Until very recently, the message was loud and clear: You can be black and beautiful (that was just about permissible), but you cannot have tightly coiled Afro hair and be one of the beautiful people.
DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T
The politics surrounding black people and hair straightening are characteristically contradictory. In Hair Story, Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps discuss the fact that early approximations of European hair—as a type of performance of respectability politics—did little to influence white opinion favorably. It often had quite the opposite effect:
The free Black populations sprinkled about in cities like Boston and Philadelphia were wont to wear the same fashions and hairstyles as their White contemporaries, only to find themselves ridiculed and satirized in the press, in the theaters, and on the streets. Blacks were actually accused of being pretentious in their adherence to White fashion standards.9
Shane White and Graham White note the prevalence of this type of attitude:
If unkempt hair seemed vaguely offensive to whites, hair that was groomed and elaborately arranged must also have seemed out of place, suggesting, as Gwendolyn Robinson has pointed out, “an attention to cosmetic detail only permitted by the enjoyment of a free and independent status.” This impression of unreadable signs and ambiguous meanings can only have been strengthened when blacks dressed, as they often did, in ways that whites considered inappropriate. Their thick hair and dark skin must have seemed to clash discordantly with the items of formerly expensive clothing and cast-off military apparel that slaves were sometimes able to acquire. Hair shaped like a fashionable wig must have looked even more out of place when combined with an ensemble of shabby, nondescript garments and a vocabulary of gesture and bodily movement whose meanings whites could not easily decipher . . . [European Americans’] confusion at the appearance of blacks could easily be displaced into ridicule, a patronizing mockery of black pretensions and lack of “taste.” What whites failed to detect were the signs of an emerging African American culture, a series of borrowings and blendings that, always changing over time, at least obliquely challenged the hegemony of blacks’ oppressors.10
Centuries later, the white aesthetic rejection of relaxed hair remained. Going to the School of African and Asian Studies (SOAS) to study African Studies, I had mistakenly assumed there might be something of a black cultural life at the university. For the most part, my cohorts were of the white-hippie variety. Coming from Ireland, I was of course intimate with white people, but this tea-drinking, poi-swinging, drum-playing, often dreadlocked variety was new to me. Despite their affected lack of pretension, their privilege was palpable, and although I didn’t have the language to articulate it at the time, their gap years in African countries and in India made them seem like the experts and me like the ignorant Westerner. It was really disorienting. In truth, I didn’t even really want to be there. I had originally applied to Spelman, the all-girls historically black college and university (HBCU) in Atlanta. These institutions were established in the late 1880s to facilitate the education of black students denied access to white institutions. Alas, it wasn’t to be; unable to afford the international tuition fees, SOAS was plan B outta Dodge.
SOAS social life certainly didn’t quite live up to my dreams of becoming a cheerleader on an all-black campus, but one of the things moving to London did offer me was hair options. Once I got there I seized the opportunity to do two things: (1) date lots of cute black boys (had to make up for those lost years in Ireland, didn’t I? Jk.) and (2) get my hair properly straightened. I steered clear of the local salons, heading straight for the bouji west London variety, where the stylists prided themselves on achieving mobility for the hair.* For those who’ve relaxed their hair, you know the world of difference that exists between the rigid facsimile of European hair and the fluid, swish-swish achieved when it’s done by an expert and set properly afterward. Now I certainly did not have the money to live that life, but I would forgo anything to manufacture it. To my mind, it was comparable to a necessary medical treatment needed to keep a chronic condition in check.
Imagine my surprise when my white-hippie peers pretty much unanimously slammed my hair. I mean, they were far from my target audience, but I still found their responses interesting: “Oh, no, Emma, it looks so much better out!” Say what? Let’s bear in mind that at this stage I didn’t have the first clue how to care for or maintain my natural hair, so that shit was a mess. Nonetheless, its appearance elicited countless assertions about how cool it looked.
And this was strange to me. Would they tell a white person that their tangled, uncombed hair looked great? Unlikely. Is it something to do with a desire for the exotic, with wanting to see difference, whether, objectively, it looks good or not? Or perhaps it is informed by the way the Afro conforms to a Western rather than an African aesthetic, one that would be especially appealing to white hippies. Speaking about the fate of the Afro in the 1960s and ’70s, Kobena Mercer explains:
The Afro operated on terrain already mapped out by the symbolic codes of the dominant white culture. The Afro not only echoed aspects of romanticism but shared this in common with the counter-cultural logic of white youth in the 1960s. From the Beatles’ mop tops to the hairy hippies of Woodstock, white subcultures of the 1960s expressed the idea that the longer you wore your hair, somehow the more ‘radical’ and ‘right-on’ your lifestyle or politics.11
But while rich-kid hippies might approve, there exist sanctions in the mainstream world for hairstyles that are too black. Often it can seem like a lose-lose situation. Almost as though the world is racist. So the moral of this story is: DO YOU BOO. Black and mixed-race people exist in a system that has been designed with our marginalization as central to its operating logic. It almost doesn’t matter what we do. Being a woman who is mixed, who is black, who is Irish, whatever way I choose to live my life, no matter what way I choose to present myself, somebody—and this I can guarantee—has a problem with it, has a problem with me.
The comments are as staggering as they are contradictory, but I’ve heard them all. In different contexts I’ve been told I’m too black, I’m too white, I’m too stuck-up, I’m too light-skinned, I think I’m too nice, I’m too posh, I’m too street, I’m too Irish, I’m not Irish enough, blah blah fuckin’ blah. The best option is to do whatever feels authentic to me. I see no need to conform to any limited definition. There is a great freedom in that. So I just do me, whatever feels right. And so should you!
Yet I remain aware that my freedom to say any of this—let alone put it into action—is in large part facilitated by the sacrifices, work, and efforts of those who went before me.
Structural inequalities remain, but in many ways these are obscured by gains in social freedom, particularly in terms of creative expression for (certain sections of certain) minorities. As long as we situate our cultural production within the terms of engagement of market relations, and while our identities remain commodifiable, as long as our contestations can be made into content and be absorbed into the status quo, many of us can, for the most part, continue within that delineated boundary to do what we please.