Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness

1. Why Hair Matters: Getting to the Roots

chapter 1 Why Hair Matters Getting to the Roots Black women share a collective consciousness about hair, though it is articulated in a variety of ways. The first question I asked the girls and women is how and why hair matters. Given the many personal reflective writings by black women about their hair, I wanted the girls and women to explain if hair is important to them, too, or if the attention it gets is a lot of hype. The responses varied, but most of the women agreed that hair matters in some way to them in particular or to black 21 I think it’s an issue because it doesn’t function in a vacuum. Its like connected to the larger issue of race and beauty. Stacy 26 years, natural hairstyle Yes hair is important, particularly for black women. I think more so than any other woman. And it’s because we learn at a very early age whether we have good or bad hair, and that automatically places us in two [camps]. Sheila 36 years, dreadlocks I think for women, in general [it’s a big issue]. I like to fix my own hair in different types of styles. And I think it does something for me as far as being creative, ’cause hair can say a lot about you as a person, something about your character. Barbara 49 years, relaxed hairstyle No I don’t [think it’s a big issue]. The reason I don’t is because I know how to press mine, my mother used to press mine, and I watched her press my sister’s hair and it’s not hard to do. Bobbie 70 years, pressing comb style women in general. It immediately became apparent to me that some of the women were having a dialogue, if not a debate, across interviews. Social, Cultural, and Personal Contexts of Hair Most of the girls and women in the individual interviews discussed the social, cultural, and personal reasons of why hair matters . Their thoughts demonstrate the importance of racial and gender ideologies and how they shape what black women think about beauty culture. That is, their comments detail how constructions of beauty intersect along the lines of race and gender for black women and how ideas about beauty often relate to devaluing , as opposed to embracing, tightly coiled black hair. Furthermore , the idea also emerges that black women go through a socialization process in which hair is central. For example, Kaliph, who wears her hair relaxed, and Indigo, who wears dreadlocks , discussed socialization in addition to their ideas about gender and race. kaliph: I think hair is a big deal for a number of reasons. Hair in general for women is a big deal because there’s the whole mythology of it being our crown and glory kind of thing, and I think that it becomes even more complex when you break it down according to ethnicity. So I think compounded to us being women there’s the whole thing of being black women and the devaluation of our natural hair texture. . . . So therefore you have this whole movement industry of hair-care products in general, but also in terms of black women for changing the very nature of our hair, the natural state of our hair. So I think it’s a big deal for black women because we are not taught, socialized, to like our natural hair. indigo: I think hair has always been a big issue for black women just because of societal values in terms of media and images that we’re inundated with. And for myself, growing up in Jamaica which was a predominantly black country, I was Why Hair Matters 22 inundated with Western images of beauty and hair. Magazines , TV commercials, TV shows [which showed] that basically the standard of beauty was always blonde and straight. And so I think for black women in a society in which our hair is unique and different from other cultures’ texture, we stand out as a result of that and we’ve been conditioned from children to believe that there’s something wrong with our hair texture in its nappy state. Kaliph and Indigo framed their discussions within a broader context —that hair shapes black women’s ideas about race, gender, and beauty. Although it is of some importance for all women, hair matters in different ways for black...