In black cultures, there often remains an indomitable spirit that, even when violently suppressed, cannot be quelled. In many ways this can be credited to the tendency to mix and chop, to forge together and to fuse. It is dynamic, constantly evolving, always imitated, never equaled, and often ridiculed before being slavishly reproduced.
Sadly, the rules of engagement have been changed. We are not operating on a level playing field. Despite the anger that is caused by cultural appropriation, Afro-diasporic black cultures generally have more of a tendency toward openness and inclusivity than Anglo-American cultures. So it’s grossly unfair when we are silenced with the old “No one owns culture” card when we call out cultural appropriation. Suddenly, nonblack folk are there to remind us: “Hey, it’s all about borrowing and exchange, guys.”
Well, thanks for the reminder. This was the logic underpinning most African cultures, but then someone kinda changed the rules. That whole process of creating an entire global infrastructure where you owned everything, our culture as well as our bodies, well, that kinda had an impact, and well, it kinda has consequences, you know.
This is precisely why cultural appropriation provokes sentiments it wouldn’t otherwise. Operating under the new rules of engagement, it would be nonsensical for black folk to be a hundred percent chill about seeing the spoils of what they have created out of what have often been—let’s be real—pretty shitty circumstances, and just be like “Yeah go for it, fuck it up, make that money!”
It’s only made worse by the fact that white artists are celebrated for pale imitations of black ingenuity while black people are penalized, or even criminalized, for doing the same things better. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. No doubt the sight of me doffing my cap with a “Yessir, massa, whatever you thinks is best” would mortify liberal sensibilities today, but essentially, this is what is being asked of me when it is suggested that I suspend both my critical faculties and my knowledge of history to greenlight Madonna as the Queen of fucking Pop, the inventor of Vogue, or either Bo Derek or Kim Kardashian as the originator of cornrows. Girl Bye!
“GOOD HAIR”
My full and cool hair would work if I were interviewing to be a backup singer in a jazz band, but I need to look professional for this interview, and professional means straight is best, but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls, but never kinky.20 [my italics]
How does cultural appropriation relate to the natural-hair world? Despite all the advances made in embracing our hair, somehow the natural-hair world seems to have become dominated by curly hair. While we need to familiarize ourselves with all types of textured hair, the curly ideal should not be privileged at the expense of kinky textured hair. Throughout the broad range of hair types that could be described as black hair, each of the textures indicates African ancestry. Nonetheless, different textures are ascribed different values. Hair that might be “good” in one context may be highly discriminated against in another. In fact, hair texture as a metaphor for antiblackness sets the scene for one of my favorite movies, Pelo Malo (Bad Hair). The protagonist is a little mixed-race boy whose white Venezuelan mother is obsessed with his sexuality and terrified that he might be gay. Whether or not he is, is never established; what is shown is the extent to which the little boy hates his hair. With its big, black, defined curls, many black people would deem his hair “good hair,” yet its texture nonetheless identifies him as of African descent, and with this comes stigma in antiblack Venezuelan society. Even though he and I have very different hair textures, he shares the same fixation that I once had with making my hair straight, and I find deep resonance between his pain and my own as a child.
When Brazilian actress Taís Araújo, who usually wore her hair straightened, revealed her natural hair on Facebook in 2016, the image unleashed a staggering racist backlash. Given the size of the black population in Brazil, Afro-textured hair should be unremarkable. Of the estimated 11.5 million Africans that survived the Middle Passage, only approximately 450,000 went to the US, but over 5 million were transported to Brazil. The percentage of the population with African ancestry stands at well over 50 percent, with some estimates placing the figure as high as 92 percent. Brazil has the second-largest black population in the world, behind only Nigeria. It also has the largest Nigerian population in the world outside of Nigeria, and the spiritual belief systems of the Yoruba remain central in the practice of Candomblé, the presence of which is felt throughout Brazil. Yet all of this is intentionally obscured by Brazil’s representation of itself as a white country. Black women make up only 5 percent of the overall media representation. Taís Araújo, the highest-profile black actress in a country that likes to keep its black women invisible, is a rare exception. Her hair, however, is irrefutable proof that she is of African descent, and as such it was unthinkable that she would publicly expose it. While Araújo’s hair texture might be perceived as “good,” the ideal to aspire to for many in the US or UK black- or natural-hair communities, it was evidently not good enough to protect her from the violent bile of racists. Comments such as “Who posted the picture of this gorilla on Facebook?” and “Lend me your hair, I wash dishes” and “I did not know that [the] zoo has a camera” leave us in no doubt of the prevailing attitude toward black hair. Araújo’s skin color, a light to medium brown, had not caused outrage, but when combined with her russet corkscrew curls, it was too offensive. And the Brazilian public made their disgust known.
Taís Araújo.
While it is important to remember that all black hair textures can be discriminated against, type-4 hair is the least visible in the natural-hair community and remains the most misunderstood by mainstream culture.
PAPER-BAG TESTS
We might balk at the memory of paper-bag tests, but it was not so long ago that they were the criteria for entry into elite black sororities and fraternities. Membership was assessed on the basis of possessing a complexion that was no darker than that of a brown paper bag. (If you were light enough for blue veins to be visible, that was an added touch of sophistication.) One could argue that the same logic underpins the meet-ups of the most popular European and American “curl activists.” I look at the images from some of today’s natural-hair conventions and I am reminded that not as much has changed between 1919 and 2019 as we might want to imagine. However, because our language about race throws the emphasis onto skin color rather than hair texture, it allows for a certain degree of slippage.
Marian Anderson and her New Orleans Sorors at the reception given after a recital in 1941.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans
Big brands sponsor bloggers and vloggers with curly-textured hair to appeal to a broader, allegedly more palatable demographic of women. Their ethnicity spans from white to (the right kind of) mixed—mixed people with my hair texture emphatically do not fit the criteria or feature in these campaigns. We are no longer in some scary niche world of black experience. Instead we have traveled to the amorphous, racially ambiguous, multiraciality so beloved of advertisers.