DCP EP. 101 The Beauty of Black Hair: Lori L. Tharps
Transcribed by: Sydney Henriques-Payne
Completion date: February 2, 2022
DCP EP 100: The Beauty of Black Hair: Lori L. Tharps
Shana Pinnock: [00:00:03] Welcome to Dear Culture, the podcast that gives you news you can trust for the culture. I’m your co-host Shana Pinnock, Social Media Director here at theGrio. [00:00:09][6.5]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:00:10] and I’m your co-host Gerren Keith Gaynor, managing editor of Politics and Washington Correspondent at theGrio. And this week we’re asking Dear Culture, how do we celebrate the beauty of Black hair? [00:00:21][11.5]
Shana Pinnock: [00:00:30] All right, Grio fam. Now you already know that we celebrate Black History 24, seven, 365 days a year on this show. But this week marks the official launch of Black History Month, and we’re kicking it off with a bang or a ba-yang, if you will. [00:00:46][16.4]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:00:49] If you haven’t already guessed, today’s show is about Black hair, from kinks to coils to every texture of curl. Crowns carry a host of history and are also a hallmark of Black culture. And let’s be clear, there’s such a spectrum. [00:01:02][13.9]
Shana Pinnock: [00:01:03] You know, Black folks, we have the range. So, we’ve got the bad ass baldys a-la, Michael Jordan, Ayanna Pressley or Tiffany Haddish, whom, if I’m not mistaken, she did. Her big chop on IG Live during quarantine last year. Shortcuts like Lupita’s and Halle’s classic pixie; braids, blowouts, weaves and locs, of which. I’m a part of that tribe. It’s a lot! And today’s guest is an expert in the history behind it all. [00:01:28][25.1]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:01:37] Lori L. Tharps is a passionate writer, author and educator whose work lands at the intersection of race and real life. She began her journalism career as a staff reporter at Vibe Magazine and correspondent for Entertainment Weekly. Later, writing for outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Times and Washington Post, she has also served as a writer and editor for magazines like MS, Glamor, Suede and Essence, just to name a few. [00:02:05][27.3]
Shana Pinnock: [00:02:06] Lori prides herself on using words to broaden the conversation about race, culture and the human experience. She is the award winning author of three–You heard that –three critically acclaimed nonfiction books, including “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America,” a chronological look at the culture behind the ever changing state of Black hair from 15th century Africa to the present day United States. Word on the street is that she also has a Black hair story for every occasion, and we’re excited to hear them all. Lori, welcome to Dear Culture. [00:02:37][31.4]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:02:38] Thank you. It’s great to be here. [00:02:40][1.4]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:02:40] Yes. Welcome welcome. So I’m really excited that we have a fellow journalist on the show. That’s pretty cool. And so as you know, when we are reporting on stories, we often feel a bit of an attachment to them. We’re both writers and researchers, and I’ve certainly had experiences researching a particular topic and wanting to really do a deep dive. Could you tell us how you went from researching and writing about variety of topics to wanting to write a book specifically about Black hair? [00:03:08][27.9]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:03:10] Yeah, actually, it’s it’s pretty much what you said. The idea for a hair story actually started as my master’s thesis when I went to graduate school for journalism. And my adviser actually said, you know, for a master’s thesis, you make sure that you pick a topic that you’re going to be interested in for a really long time because this was going to be a yearlong project. And I knew that I wanted to write something that would obviously hold my attention. And I think the best way to do that is something that you’re personally invested in. And even though I’d never been a hair person, I was never that person to, like, spend lots of time on my hair. In fact, I was always the laziest person like my go to style was a ponytail, sometimes two ponytails if I was feeling crazy. Meant in how it separated people by race, meaning I knew everything about white hair care, I knew what white people did to their hair because you live in America. You see it on TV commercials. You see it in advertisements. But white people literally had no idea if I cut my hair, even though it looked longer because I just relaxed it, or if I washed my hair because I was wearing dreadlocks and they didn’t comprehend how my hair worked. There was so much segregation around something so personal as hair that I want it to get to the bottom of it. I want it to know why Black people in particular had such complicated relationships with their hair. And so it was like a journalistic interest to get to the bottom of the story. But it was a very personal topic that I had lived my whole entire life. [00:04:55][105.1]
Shana Pinnock: [00:04:55] Hmm. OK. So for our readers, there is a lot of history covered in this book, like starting in the 15th century. So clearly we can’t get to all of it today, but I did want to make sure that we touched on a few key pieces in terms of background on traditional West African practices that are currently influencing Black hair culture today. You know, there is I start to think of you talked about in the book about like the West African practice of only like very specific special people touching your hair, which to me, I was like, That sounds like Black folks and let nobody play in your head. Like, leave it alone. You know, you even talked about there being a West African tradition of not cutting a little boy’s hair until after they turn one years old —didn’t know that was a thing. So, what are some other key themes in African-American hair culture today that originated in West African hair practices? And specifically, can you talk a little bit about how enslaved folks instituted some of our most well-known hair practices and methods? [00:06:01][66.0]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:06:03] Yeah, and I think that’s actually one of the most powerful messages that come that came out of writing.This book is recognizing that things that we kind of took for granted about our hair culture are actually coming from our heritage, our African heritage. These aren’t things we made up this idea of people touching our hair. That’s not just us being really paranoid. That actually comes from this historical tradition of there being designated people, special people in each community who were designated hairdressers and only they were allowed to work on a person’s hair or a family’s hair or community’s hair. And so it’s like a real gift to be a hairdresser, to be the person who had that tradition passed down for their from their elders, if you will. One of the things that is pervasive in many West African cultures, which we discovered in our research, you know, before European contact was that hairstyles were very elaborate. Male hairstyles were even more elaborate than women because your hairstyle represented, you know what place you had in society. So if you were the chief, you were going to have the most elaborate hairstyle and your hairstyle was basically a sign of who you were. So your hairstyle meant it could signify, for example, that again, you were the chief or that you were very powerful person or that you were very wealthy or that you were a soldier or you were the wife of a soldier. So, so much of your identity was in your hair. And we found that even everybody had a hairstyle because you wouldn’t go out into the world without signifying who you were. So your hair wasn’t done. The only time you would, you know, not do your hair is if you were crazy, not even in mourning. Like, not even if you were super sad because there was a hairstyle for being in mourning. It was literally a sign of, you know, there’s literally something wrong with this person. So when we today say something like, girl, you can go out without fixing your hair, like what was wrong with you, like that comes not just from, you know, we say it’s respectability politics, but there really is this tradition of doing our hair because it says who we are. And I think we can see that in a very positive way because we are super creative with our hairstyles, right? We color, we style. We change the style from Tuesday to Wednesday. It’s all about style and sharing who we are. And you know, we are often criticized for doing so much with our hair, but it is part of our heritage to show up and show out with our hairstyles. And I want people like the idea of writing this book was to let Black people know that they shouldn’t feel like there’s something shameful or or wrong about, you know, wanting to wear different colors, different styles, adding to the hair or making their hairstyle. Well, kind of fit their feelings for that at that time. So, so really, we find that there are so many things that we again may dismiss is just some kind of modern response to pop culture when in fact we’re really staying connected to our to our history. And one other thing I’ll add is that because Black hair has always been and time consuming to style the rather than looking at it as a burden traditionally in African cultures, the time to do one’s hair was a time for building friendships, for connecting with community members, which again, if we talk about the barbershops and the beauty parlors, that’s still what we do because it takes a long time, you’re going to be sitting around for a while. And so that’s been really a time for bonding. So even that the idea, “oh, it’s going to take me all day to be in the salon,” you know, we may complain about it, but it’s always been again, rather than looking at it, you know, traditionally it wasn’t all that’s terrible. It was now is our bonding time. So I think when we know historically what these practices meant, then we can definitely look at them today, not as a burden, but as a blessing from our ancestors. [00:10:12][249.3]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:10:13] Lori, you mentioned shame, and I have to ask about something that we all know too well in Black communities and that is “good hair” vs. “bad hair.” And it’s not specific. Or it’s not just in the Black American culture, like even Dominicans, they call “bad hair” pelo malo. And I think about my good Morehouse brother, Spike Lee’s iconic film school days. That iconic film rather the infamous scene with Tisha Campbell where there, where you see the dark skinned women who had, quote unquote bad hair battling it out with the light skinned Black women who had, quote unquote good hair. And you know, this is something that continues to play out. I think even in modern times, even there was I remember that documentary that Chris Rock had did and there really got the conversation going, but it didn’t really change necessarily how we categorize our hair. Could you tell us more about how we arrive at this binary categorization between Black hair? I mean, bad hair versus good hair? [00:11:20][66.7]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:11:21] Yeah, absolutely. And it is unfortunate that this is still something that plagues our community. But again, I think with research and in education, we can start and —we’ve actually started already, but we can work more at diminishing the this notion that there’s such a thing as good and bad hair. But historically, these terms came about from the kind of different types of African-Americans who were enslaved and how their phenotypes manifested. So we know that even before slavery became institutionalized when Africans were first brought to this country, they were indentured servants and they were freed. And when those Black males, most of them were males, were freed, many of them married white women. And so we know that their offspring then were what we would today say were mixed. And obviously their hair texture was looser, curled their skin was lighter skinned. And so we began this first level of classifying people by their appearance, by their hair texture and their skin tone. In other words, people knew that these light skinned people were free Black people, right? That they were privileged in that way. And then once slavery was institutionalized as a race based institution and we did have the continuous raping of Black women by white men, we had this again, a second tier of Black people, if you will. So after you have the second tier, are a second class of enslaved people who are the offspring of, you know, a white master and his — an African enslaved person. You get this, you get these, these privileges and I’m using privilege. I’m putting air quotes over privilege because no slave is privileged, OK? That’s like an oxymoron. But they might have had access to benefits like being in the house instead of being out in the fields. Having access to the house meant often access to learning how to read, access to better food, access to freedom on the other end of the master’s death or something like that. So by and by, it wasn’t about who’s your daddy? It was simply while you have light skin, you have loosely curled hair–You must be part white, . Therefore, you have all those privileges. And so the hair, the hair texture and the skin tone just became de facto signs of who was going to be privileged in this world. And so if you had that quote unquote good hair and that light skin You were privileged and what happened, which is the unfortunate part, is we, you know, other enslaved people recognize these benefits based on hair and skin tone, and they couldn’t change their skin. Although there is a lot of evidence that Black people were trying to lighten their skin with things like arsenic, early on that they could change their hair textures, and they came up with ingenious ways to straighten their hair, to straighten their children’s hair simply to give them that potential privilege. So really good hair wasn’t about, “Oh, you’re so pretty.” It was that good hair might get you some freedom. It might get you some education. It might get you life. Like, my baby won’t be worked to death because that’s what life was about. It was being worked to death or not being worked to death. And if you had some quote unquote good hair, that could literally be the difference between life and death. So it’s really important for people to understand that these terms weren’t invented about beauty. There was no enslaved person trying to “be cute.” They were trying to stay alive. And that’s what these terms really originate from. So when we hear them today, it’s heartbreaking to understand that people actually thought that there was something to emulate about beauty with this hair. It was really. “Maybe I can live a little bit longer. Maybe my child, I can’t, because I got real African hair, but maybe my child has a potential for a better life.” So that’s where those terms come from. And I think the more we educate our young people and our old people because really and truly, we know grandmama and them, they’ll be talking about “good hair” and “bad hair” because that was their reality. But the more we educate people about what those terms really meant, I think we can, you know, be hopeful that they will slowly diminish in our vernacular. [00:15:51][270.2]
Shana Pinnock: [00:15:52] I’m so glad that you said that point about grandmothers, because mine, when I say you, I’m fighting this lady on a regular basis. And you know, my grandmother is this elderly Jamaican lady like the fact that I have locs. My father also has locs, my brother has lock, she hates them and trying to explain to people, you know, older Jamaican folks are not here for the Rastafarian movement. They are not here for any kind of locs, but to kind of educate her on the whole ideology of like “good hair” and “bad hair” and the just the entire perspective of like, do you really do you recognize that you’re like, you’re just you’re regurgitating white supremacist ideology like like Gram, like what’s going on here? My brother has a wife who is Puerto Rican, so she has a very loose, curly hair pattern. Well, gosh, I was like, “How many kids does he have now?” Two of the four have very loosely, you know, loose curls. It’s a loose curl pattern. But the youngest, and he won’t be the youngest that much anymore. I feel bad for him — But the youngest right now, his hair is it. It is a four c texture. And I remember the first time you know, that my grandmother saw him and she’s like, Oh, he doesn’t have the good hair like the other two and you’re like, “Whoa, whoa, miss…” So I and you know, and it’s it’s so interesting, just this ideology, because, you know, Gerren and I actually had this conversation offline a couple of weeks ago about this. We didn’t even see this natural hair movement where there was this appreciation for nature hair, where there’s, you know, appreciation for 4C textures until very recently. And even now, there’s a resurgence of, I mean, there relaxers. But, you know, back in the day you call them perms. There’s there’s this resurgence of of perms and everything else and this whole this whole ideology of like what is professional by white standards. Would you agree, G? [00:17:58][126.1]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:17:59] Yeah. You know, I had my own relationship, interesting journey with my hair. I used to have cornrows and I used to work at Fox News. And I remember when I was hired, I expected them to tell me to cut my hair because I figured that they would see it as unprofessional. And they did not, thankfully. But the very fact that I even thought that that could be a problem for me and my place of employment is heartbreaking when you think about it. And even when you think about straightening hair, we often associate that with just Black women. But you know, what’s so interesting to me is, and you touch on this in your book about the about Black men also have this this struggle or rather many Black men probably don’t even realize that when they’re wearing their durags, for example, trying to get, you know, the nice wavy waves in your hair, you know that that is also rooted in a beauty standard. And I wear a durag right before — I take it off right before I come and film Dear Culture; I wear it every night. And so we kind of wrestle with our relationship with our hair. And many of us feel feel attractive and feel for– not speaking for me, but — some Black men feel more masculine, more desirable to two women when they have their hair straightened. And, you know, aside from talking, when we associate it with pimp culture like Snoop Dog and Cat Williams, we usually don’t talk about Black men straightening, straightening their hair. And I find that to be really fascinating as well. [00:19:31][92.1]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:19:32] Yeah, it’s I’m so glad you brought that up, Gerren, because too often when people talk about Black hair culture, Black hair issues, they talk about it as if it’s a women’s issue. When Black men were also enslaved, Black men are also been part of this white supremacist culture that has denigrated our hair. And you know, traditionally we saw that, like I mentioned before, that Black women would wrap their children’s hair, they would wrap their own hair, they would do all kinds of things to straighten their hair, to try to get it, to be able to style it like the European fashions of the time. And Black men were not immune to this. I mean, we had records. We found records of enslaved African men using axle grease on their hair to just to straighten their hair or simply shaving it all off. Simply not to have that very obvious symbol of African-ness, which again, the hair says, “Hey, I’m Black, OK,” like you could have the lightest skin. But if your hair had a little bit of kink in it, that was kind of the telltale marker of Blackness and the brainwashing that was done to enslaved Africans very deliberately, mind you, that “you know you are inferior, you’re an inferior being. You’re more like an animal than a human. And look at your hair that just proves it.” That is one of the ways. I mean, it wasn’t the only thing, but that kind of continuous telling of / to Black people that they were inferior. They were more like animals than humans. Black men got the same messaging. And you, you know, you see it. I mean, Malcolm X’s autobiography is that great example of how he was so into conching [perming] and he hated his hair and all of that that he went through for a certain look. We know that Black men have these same issues to untangle. The problem is that there’s really not the same amount of forums for them to do. So, you know, they’re not having the hair parties that women are having. They’re not having the brunches, the lunches, the YouTube videos and all those other things to unpack this, but they need to as well. And I have to say that the natural hair movement, while it’s still a very female led movement, I think it is making pathways and opening doors for men to have these conversations too. [00:21:43][131.1]
Shana Pinnock: [00:21:43] Yeah. So, you know, just to fast forward a little bit like modern day because like I said earlier, you know, I just I’ve noticed this resurgence of natural hair care, especially during the pandemic when when we were in lockdown and you couldn’t go get your first line up or I had to learn how to how to twist these around. I don’t know what to do. But one thing that I think I have loved about just Black culture in general and kind of the the journeys that both men and women have had to and non-binary folks – y’all here too– then have had to, you know, kind of have these different journeys with their hair is how much it is often seen as like an act of resistance. Right. So case in point, I think of like this is going to sound crazy, but I think of like Cam Newton and Jay-Z and their locs right now don’t really… It’s not really my thing, but you know, it is. It makes a very big statement. You know, in the 60s, the Afro was the style of the civil rights movement. “My hair is going to be big and lovely and it’s growing.” Can you share with us a bit about how you know, other examples of how Black hair the Black hair has been used as an act of resistance? [00:23:02][78.0]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:23:03] Absolutely. Well, I’m going to start with the go back to the civil rights movement because that Afro wasn’t actually big and beautiful when it started, because it really was, as you said, an act of resistance. And what I mean by that is, you know, in the late 50s, when the civil rights really started, really started, right? What you had were some angry Black people who were fed up with this idea of respectability politics. They were fed up with this idea that they were told to dress properly, be small, keep a quiet voice, don’t make a fuss and you’ll get what you want. You’ll get your what you deserve. But that wasn’t what was happening. They were still getting lynched. They were still being treated like second class citizens. They still couldn’t buy a house. They still couldn’t eat at the freakin Woolworth’s counter and get a freaking hot dog, right? I mean, nothing was what that was promised. And so the idea was, if we’re not — if we’re playing by the rules and we don’t get anything that we deserve, then let’s stop playing by the rules. And one of those things was let’s stop straightening our hair as women to make white people feel comfortable — and as men, let’s stop shaving our hair down to, you know, a half a centimeter so that it doesn’t quote unquote scare anybody. So the first act of resistance vis a vis our hair was just letting it grow. Letting it be be natural. And so it wasn’t these perfectly quaffed afros. At first, it really was just what happens when you don’t perm your when you don’t straighten your hair? What happens Black men? When you just let your hair grow? Hello, Jay-Z. So it wasn’t like they were necessarily, you know, with the the lax or anything like that. But it was unkempt and straightened Black hair. And that really stood out and made a statement because white people weren’t used to Black people showing up in their natural with their natural hair. Right? And that that said something. Eventually, it became the big round, which was also quite defiant, right? It did make a statement when you saw the Panthers, for example, or Angela Davis with that round afro that stood way up. You couldn’t ignore it, especially in mass in a group of people. Another example of the hair being used as resistance is definitely in the case outside of the United States. In Kenya, the Kenyan Marmar warriors who were fighting against British invasion. They let their hair grow into dreadlocks as a symbol of like masculinity and fierceness, which is where we got the term dreadlocks. Because when the British saw these Kenyan warriors, their response was like, “Look at their dreadful hair,” you know, imagine these fierce warriors with this long, thick dreadlocks for a British person. And that was quite frightening, right? I mean, that made them look really like a formidable foe. So that’s another example. And then, of course, the group MOVE in the in Philadelphia. It was a group of like, I don’t want to say they call themselves a back to natural movement, and I don’t want to say necessarily resistance. But They all wore dreadlocks also, and they were like free-form locs more or less. But they were resisting kind of what popular culture said you had to do. I mean, they had their home schooled their kids. They…did have their own weapons in their houses. They had their own ideas of diet and everything else. They basically were separatists, for all intents and purposes, and their hairstyles was what set them apart and people would know if you were part of the MOVE movement. So, so… we have these different examples, which of course, there is the – I don’t know, I guess you would say the negative aspect of that which still lingers today is because our hair has been used as a physical symbol of resistance. Then today, when people wear those same hairstyles, they’re often associated with these kind of negative or violent or extreme movements from history, which on the one hand, it’s like, you know, fist up for taking control of our own lives with our hair and using it as a symbol. But at the same time, you know, 20, 30, 40, 50 years later, why can’t we get past that and just have these styles, as you know, cultural touchstones, right? So we do have to deal with the legacy of our hair being used as a very visual symbol of resistance and today understand why people still have negative reactions to some of these styles because really, they invoke fear, which is what they were supposed to do. [00:27:55][292.1]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:27:56] And that’s a perfect segway, Lori, because there is still discrimination as it relates to Black natural hair. And I think there’s no better evidence of that than the Crown Act, which was enacted in 2019, which stands for creating a respectable and open world of natural hair. And and the fact that we have to have a law to prevent us, prevent other people who are not us from discriminating against us in our hair. I think that is it. Just it kind of just blows my mind. Do you think we’ll ever get to a place where Black hair is not seen as something disruptive, where Black hair is just “normal”? [00:28:34][38.0]
Lori L. Tharps: [00:28:35] I mean, maybe not in my lifetime, maybe not in y’all’s lifetime, but maybe in my style. My daughter is 10. Maybe in her lifetime. I definitely think again. Hair story came out in two thousand one. And then we updated in 2014. And just the difference between what was considered acceptable between 2001 and 2014 is amazing to me. The natural hair movement hadn’t started when we first wrote the book. And if you had asked me, you know, do you think it’s ever going to be a time when we see a newscaster with natural hair or when we see Black women wearing natural hair on catwalks or, you know, in fashion magazines and movies like will there ever be, you know, like an s array, right? I would have said, “Oh no, keep dreaming, darling, keep dreaming.” But but then look what happened, you know, by 2014. Not only did these styles become quote unquote mainstream, but you had an entire industry like one of the largest industries in the world, the global industry of hair care that, you know, jumped right on that bandwagon and supported this quote unquote natural hair movement, which helped it become a phenomenon, not just something in the Black community, right, which helped it become more mainstream and acceptable. So change happens sometimes at a slow, it feels too slow. I see that change. I’m excited by the change. I think the change that’s happened in the Black hair community is instructive for other social change that we want to see happen. I don’t think, though, that I can say again within my lifetime that there won’t be disruptive Black hair events. Still, because we still live in a white supremacist society, we still live in a society where white culture is the dominant culture. So any time you have a Black hairstyle come up against, you know, hit the white cultural guidelines or or or, I don’t know walls, if you will, then there’s going to be some sort of disruption. But every hit creates a crack in every crack as an opportunity for a window, a door to be open. So I see it happening. It’s continuously happening and I think it’ll continue to happen, but it’s not going to be done any time soon. [00:31:04][148.7]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:31:05] Well, Lori, thank you so much for coming on Dear Culture and kicking off Black History Month with us. I think this is a perfect conversation to kind of set the tone. I really hope that our listeners really got — I know that me and Shana — got a lot of lessons from this conversation. I hope it lifts the vibration so that we can really learn to accept and love our hair as it is. If you want to learn more about Lori or to order her amazing books, visit her website at Lori L. Tharps dot com. That’s l o r i. The letter “L”, T H A R P S dot .com, and of course, for more news and commentary on the culture, visit theGrio’s website at www.theGrio.com And follow us on Instagram at Dear Culture Pod. [00:31:50][45.6]
Shana Pinnock: [00:31:59] We want to remind our listeners to support your local Black businesses and donate to your local organizations and religious institutions. The business that we will highlight this week is Dreamgirls Fine Hair Imports and Salon. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the Thompson sisters launched Dreamgirls in 2006 to help her clients reach their hair strength and length goals through a healthy hair system and product line. Their five step healthy hair care system is a key component to achieving the “wow” factor results and is exclusively used in their salons. Dreamgirls holds the principle belief that everyone everywhere deserves to have healthy hair. To learn more about Dreamgirls fine hair imports in Salon, visit their website at WWW do DG hair dot com that’s d as in Delta G as in gamma, hair dot com. [00:32:48][48.8]
Gerren Keith Gaynor: [00:32:49] Thank you for listening to Dear Culture. If you like what you heard, please give us a five star review and Subscribe to the show wherever you listen to your podcast and share it with everyone you know. [00:32:57][7.5]
Shana Pinnock: [00:32:57] and please email all questions, suggestions and compliments. We love those two podcasts at the Grio dot com. The Dear Culture podcast is brought to you by theGrio and co-produced by Taji Senior Sydney Henriques-Payne and Abdul Quddas. [00:32:57][0.0]
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