The hood is my home, and always will be, but I am deeply aware of the way that my privilege in being able to code-switch and to see and mimic middle-class manners has given me access. I’m not above admitting I have my own biases when it comes to criticizing views I strongly disagree with. But I always want to be able to look at myself in the mirror and know that I didn’t disrespect the sacrifices that made it possible for me to be where I am now. I know the extent of the damage respectability narratives have inflicted on our movements, on our communities, and on our psyches.
There’s no doubt that the white supremacist patriarchy needs to be dismantled, but we can’t pretend that classism inside the Black community isn’t also a major problem. We need to unpack what it means to be a gatekeeper, to be willing to call for the uprooting of bigotry, but not face the ways it has influenced our narratives. We have to fight our own battles, and handle our own unpacking process, not just hope that getting rid of the overarching problem will get rid of all the problems. Being Black and being a feminist are not mutually exclusive; when I say “we,” I mean the Black community as a whole and Black feminists in particular, because we are sometimes best equipped to access resources that can benefit everyone.
The traumas of the past are woven into the fabric of our coping mechanisms. We have to create new ones that don’t rely on perfectly packaged responses or ways to change ourselves to be accepted. I know we can come to a place where we embrace differences instead of pretending that freedom comes from erasing them.
PRETTY FOR A . . .
I don’t actually know who my biological father is, but presumably, like every Black American descended from enslaved people, there’s some white hanging around in his family tree. There definitely is some white and Indigenous ancestry hanging around in my maternal line. Depending on if you’re my grandmother’s side (largely shrouded in secrecy) or my grandfather’s (hello genealogy obsession, complete with records), the amounts of other ancestries vary. We’re Black with some sprinkles of Irish that might explain the freckles and occasional outbursts of red hair, but none of us have ever had to consider passing as anything else, so the fact of so much internal ranking based on skin tone and hair texture in my family is more than a little bizarre sometimes, especially since I’m the family yeti. I’m the tall one, broad shouldered, and built like I came here to box. Think Serena Williams with less money and athletic prowess, but still more muscular than anything else. My cousins, on the other hand, are short, fine boned, with the narrow shoulders that you would expect from women that tiny. The one thing we all share is curves. Theirs always looked like they fit right, while mine were the physical equivalent of press-on nails until weight lifting took me from being chronically underweight to finally fitting this frame.
As I transitioned from Not-Quite-Yellow Awkward to Pretty for a Black Girl, I discovered that beauty aesthetics inside my community weren’t the only place I could feel alienated. I’m brown skinned, what some folks would call medium toned, so I largely sit on the outskirts of any major colorism debate. But I have a wide nose and full lips, and a big ass, which means that in any conversation about white-centric beauty aesthetics, I have the features that are revered or reviled depending on who’s talking. When I was a teenager with the worst taste in white boys, I dated the kind of men who would say things like “You’re pretty for a Black girl,” and I’d chalk it up to ignorance instead of malice. Backhanded compliments were still better than no compliments, in my mind. I was a fool. A fool with low self-esteem, but still a fool.
I was an astonishingly awkward-looking child. If you were feeling generous and moderately poetic you could have called me fey. Proportions were not on my side. I didn’t grow into my head until I was twelve; I wasn’t cute, I was just lighter skinned than some of my maternal cousins. What I did have on my side, in the color-struck narratives that came from some family members, was my light skin. I didn’t have “good hair,” but I was lighter skinned than most of Mom’s side of the family, and as far as they were concerned, that was something of a boon for an otherwise odd-looking child. One of my aunts tried to solve the problem of my hair by taking me to a kitchen beautician who put a lye relaxer on my head when I was three. In a very few minutes I was crying, bleeding, and burned. It’s one of my earliest memories, and I can’t say that I completely understood what had happened to me.
Even before the perm that burned me, the few pictures I’ve seen of me as a toddler make it clear that my family always did something to tame my hair. No wild-haired pictures of a running baby with an Afro. I can’t remember one time when my hair was allowed to just be the way it grew out of my head. For years after the relaxer incident, Grandmother took me to the salon every two weeks like clockwork. She meant well, but she had a whole lot of internalized issues around hair and skin color that meant I didn’t see myself with natural hair until I was seventeen. By then I had tried no-lye relaxers, applied heat daily, and generally battered my hair until it was damaged. It was around then that I started trying to rebel against that “Natural is not good enough” aesthetic.
When I first tried to go natural, it was early 1994 or thereabouts, and I had no idea how to take care of my hair. This was well before YouTube gurus or the wealth of easy-to-find products designed for my hair texture. I tried using the existing products, but I had no idea what I was doing with my hair and it showed. I eventually caved under the pressure from family members to style it differently and got it relaxed again after about a year. Being in charge of my own hair meant that I could minimize how many times a year I got a relaxer, and for the next thirteen years, my hair veered wildly from perfectly coiffed to mostly new growth. Along the way, I came to understand that my hair grows rapidly, and styles that rely on changing texture require a level of upkeep that I am not willing to do. In 2005, while pregnant with my youngest son, I got tired of my hair. Just absolutely fed up with the need to sit in a shop, to wrap it or flat-iron it or whatever. So, I shaved my head. Well, I cut off all my hair, and my husband walked in on his five-months-pregnant wife with scissors and stepped in to do the actual shaving.
Post-chop (after the initial shock) I started learning how to deal with it. And for a long time, while it was growing out, I wasn’t entirely sold on being natural. Mostly I was convinced that I had consigned myself to looking unfortunate for some months. Because of how I was raised, I used to be one of those Black women who thought natural hair looked a mess. Then I started growing up and really paying attention to what well-maintained natural styles looked like on friends and neighbors. And over time I started wishing I could wear a twist out or puffs. I had no idea how to really do my hair. None.
Because I grew up going to beauty salons where my hair was pressed bone straight, braided, or relaxed, my relationship with it was casual. I could wash it, blow-dry it, and flat-iron it, but actually care for it? Not so much. When it got long enough for me to want to style it, I had to rely on the magic of YouTube channels “recommended by friends.” And the more I learned, the more I liked having natural hair. Because suddenly, doing my hair didn’t have to involve any pain. None. And some of you reading this are probably thinking, “Why the hell do Black women do that if it hurts?” and there’s a whole list of answers to that question that range from preferences, to not being able to be employed without straightened hair, to internalized racism.