The examples from the Dominican Republic demonstrate the fact that in non-English-speaking countries different terms exist that recognize the role that hair texture and phenotype play in proximity to whiteness. In English, terms like “colorism” place all the emphasis on complexion. The word “colorism” comes from the US and was coined only as recently as 1983, when Alice Walker used it in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, identifying the phenomenon as an impediment to black progress. The word acknowledges the huge discrimination faced by people with darker skin in black communities but overlooks the other factors of racialization. The use of the word “color” also arguably contributes to a false equivalency between complexion and racial categorization. Most “black” women are brown! Being racialized as black isn’t reducible to skin color. We have to remind ourselves that “black” is not merely a descriptive term for skin color; rather, it is a historically loaded ideology.
Being light-skinned mediates my experience of blackness, placing me highly within a distasteful ranking of value and worth, yet I also have tightly coiled Afro hair, for which my status, alas, tumbles several notches. (Within this perverse hierarchy those with both dark skin and tightly coiled hair would feel the weight of it most fully.) But as a black South African friend told me, when a mixed-race child is born with my hair texture, the consensus is usually, “Ahhh, what a shame!” Of course, hair is far easier to disguise than one’s complexion. But look at the lengths to which many black women go to hide their natural hair and we start to see where some of that motivation might originate. We need to interrogate the fact that, despite one feature being easier to disguise than another, the expectation that we hide our African features still remains.
Hair has the power to confer classification as black or not. Growing up, I knew another girl who had a Nigerian father and an Irish mother. We shared a similarly light complexion—she was perhaps slightly darker than me—but our experiences were very different. Somehow, the fates had bestowed upon her a head of glossy, tumbling black curls by virtue of which she could—and did—pass as Spanish. Now, don’t get me wrong, “Spanish” wasn’t a particularly easy path to tread in 1980s Ireland either, but it was a far sight better than “African.”
African was not the one. My family returned to Ireland around the time Bob Geldof’s Band Aid had a number one hit with “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” and the nation was united in song. And so we all learned that not everyone was as lucky as us. That, beyond the pale, firmly located in the valley of tears, lurked “darkest Africa,” a world of dread and fear, where the only Christmas bells are the clanging chimes of doom. Or something.
Two themes filled people’s imaginations when it came to Africans and black people more generally. The first was crushing poverty, the result of an inherent black backwardness. Hope, it seemed, appeared only through the benevolence of “white” saviors like Jesus, missionaries, or Geldof himself. The second, more gendered, theme hung loosely along the lines of the criminality of the men and the sexual promiscuity of the women. There was a healthy intersection between these themes, so I was fortunate enough to experience the full hand. These were the ideas my presence provoked, marked by stigma and a sense of “dirtiness” that was only compounded by ideas about sin and cleanliness, a consequence of the toxic Catholicism that still held the country in its grip.
Isn’t it crazy to think that this is what all the fuss is about? Black hair starts from 3A, although there are plenty of nonblack women who have this curly hair texture too. As we work our way to the world of 4s, we enter a realm inhabited only by black people and, unsurprisingly, we move further away from what is considered “good hair.” For the record, I’m around 4b. Shout-out to my Nigerian ancestors.
Type-4 Afro hair—the tightly coiled type—is elliptical in shape. This means it is very tightly curled. Asian hair is generally round, while Caucasian hair is round also, or slightly oval, but much more similar in both shape and appearance to Asian hair. Many people who are racialized as black, even some who might have a dark complexion, are in fact of mixed ancestry. Their hair might be a combination of all these types, and this is the reason we see more African Americans and African Caribbeans whose hair conforms to the standards of “good hair” than West Africans.
Generally, in black communities there is an acceptance that loose, curly hair is the ideal, while tightly coiled hair demands serious intervention. The expectation is that you will radically transform it in some way, whereas curls can (these days) require a lot less interference. Tatyana Ali, who played Ashley Banks in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, has spoken about her personal experiences of the phenomenon of colorism. Although she is not light-skinned, her mixed heritage (her father is Indian) has bequeathed her a head of long, thick, silky black hair. Ali explains that, growing up, she was “singled out” and experienced what was essentially “light-skin privilege” (you see we need a new term for when these processes relate to hair) because of her “good hair.” Although her hair texture has undoubtedly been advantageous to her career, by her account, however, she did not like it as a child and desperately wanted the same hair texture as her black mother, cousins, and aunts. Similarly, the Bahamian British journalist Elizabeth Pears has spoken about the way in which her hair informed both others’ and her own perception of herself.
Recently, my mother told me a story of myself as a child. When strangers approached me and said things such as: “Isn’t she lovely?” or “What pretty hair you have!” I would innocently answer: “I know.” My unassuming arrogance would take people aback, then everyone would laugh at the adorable curly-haired prima donna . . . Many of these compliments came from white women, but the majority came from black women, inside and outside of my own family. I was light-skinned with long thick hair thanks in part to my father’s white English heritage. That was all that qualified me to be considered “beautiful.” It had nothing to do with being funny or smart but plenty to do with physical attributes over which I had no control. 12
By contrast, my hair was a constant source of deep, deep shame. I became fixated on it, imagining that, if it just looked “normal,” I, too, might be normal. I wept myself to sleep most nights between the ages of eight and ten, desperately imploring the nighttime to work its magic and by morning to have transformed my tight, picky coils into the headful of limp, straight hair I rightly deserved. But yeah. That didn’t happen. With hindsight, I can say, “Thank God.”
It may seem unimaginable that an adult would cosset or indeed be abusive to a child depending on the gradation of their shade of brown or their hair texture, but, as many of us know, it happens more often than you might think. I have witnessed it many times, for example, when a lighter-skinned sibling is put on a pedestal while the darker-skinned one is ignored or mistreated. And it happens in the public eye too. Consider Blue Ivy, the first-born daughter of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. At the time of writing, typing Blue Ivy’s name into search engines produced “Blue Ivy ugly” as a top result. Blue Ivy’s biggest crime seems to be that she wasn’t born with hair that has the texture of one of her mother’s weaves. Blue has the audacity to have tightly coiled hair, hair that is uniquely black. This is the source of most of the abuse; in fact, the public was so incensed by Blue’s hair that a petition called “Comb Her Hair” was launched when she was two years old. Although it was ostensibly concerned with her parents combing Blue’s hair, the evidence of the hatred that more than 6,000 signatories felt toward its texture is palpable: