Hair type rapidly became the real symbolic badge of slavery, although like many powerful symbols, it was disguised—in this case by the linguistic device of using the term “black”—which nominally threw the emphasis to color. No one who has grown up in a multiracial society, however, is unaware of the fact that hair difference is what carries the real symbolic potency.7
Patterson argues that during slavery it was hair texture more than skin color that distinguished Africans specifically as degenerate. Think about it: an African albino is still read as black due to their hair and features. There are East Asian and South Asians who have darker complexions than some Africans and who are certainly darker-skinned than many African Americans and African Caribbeans, yet they are not “black.”
The nifty little “hair gauge” opposite resides in a collection at University College London. It was designed by the German scientist Eugen Fischer in 1905. Fischer used hair texture to determine the “whiteness” of people of mixed race, the offspring of German or Boer men and African women in modern-day Namibia. He carried out experiments on these people before recommending that they should not be allowed to “continue to reproduce.” Accordingly, interracial marriages were banned in all German colonies in 1912. Fischer’s “work” in Africa was hugely influential in German discourse on race and went on to inform the Nuremberg Laws, the legislative framework for Nazi ideology. Fischer’s interest in the “hereditarily unfit,” as mixed-race people were classified, didn’t end in Africa. In fact, Fischer was just getting started. Between 1937 and 1938, he oversaw tests on 600 mixed-race children, the product of liaisons between the French-African soldiers who occupied western areas of Germany after the First World War and German women. Following this, the children were forcibly sterilized to prevent the contamination of the white race “by Negro blood on the Rhine in the heart of Europe.”
HAIR TEXTURE DISCRIMINATION
My own hair has been disappointing people since my birth. Its texture didn’t correspond to the expectations accorded someone of my skin color.
Although I was born in Ireland, a couple of months after that happy event we relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, where my pops was studying at Morehouse College. We lived in the black mecca of the South for four years. I was too young to remember a sense of the colorism that is so deeply entrenched there, but my mother tells me people would frequently express sentiments such as “What a beautiful [read “light-skinned”] child. Let me see her hair.” When they peeked under my bonnet and were confronted with my kinky naps, disappointment and awkwardness would quickly replace their enthusiasm.
Colorism in black communities is a product of slavery and colonialism. Under the laws of slavery black people were considered property and as such subject to rape at a systemic level, at the hands of their owners and other whites. One result of this was the rise in mixed-race slaves. Mixed-race blacks were more likely to make up the free colored populations and, even when enslaved, might receive treatment preferable to that bestowed on their non-mixed brethren. These relative advantages often carried over post-emancipation, and the elites of negro society were often individuals who possessed a significant amount of European, as well as African, ancestry. Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson describes colorism as such:
There is, too, a curious color dynamic that sadly persists in our culture. In fact, New Orleans invented the brown paper bag party—usually at a gathering in a home—where anyone darker than the bag attached to the door was denied entrance. The brown bag criterion survives as a metaphor for how the black cultural elite quite literally establishes caste along color lines within black life. On my many trips to New Orleans . . . I have observed color politics at work among black folk. The cruel color code has to be defeated by our love for one another.8
But there exist other important dimensions too. Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps echo Patterson’s observations about hair, explaining that “essentially the hair acted as the true test of Blackness.”9 They point out that, historically, the fact remained that, if the hair betrayed the tiniest trace of kinkiness, the person—regardless of their complexion—would be unable to pass as white. Like the paper-bag crew, they describe black churches to which membership was dictated by hair texture. A comb had to pass smoothly through the hair for membership to be awarded, for which purpose one was placed on a string at the entrance to the church. If successful, you may proceed, pass go, collect $200 on your way. If, on the other hand, the comb snagged, you needed to get the hell gone; the good lord Jesus didn’t want to see you or your nappy head in this exclusive house of prayer. This is like an early precursor to South Africa’s pencil test, where a child’s race was determined by whether or not their hair could hold a pencil.
Colorism is undoubtedly about proximity to racial whiteness, but proximity is determined by far more than just complexion. In addition to lighter skin, the texture of one’s hair, one’s facial structure, the shape of one’s nose and lips, and even one’s body type are assessed in calculating who has, and who is denied, proximity to whiteness. Consider Iman, a dark-skinned Somali model who achieved success in the 1970s, when African features were emphatically not “in.” In 1976 an Essence magazine article by editor in chief Marcia Gillespie referred to Iman as “a white woman dipped in chocolate.” Quite understandably, the model was enraged and retorted: “I don’t look like a white woman. I look Somali.”10
And she does indeed. Yet despite Iman’s dark complexion, her facial features, in comparison to those associated with West Africans, have a look that is perceived as more comparable with Caucasian features and are therefore understood as superior to the looks of those who remain further from the European standard.
In “Hair Race-ing: Dominican Beauty Culture and Identity Production,” Ginetta Candelario examines the role of hair texture in racial identity on the Caribbean island. She shares an exchange between herself, a “white-skinned and straight-haired Dominican,” and another “white-skinned and straight-haired Dominican” woman named Doris. Doris is married to a “brown-skinned, curly-haired Dominican man” and is describing their children. Doris explains that, in Dominican society (which remains notoriously anti-black, despite the fact that most of the population are to varying degrees of African descent), entry into whiteness and its subsequent “rewards” are determined by your features and your hair texture far more than by the color of your skin: “For Dominicans hair is the principal bodily signifier of race.”
GINETTA: Tell me something. You’ve just told me that we value hair a lot and color less, in the sense that if hair is “good” you are placed in the white category. What happens in the case of someone who is very light but has “bad hair”?
DORIS: No, that one is on the black side because it’s just that the jabao in Santo Domingo is white with bad hair, really tight hair. Well, that one is on the black side, because I myself say, “If my daughters had turned out jabá, it’s better that they would have turned out brown, with their hair like that, trigueño.” Because I didn’t want my daughters to come out white with tight hair. No. For me, better trigueña. They’re prettier [trigueños]. I’ve always said that. All three of my children are trigueños.11