Kitsch Magazine: Fall 2015

DEAR WHITE PEOPL
musings on the politics of black hair
by Yana Makuwa
When I was growing up, I wanted a sheet of long
black hair. I wanted it to fall down to the center of my back
like a waterfall, gracefully cover my face with polite strands
when the wind blew, and reflect light like a still dark lake.
Essentially, I wanted to be Pocahontas. I cannot describe to
you how frustrated I was that the soft curly poof on my head
would stay wherever I put it instead of swishing back and forth
behind me, and that when I tied it back my ponytail looked
more like a rabbit’s tail. I was convinced that my hair was the
only thing holding me back from reaching my true potential as
a beautiful, popular, and successful human being.
As I entered the early stages of pubescence I did
everything I could to wrestle my hair out of spirals and into
the straight strands that I desired (although it’s never been
quite long enough). I was thrilled when I finally convinced my
mother to let me chemically straighten my hair. I felt adult,
powerful, and most importantly, on my way to pretty. What I
didn’t realize then was that I was making a choice based on
skewed and exclusionary conceptions of beauty, and that this
placed me squarely in a fraught historical and political context
that I would eventually have to face.
To get to the real roots of this issue would require an
analytical knowledge of history that my hodge-podge of an
education simply didn’t provide. First, this dialogue is situated
heavily in an American context. Even if my naïve 12-year-oldself
had wanted to think more carefully about the ramifications
of what I was doing to my hair, I could never have anticipated
the extent that it would matter because the significance is
simply not the same in Harare, Zimbabwe. While the country,
and consequently its beauty standards, are of course affected
by a traumatic colonial history, the absence of a racial legacy of
slavery and Jim Crow changes and reduces the weight placed
on hair. So in looking to the past for some insight on how I
ended up spending vast amounts of time and money thinking
about and changing my hair, in the interest of writing what
I know this article will focus on the particularly
American and particularly female.
Keeping in mind that we are skipping
over the hundreds of years of slavery that
left a considerable mark on the African-
American psyche (how could a collective
consciousness not be changed by being
completely removed from a cultural
context and placed in a world where your
identity is prescribed for you and then
instantly dehumanized?), we could begin
tracing the identity politics of hair in
the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries.
The turn of the previous century was
the moment when altering black hair
became not only crucial for admittance
into an economic sphere, but also
became an industry in and of itself.
After slavery, there was a new burden
on the black population to participate
in an economy that structurally had no
place for them. It was crucial for them to
present an unthreatening, assimilationist
image; they had to bring the house-slave
aesthetic with them into freedom in order
to make a living wage. In an entry titled
“Black Hair Care and Culture, A History” on the
website of non-profit organization The African
American Registry, Ben Arogundade writes, “Many
blacks argue that imitating European standards of
beauty and grooming was necessary for blacks to be
accepted by white culture, especially by potential
white masters and employers.”
In a serendipitous turn of events, this
drive to imitate white beauty not only allowed
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