I remain surprised at the lack of any sustained critical commentary regarding this troubling phenomenon, but I have spoken with many kinky-haired bloggers and influencers and they express frustration that they do not get the same opportunities as the “good hair” girls.
Some of the international natural-hair tours of these curl influencers leave me speechless. Whatever the realities of colorism in the UK, in countries like South Africa, with its fraught racial history of apartheid, or parts of the Caribbean islands, where access to material privileges and political power was and often still is determined by proximity to whiteness, and where, in the absence of a significantly large white population, light-skinned people of African descent have often historically acted as de facto whites, enforcing a strict social demarcation between light and dark, it seems tone deaf, if not dangerous, to promote a mixed-race, curly-haired ideal as the epitome of black beauty and the standard for natural hair.
In the face of a five-century-long campaign about the ugliness and inadequacy of our hair, black women have collectively turned around and said, “Nah.” We have shared our hair stories, our journeys through pain into acceptance and to pride. In doing so, we have built a powerful international community from Lisbon to London to LA. Yet this, much like everything we create, is now ripe for exploitation. Gradually, there is a shift in the boundaries of what constitutes natural hair and, the next thing you know, you are erased from your own story.
SHEA MOISTURE CONTROVERSY
Whatever the politics of black women with a certain, acceptable hair texture becoming the representatives of natural hair, the company Shea Moisture took things one step further. I’m under no illusion that big brands and multinationals are altruistic or that they operate as some sort of benign force that wishes us well. But I was shocked by the 2017 Shea Moisture advertising campaign. After my disappointments with natural-hair brands like Mixed Chicks, which weren’t designed with my type of hair in mind, Shea Moisture felt familiar and reliable. They were a company that had grown with the natural-hair movement, even entering into the literary sphere when they featured as producers of Ifemelu’s favorite product in her fictionalized Americanah blog post “A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor.”21
The most controversial ad features three white and one mixed-race woman with soft, long, curly hair. Black women were incensed. Calls to boycott it came thick and fast. It is bad enough that natural hair is now most commonly represented as curly hair, hair that is the result of mixed ancestry or simply the curly texture that many phenotypically white people naturally have, but Shea Moisture really made the situation worse by featuring white blondes and redheads, framing their stories through the struggle and language of black women with kinky textures.
“Hair hate is real, guys.”
Said by the light-skinned girl with the long, softly tumbling curls. The marketable “empowering” narrative remains. The language of struggle and the overcoming of adversity still define the conversation. These are our words all right, but not from our mouths.
“Everybody wanna sing my blues, nobody wanna live my blues.”
Once again there is that sense that we’re not allowed to own anything. Even our experiences of our own hair are not ours. Extract our expressions of pain and anger, our redemptive efforts, then superimpose all that energy onto white women and golden-brown mixed-race girls with long, silky, princess curls (extra points if it’s blond; hazel eyes are a bonus, blue and you can just skip straight to the finish line). Meanwhile, hair that is my texture—type-4 hair that is kinky, hair that is typically West African hair, hair that only people of African descent have—is barely granted visibility and becomes an anomaly sidelined from its own story.
For Richelieu Dennis, the owner of Shea Moisture, business and trade seem to be in the blood. His grandmother Sofi Tucker, famed for passing down her knowledge of haircare products to her entrepreneurial grandson, is allegedly a Sherbro Tucker.
The Sherbro Tuckers have a remarkable lineage. They are an Anglo-African clan whose origins date back to the 1600s and the arrival of some of the earliest European traders on the coast of West Africa.
In 1665 John Tucker, an English agent of the Gambia Adventurers (a trading company led by the Duke of York, later King James II), set off to make his fortune in Sierra Leone. He was accompanied by another Englishman, Zachary Rogers. Local customs in the region dictated that trading rights were dependent on marriage. Before long, the two Englishmen had married daughters of the Sherbro chief. These unions produced numerous children and both men went on to become the founding fathers of two powerful mixed-race Sierra Leone clans, the Tuckers and the Rogers.
Sherbro society was matrilineal, so the Tucker offspring could claim chieftaincy through their mother while exploiting the trading contacts and English connections of their father. Some of the family members were schooled in the UK, but they took care to maintain important positions within powerful local African institutions such as the Poro, the secret male society of the Mende.
The Sherbro Tuckers rapidly expanded their territories. They gained control over more land and leveraged their contacts, becoming powerful traders. It wasn’t long before they became major players in the most lucrative business of all, the newly developing trade in slaves. These mixed-race African families, including the Tuckers, the Rogers, and the Caulkers,* were integral to the development and maintenance of the southern Sierra Leone slave trade. They amassed great fortunes and positioned themselves favorably in the politics and government of Sierra Leone. Their descendants remain influential to this day.
Dennis’s own business acumen is apparent. His company Sundial, which owns Shea Moisture, goes from strength to strength. In 2015, they secured investment from Bain Capital, and then from Unilever in 2017. Dennis also purchased Essence magazine at the end of that year, an incredibly savvy business move for a brand that sells to the black community.
The announcement of the relationship with Bain raised eyebrows. Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate who ran against Barack Obama in 2012, had been the CEO of Bain for many years, and people were suspicious of the association. Many loyal Shea Moisture customers, mostly black women, thought the investment appeared ominous. Was this yet another example of a black-owned business getting bought out and subsequently shifting its focus from its core black customers to chase the perceived big bucks of the mainstream (white) general market?
Dennis was quick with reassurances: the customers—the “community”—remained the company’s most important priority. In fact, Shea Moisture’s deep commitment to community was what had motivated the deal with Bain. Shea Moisture chose Bain because the equity firm is “a partner that understood how important community is,” one “that’s already invested in community” and is “meaningfully engaging in social missions.”22 Shea Moisture hadn’t been “bought out,” they remained black-owned. Bain was only a minority investor. Yet Bain Capital operates a business model charged with conducting corporate raids that effectively destroy smaller companies’ assets and jobs. Josh Kosman, author of The Buyout of America, argues that Romney made his fortune through private equity. He describes this as the process through which a company like Bain acquires cheap credit that it then uses to take over another company in a leveraged buyout. The leverage is used in reference to the fact that the company that has been bought is now responsible for paying for approximately 70 percent of its own acquisition. Following the buyout, the private-equity guys start with an aggressive austerity makeover, characterized by layoffs and the cutting of all conceivable costs. Ultimately, the lack of resources and investment and the burden of debt repayment mean that it is difficult for companies to remain competitive. Kosman points out that, of the “twenty-five companies that private-equity firms bought in the 1980s that had borrowed more than $1 billion in junk bonds, more than half went bankrupt.”23 This type of leveraged buyout has contributed to the rapacious destruction of local industry (and subsequently the communities that depended on it) and the hollowing out of America’s heartlands. It could be argued that these activities contributed to the type of poverty, hopelessness, and despair that proved such fertile ground for the election of Donald Trump.