I heard about the natural hair movement for the first time in 1996, but interestingly enough, the movement wasn’t an isolated group of men or women promoting a love of kinky hair. Instead, it was an aspect of Black Nationalism. The movement to love our natural hair wasn’t so much about style as it was about promoting the positivity of every Black feature that didn’t fit into the dominant culture’s standards of beauty. It was about embracing our fuller lips, loving our broad noses, adoring our brown skin, and admiring every nap on our heads, even though those features were largely undesirable in our society.
Since ’96, the natural hair movement has taken on a life of its own, having been embraced by Black women all over North America. It’s even a booming aspect of the hair industry, with blogger CurlyNikki being one of the largest players in the community. So when CurlyNikki featured white vlogger Sarah, whose YouTube channel WaterLily716 discusses curly hair and beauty, on her site to talk about her hair, I immediately felt a sharp pang of intense defeat and disgust at what I was witnessing. It’s NOT about preventing one woman of a different race from telling her story, it’s about a larger ongoing cultural issue being ignored to embrace the conceptualization of multicultural unity — a concept that is NEVER extended to Black folks in other groups’ sacred cultural spaces.
The word sacred might throw some folks off, but if you think that the Black struggle with natural hair acceptance is solely about being happy with who you are, and NOT about revolution, then you are highly uneducated with the struggles we dealt with in the past. Loving every inch of our Blackness has been an integral part of the battle fought by our most revered leaders. Loving every nuance, skin tone, and feature is central to understanding the importance of Malcolm, Martin and Angela’s fight. The revolutionary Marcus Garvey once famously said, “Don’t remove the kinks from your hair, remove them from your brain,” back in the early 20th century because the denial of our intrinsic selves has been a major concern since the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In fact, Kathleen Cleaver bests summarized why the Black power movement NEEDED to embrace natural hair.
When I say there’s no room for white people in the natural hair movement, I do not have malice or anger. It’s just a simple statement of FACT. Our kinks, our curls, our dreads, our naps, our Afros have not only presented extreme individual inner-conflict in us (which white people can NOT understand), but it has also created barriers which white folks have never, and will never, face. Afros, dreads, and even head wraps to contain our coils are called unkempt and actually have been deemed unprofessional in the work place, schools, and the U.S. Army. White people do NOT deal with these issues in the same context that we do, and to pretend that they do is nothing more than an ignorant-ass false equivalency.
Truthfully, I believe Sarah can provide some insight to women of all colors about her internal battle to accept her natural beauty, which is an issue people of all cultures and races can relate to, but framing her concerns as equivalent to what Black women deal with is utter bullshit. Several months ago, talented, natural hair writer Bee Quammie wrote an article for UPTOWN explaining the sentiment, “You have to be TWICE as good as them, to get HALF of what they have” and how we choose to embrace our hair actually has real-life consequences on our own climb through corporate and social ladders. If you think that Black women’s battle with their hair ends at their roots, then you have no clue about the modern day effects of colorism, self-hate, and racism that still exist in our community. There are many great forums for Black and white folks to come together, but the Black community has a lot of work to do amongst our OWN, before we start soliciting advice and assistance from other people OUTSIDE of our OWN sacred space.
LAB
Lincoln Anthony Blades blogs daily on his site ThisIsYourConscience.com, he’s an author of the book “You’re Not A Victim, You’re A Volunteer” and a weekly contributor for UPTOWN Magazine. He can be reached via Twitter @lincolnablades and on Facebook at This Is Your Conscience.
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