With Hair People Want to Touch All the Time

[jlh]

This Is Dedicated to That One Black Kid, comic by Keith Knight
Monday: who lives in that tiny ass town off the highway, in the middle of nowhere
Tuesday: who was not into hip hop in high school
Wednesday: who gets used as the reason why someone isn't a racist

Short answer: Don't ask people you don't know well if you can touch their hair. It's obnoxious. It always made me feel like a dog.

When I was a child, I had a very short curly afro haircut because my mother didn't really know how to deal with my hair. When I was fifteen, I started growing it out again, and after getting an unmanageable afro, on my beautician sister's advice, I started to flat iron it. Once a week I would wash it, blow it dry, run a very hot curling iron through it, and then wear it in a french braid the rest of the week. When I was a senior in high school I got upset that I couldn't do anything fun with it for a party, so my sister came over for an emergency cut where mysteriously, my curly hair started to fall, rather than frizz out sideways. In college I kept growing it out, putting very mild hair straightener on After a few years of that I sort of didn't need to do it anymore, and now I have shoulder-length, quite curly hair. Sometimes women—usually black women—ask me how I've done it and I have to answer honestly, "it's just like this," and they say, "you're lucky."

Hair within the black community is incredibly political, because it doesn't behave like white hair, hence the entirely separate culture of black hair salons (and products; take a trip down the aisle in your CVS sometime). Do you leave it natural and short? Do you straighten? Is straightened hair a signifier of wanting to be more "white" or of class? (Because that hair Oprah has? That is some expensive damn hair.) What about extensions, or wigs? What does it mean for a black woman to have beautiful hair? We have a lot of options, but nearly all of them have some kind of political meaning, relative to how accepting or resistant one is to the white standard of beauty symbolized by, well, Hef's girlfriends, at least: long, straight, blonde hair.

So, calling a girl "nappy-headed"? It's a huge political insult with all kinds of "jungle bunny" implications. Yet keeping your hair natural is also a statement of rejection of those white standards of beauty. Yet, straightening your hair doesn't mean abandoning the race. And because so much black hair has been altered in some way, there's been a wholesale abandonment of being natural, an embrace of dyes and crazy hairstyles and the like because you can just make your hair do whatever with enough chemicals. Like so many other things for women, there is no perfect answer.

Comments

[misscake]

Your description of feeling like a dog when people want to touch your hair reminds me of how incredibly uncomfortable it was when strangers tried to touch my pregnant belly.

Also, I wanted to let you know I've really enjoyed your posts this week. I wasn't quite in a mind frame to comment on them, but I've read them all.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I thought of that parallel as I was writing this, but I didn't want to put it in my post because I haven't experienced that. So thanks for bringing that up, and for reading the posts this week!

[phoenixsong]

Oh, the hair thing. As someone with natural corkscrews that my mother never quite knew what to do with? This one I can get. And having gotten into the "Curly Girl" thing a few years ago, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say my hair has more in common with black hair than with white straight hair. And yes, we have our own product lines, too -- but most of them seem to be about controlling frizziness, or "letting" us have beautiful straight hair. Except I can tell you from experience, anything that involves fussing at my hair too much? Will just add to the frizz, not control it, not unless I go for the helmet-head look with tons of product.

There are the keeping the curls v. blowing/ironing/chemical straightening debates, shampoo v. no-poo, no product v. various types of products. Luckily, though, there are also plenty who realize that even among curlies there are so many variations that different things work for different people. Which is pretty much the only thing we want from hairdressers, too -- to get them to stop treating our hair like wayward straight hair and realize curly hair needs different treatment.

And yes, I get highly annoyed by people who think I'm "lucky" to have curly hair. s:) I've gotten better at accepting my hair as-is, but there are still days I look around on the Metro, and think "If only I could have your hair, just for one day..." Human nature, I guess.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Still, your and my hair, and the curly hair of other Mediterranean-heritage friends of mine, is very different from the wiry hair of most black folks. I don't know when mine stopped being very afro-like, but it will fall into a curl, while a lot of black women simply do not have that option at all, which is why they're envious of my hair—because it IS closer to that white beauty ideal than theirs is.

That said, it's definitely true that the less I fight my hair, the better it looks.

[poisontaster]

I was over on the Angry Black Woman's blog the other day looking at (IIRC) an archived entry where she'd embedded a video of some girls essentially playing a "pet people's hair" GAME. And it was both outrageous to me and completely unsurprising.

A short time later, someone on my flist was writing a story about Martha, from Doctor Who (the woman in my icon, for ease of use) and asking for advice about what black hair would feel like. She went about it what I thought was a pretty respectful way, admitting her own cluelessness about the topic, but in the comments, someone was advising her to just walk up to a black person and touch. And it wasn't clear at the time whether it was serious advice or tongue in cheek. So I responded and said, "I don't know if you're kidding or not, but I don't recommend doing that. Ever." And her return response was that she'd just watched too much Candid Camera as a child. At that point, I dropped the subject and backed away slowly.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

That's so weird, what does candid camera have to do with it? I don't blame you for running from that thread.

Oh, poor Martha, she has caused such controversy. It makes me sad.

Hair!

[millefiori.livejournal.com]

I remember hearing a story about that on NPR a while back -- a young black woman transitioning between high school and college dealing with the personal/political fallout around how she styled her hair. If I remember correctly, she'd straightened it in high school, and when she went to college she let it do something more natural. She got approval from black friends, but her family (who presumably taught her about straightening in the first place) was very disapproving.

It seems to me that a lot of black women I see style their hair in ways that attempt to achieve the straight, free-swinging look of (some) white hair, but, not having Oprah's hairdresser, it becomes very stiff and unnatural looking. I think I may be particularly sensitive to this because I have curly/wavy hair, and when I was younger I desperately wanted long, straight, 'swingy' hair, but nothing I did achieved it -- instead I always ended up with a semi-straight, coarse, stiff mess. I eventually embraced my curls, and learned how to work with them instead of against them. When I see women working against their hair instead of with it, I feel kind of sad for them, because I remember how sad I was back then, longing for something I couldn't have and feeling miserable and down on myself because I always felt like I looked 'wrong'.

Re: Hair!

[phoenixsong]

Oh yes! For all that I still have the twinge over not having "swingy" hair, I can still tell fairly easily which people with wavy or curly hair are trying to straighten unsuccessfully. And it's all I can do to not go tell them "No, really, you need to read this book and stop torturing your hair like that!"

Re: Hair!

[millefiori.livejournal.com]

Oooh, thanks for the book rec! When I look at old pictures of myself I want to cry at how awful my hair looks. I wish I could go back in time and have a talk with that girl!

Re: Hair!

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

*seconds with the book rec thank you!*
As someone whose hair didn't turn curly til puberty and who is STILL looking for the right products and how to deal with it, this is a huge help!

Re: Hair!

[folk.livejournal.com]

Have you tried going to a stylist who has experience with African-American hair? My Polish friend who has the curliest hair ever omg relies on the Afro-Caribbean community in London for all her hair needs.

Re: Hair!

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

I haven't, but that is a cool idea! My hair is weird because while it is curly, it isn't crazy thick and hard to straighten. So usually conventional methods work with it, though figuring out products and stuff is a nightmare.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

It has always seemed like a huge thing to me, even from where I sit.

It suddenly makes me wonder what it would be like in an AU world where it was reversed with white people using black hair as a standard of beauty, and different things they might do and what the political implications would be and the chemicals etc. My sister would probably be considered lucky for also having really curly curly hair.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

And there's this whole other community that I didn't talk about, but a lot of upper middle class Jewish women of my acquaintance who have curly hair get it blown out regularly. A friend of mine liked to keep it curly but her mother very strongly suggested, really almost pleaded, that she get it blown out for her wedding, and so she did, and all day her relatives were telling her how much more beautiful she looked with straight hair. It weirded her out so much that she's never done it since. But that's also applying this, well, very western dominant culture standard of beauty to their own culture.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Wow, I hadn't thought of that. I have a friend from that background and that hair--she wears it curly and occasionally gets it blown out, but for her it's just sort of something to sometimes do with her hair that's not better than naturally.

[longtimegone]

When I was a child, I had a very short curly afro haircut because my mother didn't really know how to deal with my hair.

I bet that was adorable! :D I love curly hair on babies. Maybe I'm biased a bit because of my own hair, but it's just so precious!

The hair touching thing is weird, though I may have been guilty of it in the past. I try to be aware of such things, because people LOVE to touch my hair too, and I find it so weird and UGH.

You know, throughout my life, particularly after I really embraced my hair's natural curl, I've received comments about my "black girl" hair, with the implication being that my hair wasn't up to some standard because of its thickness and unrelenting curl patterns. I always found that so jarring and distasteful (on their part) because 1) they don't mean it as a good thing and 2) so what if it is like "black girl" hair? I mean, would that be a bad thing?

I've joked about this myself, so I'm not like, pissed at anyone who says this to me. Dionne and I have gotten a lot of mileage out of this. ;) It's just certain situations, where it's clearly a mark that I'm not living up to my potential of white-ness or whatever. *facedesk* I also get pegged as Puerto Rican a lot of times, which is odd to me, as I feel so very Italian -looking, but I suppose I know I'm half-Italian, so I see it.

I do love my hair, and other people's hair, straight, because it's pretty and something different every now and then, but I have to say that I'm infinitely more happy with it curly because it takes forever to straighten properly, and curly hair is just...me. And your hair is you. And, Clio, can I just say how much I love your hair? It's so springy and fantastic. Also, life is infintely easier when it's all "wash and go". :)

[jlh.livejournal.com]

It was, except that until I started growing breasts people thought I was a boy. That was really annoying. And I don't have any pictures of me being a girly little girl in bows and pretty dresses and all that.

It is really weird, because I want to be nice, but I also don't want strangers touching me, and it's tough to say "no" without sounding cold or bitchy. I really hate it when they pull it and go "wow it's really so long!" and then let it sproing back, but that might be because that's what everyone does and it's like, yep, got it, I KNOW.

When I straighten my hair, I can't explain this, but I feel fatter. It's just sort of limply laying on my shoulders and it's really really long and I just do not like it at all. And it feels so strange against my scalp to be straight, like it's fake hair rather than my own real hair.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

This has been a great series of posts. I have been especially interested by all the things you mention that don't seem racially motivated to me.
"I'm so used to "educating" people about race, but is that my job, because so many of my friends are white?"
Well, it is your job, because you are a history teacher. That is what makes it your job. And your friends probably realize that you are, in addition, a very explainy person. Proof of this: I know about pop music, the effect of salting the roads on East Coast cars, various theories on why the North won the Civil War, etc. I think people expect you to explain everything because you, as an individual, often explain various things kindly and well.

"Sometimes women—usually black women—ask me how I've done it and I have to answer honestly, "it's just like this," and they say, "you're lucky." "
You have great hair. This is lucky. Some white women also have great hair. They are also lucky. What gets considered "great hair" is transitory - it's like telling a girl with a fast metabolism that she's lucky she doesn't "have to" diet. In the 1930s, no one would have said that. In the 1980s, many would have said that.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I guess what I mean about responsibility is not, am I responsible for saying something, but more, should I be the end all of someone's racial knowledge? Like, did I fail my friend in high school that she was unprepared that all black people aren't like me? Should I have tried harder to tell her that they aren't? Am I responsible because I am black and I know things to research the things I don't know, or make clear the things I understand, so that I can be that one-stop shop for my white friends for whom I am their only black friend? That's really what I mean.

In the classroom, of course I have a responsibility, and I've discovered this year just how much teaching is a political act, because you have to decide what and how to teach. I sort of knew that on a higher level, but there are all these tiny decisions, and I realize how political they all can be. So yeah, sure, I'm a teacher, and I'm willing to explain things. I guess I'm thinking, well, where does how I'm willing to help in pointing things out end, and the other person's responsibility to look up some things on their own begin?

I see what you're saying about great hair, though I think that black women are also saying "you're biracial, aren't you" and in fact that's often the next sentence. You can see conob's comment below for her experience with that as a mixed race white/Korean woman—it was her comment that made me understand why I saw that as a sort of racial thing. But basically, within the black community the standards might swing (though not as much as in the dominant culture) but all hair is always political, all the time.

[calloocallay.livejournal.com]

Re Teaching one's casual acquaintances: It IS a scary thought to wonder if you are really one-stop shopping for an entire body of knowledge. I see what you mean.

Also, I would like to self-edit a bit: I did not mean to imply that these subjects were not fraught with racial significance, but rather that because of your posts, I now see these specific good hair and explainy-ness racial issues in a new light. Whew. I was slightly afraid all weekend that I had accidentally implied that I thought you were wrong.

Also, Chris got you a small present!

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I was slightly afraid all weekend that I had accidentally implied that I thought you were wrong.

No, I never thought that. I can see how it could read that way, except that you would never say "You don't know what your experience means" so I knew you meant it the way you meant it.

I really hope that I'm leading people to do thinky things and then research further, though I think that making lots of links to things helps with that. Reading through the IBARW posts--and I haven't read nearly as many as I am going to--has been a huge learning experience so I'll probably also be pointing to some of those in the coming months, too.

Also: Yay for presents!

[ladylisse.livejournal.com]

I...don't think I had any idea that people really did that. It's rude as hell.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

People do so many things. You have no idea. And yet, if you say no, you're the one who seems rude. It's a no win, really.

[melieltathariel.livejournal.com]

How about people you know touching your hair? When are you or are you not okay with it?
Thanks for all your posts this week; this one is something I'm often surprised to find a lot of white people don't know about. Many, many people are out there in complete ignorance of the fact that hair can be a big deal.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

People I know and am friends with, I'm really fine with, because that's just something that friends do, is touch each other. So rather than it being objectifying, it's affectionate. They are touching me and also my hair, rather than my hair and also me.

Hair is such a huge deal that I know I didn't even begin to do it justice, because I don't actually have that wiry black hair, so I don't have that much experience in dealing with it.

Thanks so much!

[kerosinkanister.livejournal.com]

Don't ask people you don't know well if you can touch their hair. It's obnoxious.

It is obnoxious. But at the same time at PR I do remember thinking your hair looked very touchable (not that it's something I'd actually do or ask to do with someone I don't know, or really anyone who isn't a girlfriend) so I think people are drawn to certain things. Once in a while I get that with the shaved head, someone randomly touching it just to see if or how smooth it is. I think if it's something people haven't had much exposure to they want to feel. But there's cultural things as well. The last time I was in France I got tons of attention with the shaved head but no random touching. I believe shaving is much less popular there but the people are more polite than to just come up for a feel.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Well, but that's exactly the thing, you wouldn't ask. It's not about not noticing difference, but about how you think it's okay to behave. You can say, "wow, that looks really neat" without being a jerk about it.

I think your shaved head suits you very well, actually.

[locumtenens.livejournal.com]

From the other side of the fence, I was always jealous of the black girls' hair in my class while growing up. I always thought they could do so many neat things with their hair, while mine was always the same: straight, flat, and boring.

Don't ask people you don't know well if you can touch their hair

o.O I find this akin to wanting to touch a pregnant woman's stomach.

Dear social buffoons: You wouldn't touch a non-pregnant woman's stomach, so why is it okay now? Clue: IT'S NOT. The same with people who have hair/skin/whatever that's different than yours.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think it really is the same as the touching the pregnant stomach thing. I might touch my friends' hair but I don't touch my friends' pregnant stomachs unless invited to. (I'm all about holding the baby, though.)

I think that we all envy other people's hair, really. When I'm in the shower combing the stuff out, or cleaning out the hair trap four times in each shower even if I didn't comb it out, I'm sort of cursing it.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, in the east black hair tends to be either short and natural or sculpture. Though I do like braids and twists. But those women tend to be a little more bohemian.

I think they totally deserved it! Sometimes when black women see my hair they say, "You're mixed, aren't you?" because yeah, that's how I got this hair. Which makes it racial again. I totally agree that it's about belonging, and even a very subtle method of cultural control in a sense. "Is she one of us or not, because she does not have our hair."

My hair is very dark brown, but when it started to go gray I started to dye it mostly because the gray hairs are so wiry that they would stick out and I felt it looked messy. Now it's a dark auburn and the gray just looks redder, which is much neater.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

It's obnoxious. It always made me feel like a dog.

So very true! I used to get that a lot either for bair or any time I got a new coat, random people would reach out and touch me/pet my coat. EWWWW!

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

...because I always add intelligently to the discussion. *cough*

[jlh.livejournal.com]

But that's the right reaction: EWWWW!

[folk.livejournal.com]

Oh God, seriously, people asking to touch my hair when I have it buzzed weirds me the fuck out too, and you don't really get any whiter than me. I can only imagine what it feels like for a black person.

(Also, you are one of my hair heroes, because your hair is made of awesome. I mean, technically keratin, but you know.)

From a selfish perspective, I'm quite grateful that black women do intensive and damaging things to their hair, because otherwise there wouldn't be a market for proper cholesterol, which would mean I'd have to find some other way to fix my hair when I do intensive and damaging things to it. WHY HELO THAR, PURPLE HAIR. ;)