Damned if you ‘do’ and damned if you don’t ‘do’ your hair
OPINION - Long and fake, short and natural and everything in between, black women's hair never seems to make the cut.
Long and fake, short and natural and everything in between; black women’s hair never seems to make the cut. Put aside the quest for “good hair” – that holy grail of long, shiny, silky hair – momentarily and you realize that many black women are simply trying to have “good enough” hair. That is, hairstyles that fit our personalities, our style, our professions, our budgets or our maintenance preferences. But even “good enough” isn’t always enough.
Take Beyonce and Solange Knowles, for example. The two sisters have taken radically different approaches to their hairstyles recently, but neither woman can catch a break when it comes to their hair.
Beyonce’s trademark golden mane, though it is a highly sought after style, still gets knocked for its artifice. Her legendary lace-front wigs and weaves, special hair extensions that are prized for their “natural” look, are the butt of bloggers’ jokes. Yet, if her coif fails to look flawless, a little droopy here or a little frizzy there, she is ridiculed in magazines and blogs.
Her sister Solange, who also once wore a variety of hair extensions and wigs, cut her hair short over the summer and has been rocking a short ‘fro ever since. You think this might be seen as courageous, even trend-setting. You may expect to hear someone say, “See, Solange has the style points to do what Beyonce could never do.” Instead, Solange has been described as “insane,” or even more cruelly, some have suggested that her choice is a feeble attempt to get some shine while standing in the shadows of Beyonce’s reign as pop music’s perfect princess.
The fact is regardless of the style, length, texture, or tone, black women’s hair always seems wrong to someone. Isn’t it enough that black women have to fend off curious white co-workers, neighbors or strangers who want to touch their hair as if it were a mystical portal to understanding blackness? Was I the only one mad that Larry King asked to touch Tyra’s extension-free hair on television? Add to that intra-racial hair politics that leave many black women trying to decide if their hair is too nappy or not nappy enough.
Good enough hair – let alone good hair – is a goal that seems difficult to achieve. There will always be someone who will denigrate our claims to beauty no matter how they are expressed, because beauty is a commodity that black women still struggle to own. Unfortunately, just being on the cover of magazines does not reflect ownership.
Certainly, in the case of Beyonce and Solange, some of this chatter cannot be avoided because both women are entertainers. Their lives and livelihood rely on their visibility, which is always open for critique. But what is striking is that the critique remains at a level that does not question the beauty standards themselves, who creates them, or who stands to benefit from particular ideas about black beauty or femininity. All this criticism does is send a message — as far as hair is concerned, black women cannot win.
Black women’s hair care choices should be just that — choices. Yet, I do wish women had more information about the health issues associated with certain hair treatments so their choices come from a place of knowledge rather than ignorance. I wish there were more positive images of black women with unprocessed hair in popular culture, those whose shorn heads, bouncy twists, or luscious locks were not seen as a neon sign flashing “crazy.” I wish that women with weaves were not the punch line of jokes about the ability of a man to run his fingers through her coif.
Black hair issues are interesting too, because let’s be honest, white women also have their hair fried, dyed and laid to the side in order to look like feminine ideals they also cannot achieve. But our hair-story is tangled with unique histories of racism that are compounded by sexist ideas about what women should look like.
If only pop culture loved black women as much as it loves criticizing their hair choices, we might make a dent in the internalized racism and sexism that these hair debates foster.
