Black hair intimidates a lot of white people, and this can extend to parents as well. Bordo described one mother who was so stressed out by the very prospect of combing her daughter’s hair that she just left it, and, sadly neglected, it tangled into one matted clump and had to be cut off. It’s a familiar story: I know a number who suffered a similar fate. Stories such as these galvanize Bordo, who understands: “That poor child. I never wanted my daughter to be the object of that kind of pity. Or me the object of that kind of scorn.”15
There are numerous reasons as to why this “relaxed” approach to grooming may be more permissible among one group than another. Firstly, “shabbiness” in general does not feature within African aesthetics. Historically among the Yoruba, the main method of enhancing natural beauty was cleanliness. Traditionally, one of the worst insults was obùn, which means “filthy.”16 A great premium was put on hygiene; while the average British person in the nineteenth century might wash their body every few weeks, a traditional Yoruba person would wash at least once a day.
Secondly, the white body is not subject to the same regulatory procedures as the body racialized as black. The carefree insouciance of shabbiness does not invoke the same social costs for a white person: their lack of effort will be afforded a value, perhaps elevated to chic, interpreted as bohemian, even. In contrast, the shabby black person might be read as disheveled, wild, and threatening. With such a perception comes the use of regulatory power against the black body, perhaps resulting in arrest, or even death.
So, for me, there were two things going on: my hair was ugly, judged by European beauty standards; but also Nigerian and black diasporic norms were entirely abandoned. While I lived in the US, my hair was styled in a way that is quite typical for a lot of little Nigerian girls. It was worn neatly in a short Afro. This keeps maintenance issues to a minimum. It was only after we moved back to Ireland and my hair grew longer that all normal black hair culture seems to have been dispensed with. If you look at little black American girls’ hairstyles, which could also have been easily achieved with my hair, and compare them to how my hair looked, you will see a huge difference.
Yet, beautiful as these hairstyles were, because we now lived in Ireland they would also have been stigmatized. Their intricacy, and the use of brightly colored barrettes, would have been seen as “common,” outlandish, and generally tacky. Even if my mother could have done my hair like that, I doubt she would have. These styles belong to a black aesthetic that is dismissed as “ghetto,” until, of course, it becomes popularized by a white person and is reimagined as a trend.
The thing is that it’s really quite simple: Afro hair just has different requirements from straight hair. Regardless of hair texture, everybody produces a lubricant called sebum. Along with water, this is what keeps hair moisturized. The difference is that the shape of Afro hair prevents the sebum and water traveling all the way down the hair shaft and the hair doesn’t absorb it in the same way. This is not a problem per se, it just means that—and I repeat—Afro hair has different requirements.
Many white people seem shocked when they discover that I wash my hair only every two weeks or so. But where straight hair is prone to greasiness, mine is prone to dryness, and washing it daily would further strip it of its essential oils and dry it out even further. Afro hair needs products that would make white people’s hair greasy and oily but keep ours moisturized. In the same way that I do not expect white people to use the same products as me, or to go two weeks, maybe even three or four weeks, without washing their hair, there is no reason that I would wash mine daily, unless it were borne of some masochistic motivation that I like to think I’ve now mostly healed from.
By the time I reached my teens, the attention I received developed into something more sinister, acquiring more of a sexualized edge. Even long before I hit adolescence, I felt as though there was some sort of depravity associated with me. There was often explicit judgment of white women with black children, which in turn informed perceptions of me.
Sleeping with a black man remained illicit, and I remember when I was in my late teens a tendency among a couple of my boyfriends toward irrational jealousy over my supposed affections for hypothetical black men, despite the fact that there was (sadly) precious little chance of me ever meeting one in 1990s Dublin.
But even at an earlier age, my hair let me down, assuming something of an embarrassing, sexualized nature. I remember being thirteen or so and sleeping over at a friend’s house. (I have a white mum; sleepovers were allowed, lol.) I use the term “friend” loosely because, when I left home and gained more autonomy over the spaces I frequented and the people I chose to surround myself with, I realized that most of these girls were never really my friends. We were just thrown together through the combined misfortune of coincidence and a distinct lack of options on my behalf. (Hiiiiiii, if you’re reading, hope yisser grand.)
But to return to the sleepover: making her bed in the morning, my host reached down and plucked something from the pillow. “Ugh, ugh, ugh! Gross!” she shrieked, ramping up the dramatics to full effect. We were all going: “OMG! OMG, what? What is it?”
“Eugh! There’s pubes in my bed.”
“Ugh, gross.”
“No, hang on, it’s just Emma’s hair.”
Cue squeals of laughter all around.
I wanted to die!
The sensation was sharpened by the disparity between my own hair and my host’s hair that I secretly coveted. It was dead straight, a luminously shiny black, and hung the whole way down her back; she was complimented on it all the time. Her hair framed almost cartoonishly blue eyes, a particular blue that exists in Ireland. Even when I am abroad, if I see somebody with that eye color I can immediately identify them as Irish. Of course, only a minority of Irish people possess this uniquely beautiful blue eye color, but it exists with a frequency one rarely finds elsewhere.
To heighten my sense of unfairness, my own mother has eyes of this color. In addition to being denied the bright blue eyes that were my birthright, it seemed a peculiarly personal punishment that I had a head of tight, frizzy knots, while every other girl in the feckin’ country seemed instead to have long, straight shiny locks that they could toss and flick with the carefree abandon of whiteness.
Growing up, I rarely saw any black women on TV (or anywhere, for that matter), but there were a few exceptions: the popstar Neneh Cherry, and Hilary and Ashley Banks of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame. Cherry, in particular, I tried to emulate, but her big black curls, which grew down over her shoulders, as well as Hilary’s honey-blond locks and Ashley’s super-sleek jet-black hair, which was damn near waist length, well, actually, it all made me feel worse. All these women had hair that seemed as unachievable for me as the hair of my white counterparts. If anything, seeing black women with “good hair” made me feel even more inadequate about my own shortcomings.
I now know about the politics of visibility. Think about the fact that on black TV shows today, as back then—from the ethereal Lisa Bonet, to Karyn Parsons, to Tatyana Ali, to Yara Shahidi—the “beautiful” members of idealized onscreen black families are played by actresses who in real life have one white or nonblack parent. Yet onscreen they are the product of two black parents.*