hair and it’s nappy, it’s still nappy.” (A term she uses proudly, though some use it as a slur.)

For Banks, making a choice is crucial, not the resulting hairstyle.

“If a black woman makes a choice to relax her hair, or to cut all her hair off, or just do nothing to it, it’s empowering to make that choice,” she said, noting that black women on plantations didn’t have that luxury.

Shayna Y. Rudd, of Washington, wore a past-her-shoulders weave to have a better shot at the Miss America title.

She said an adviser gave her two choices: imitate Beyonce’s long luscious look or Jada Pinkett Smith’s flowing mane.

“I couldn’t be who God wanted me to be,” Rudd, 24, said ruefully. “I didn’t win. My spirit was crushed.”

She has since sworn off relaxers and extensions; instead, she occasionally presses her tight-curled hair and slicks it into a bun, which is what she did when she won the title Miss Black USA. (She bested 28 other contestants, only three of whom wore their hair natural.)

“Don’t buy into anyone else’s standard, set your own,” Rudd said. — NYT

Afua Adusei-Gontarz (left) and Shayna Rudd.