This reveals a lot about the type of fantasies we ourselves continue to uphold about what constitutes black beauty. The fact that until very recently the only “black hair” granted onscreen visibility corresponded to European standards of beauty highlights the fact that beauty is the possession only of those with features deemed permissible by a racist criterion.
When Lauryn Hill emerged on the scene, in Sister Act II, it was a revelation. I saw myself reflected more in Lauryn than in women like Neneh Cherry or Karyn Parsons, primarily because Hill and I had the same type of hair but also because I saw for the first time a woman with facial features comparable to my own. And she was being celebrated as beautiful!
IT’S ONLY HAIR
The question “Is black hair political?” is something of a straw-man argument. Of course it is. It would make more sense to ask how it is that, in this day and age, where a Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) poll from November 2015 showed that 43 percent of white Americans believe discrimination against whites has become as large a problem as discrimination against blacks, black people wearing their hair in its natural state is still enshrined in law as permissible grounds to be fired.
And it’s a global issue, from South Africa to Brazil, to the UK, to the US and Ireland. Wherever people of African descent exist, we continue to be discriminated against because of our hair.
Magazines have got the woke memo, but as recently as 2007, a Glamour magazine editor presented a slideshow on “Dos and Don’ts of Corporate Fashion” to a New York law firm. A prominent “Don’t” was a picture of a black woman with an Afro; it was accompanied by the editor’s exclamation: “it was ‘shocking’ that some people still think it ‘appropriate’ to wear those hairstyles at the office. ‘No offense’ . . . but those ‘political’ hairstyles really have to go.”17 It was only as recently as 2014 that the US army permitted black female soldiers to wear protective styles like cornrows and eliminated the use of words such as “matted” and “unkempt” in relation to black hair. It is only since January 2017 that locs have been permitted.
British theorist Kobena Mercer points out that hair care remains a universal cultural practice. A person’s hair “is never a straightforward biological fact.” It is “almost always ‘worked upon’ by human hands.”18 Hair is a material used to express oneself but also to comment upon, reflect, or indeed contest society. While there is of course a degree of universality to this, it is important to note that, for multiple reasons, hair occupies a position of greater significance in African and African diaspora cultures than in most others. Cultures develop to reflect the interests and the needs of their people. Historian John Thornton notes that, at the most simple and practical level, “the tightly spiraled hair of Africans makes it possible to design and shape it in many ways impossible for the straighter hair of Europeans.”19
Thornton describes black hairstyling as a lively, dynamic, popular art form responding to contemporary life. Traditionally, hairstyling could operate as a means of organizing people into different social categories and contribute to the maintenance of these categories. Hairstyling also functioned symbolically in marking important life stages, as well as signifying the transition from one status to another, such as puberty, initiation into societies and guilds, or marriage. Hairstyles were an integral part of ritual, constituting a visual form of language in oral societies.
Yet one of the legacies of European political, physical, and cultural dominion was the stigmatization of Africa and its customs and practices. Within that framework, African hair, too, is degraded. It’s a system that operates according to the same logic that places everything that is African as inferior to that which is European. It is no coincidence that the students in Pretoria High were also forbidden from speaking their “backward” African languages.
Despite all this context, I have lost track of the amount of times I have sent the “It’s Only Hair” brigade into paroxysms of apoplectic rage by having the temerity to talk about the politics of black hair in the media. In one appearance on BBC’s Newsnight I argued that I really couldn’t give a flying fig about whether or not Justin Bieber wore dreadlocks. The point I was making was that it is all about power imbalances and the continued extraction of Africa’s physical, material, and cultural resources over a five-hundred-year period. This line of reasoning provoked a barrage of online abuse. I learned that I am an ungrateful nigger who should be thankful to whites for liberating me from the darkness of barbarism. Indeed, where was my gratitude for colonialism’s gifts of civilization, clothing, and technology? This affected outrage is not only wearying, it is wildly inaccurate.
In their groundbreaking book The Invention of Tradition (1983), historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger detail the way in which European colonialists were essentially blind to many cultural practices they encountered in Africa. Contrary to colonial propaganda, for example, Africa has many long written traditions. In Timbuktu during the city’s Golden Age (fifteenth and sixteenth centuries), books were reputed to be the most valued and valuable commodity.20 However, unless something had a direct parallel in European society, usually it went unseen. As a result, many rich, complex cultural phenomena were merely discarded and dismissed as primitive, and certainly never made it into the annals of history. European culture placed value only on the written word, on art, and on monuments that stood the test of time. This, it was believed, is what conferred civilization on a people. Without evidence of these markers,* it was debatable whether or not Africans were even human. The European benchmark of value obscured colonial vision, and the emissaries of European culture remained illiterate in much that existed of value in oral societies, including the intricate language of hairstyling, unable to understand the ephemeral temporality of this art form.
African aesthetics have their own norms, which do not always correspond to European ones. Take the Afro hairstyle, particularly when not worn neatly. Kobena Mercer discusses the inherent irony wherein the Afro is read as traditionally “African,” despite the fact that in West African contexts hair is rarely left unmolded or unbraided. The Afro is a symbol of diasporic resistance, a rejection of an imposed value system that denigrated us. Sporting an Afro is a defiant up-yours to such a system, but that fact alone does not make it inherently “African.”
The African American ethnographer Sylvia Boone writes that, for the Mende people of Sierra Leone, the opposite of well-groomed hair is yivi-yivi—untidy, unkempt, messy, without shape. A dirty home is yivi, as are dirty political dealings. Hair that looks dirty and untidy is seen by the Mende as evidence of mental-health problems—“those who buckle under the strains of everyday life, retreating into madness, signal their illness graphically by no longer grooming their hair, thus abandoning the community’s standards of behavior”—or of loose morals.21 Shane White and Graham White point out that these cultural norms give insight to the “humiliation slave women may have felt in being prevented from grooming and styling their hair as they wished, as well as indicating the importance they are likely to have attached to whatever hairstyles they were able—during the time of their enslavement and after—to achieve.”22 This is yet another example of the context in which black hair became politicized and where the choice of styles can be read as contestations.