![]() Our hair first needs to look like that of a white male - short and very straight, especially around the edges. Most of our mothers and grandmothers met the same shame in their girlhood days, and not wanting us to experience the levels of hurt they endured, saved us by straightening our hair. And that road is unfortunately far more familiar than the other road that tells us to be proud - and to stay proud - of our hair for being exactly how it is. The shame may show up in the form of words that we begin to recognize as bad: nappy, tough, unmanageable. I mindfully and deliberately use the term Blackgirl because our hair consciousness and subsequent struggles do not begin in womanhood.įor most of us, it starts the moment we each sit between our mother or grandmother’s thighs to get our hair combed, and we first stare down the two-pronged road of shame and celebration. And more than that, the strength of that link has created multi-tentacled offshoots of Blackgirl hair-isms, including intra-racial biases and judgments. I think the reason I started to think about hair is perhaps because I also discovered race. “When I was growing up in Nigeria, I didn’t think much about hair, because there was no need to. In a separate interview, Adichie addressed the intersection of race and hair as follows: So if you can do that, why not Black women’s hair, which has a history, which has political meaning, which is so deeply layered, and which I think the world doesn’t know enough about? Which is why when a woman wears her hair a certain way, she’s considered unprofessional, …she can’t work in consulting in New York City.” People can write books about baseball, and people can intellectualize the discussion around baseball. “I think hair is a big issue I absolutely do. I appreciated the honesty and weight of Adichie’s response. How do you feel about people focusing on the hair issue, and not focusing on the bigger issues you address?” The book is about so much more to me, including exile, identity, Blackness, African-ness, etc. ![]() ![]() “So much of the commentary I’ve read about the book focuses on hair. Interviewer and fellow word-wielder Zadie Smith read aloud an audience question about hair: ![]() In a March 2014 interview about her best-selling novel Americanah (a brilliant read!), acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Adichie spoke about her views on Black women’s hair through the American lens. As such, they should be relegated to the privacy of our bathrooms - or better yet, transformed into tamed, relaxed, and otherwise invisible alternatives. ![]() And I am not alone.Īs Black women in America, we’ve been taught that aspects of our physical self are unacceptable in their natural forms. Yes, all of those are terms used to describe (read: disdain) the tight tufts that parallel my earlobes and flank the top of my neck. If you put your fingers directly behind your ears, ran them down the bumpy curves of your skull, and stopped right where your hairline began - right along those edges, for some of us as Black women, lay the sources of ridicule and reasons to hide. I am talking about the tightest-of-the-already-tight tufts of hair that flank the base of the necks on many Black women. Nor am I referencing the canned variety with the creepy green dude on the label. I’m not referring to the peas my grandma bought from the market and assigned me to shelling on Sunday mornings. You know the difference between kitchen peas and kitchen peas, don’t you? ![]()
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