Good Hair is All Relative:

 Or, from my experience, determined by who your relatives are.  In the movie, “Good Hair,” Melissa Ford describes being told by other black women she had “good” hair.  Yet, because her mother is white, she could rarely accept that her hair was beautiful.  I can relate to her—not to her choice in career—but to her hair experience as a mixed black woman.

As a black woman with white fam, I  grew up around the socially constructed hair standard—light brown or blond, shiny and bone straight.  I remember playing with Barbie and noticing that her hair looked more like my older white half sister’s follicles than mine.  Although my family often complimented me on my curls, I still felt like an outsider.  Another issue was that my mother didn’t always know how to care for my hair.  Fortunately, she’d let it grow naturally and never considered applying harmful chemicals or relaxers to it.  The downside was that she failed to explain to me that wearing my hair constantly kinky is, at times, an isolating experience in the black community and outside of it.

In middle school, I desperately wanted to fit in, so I pulled my hair into a tight ponytail.  Although it made me feel sophisticated, styling it that way for years made my hair thinner at the front.  Once, I let a homegurl dye my hair blond with actual Bleach!  This might have been around the time when my mom realized I had hair issues.  We’d occasionally go to black hair salons.  I felt awkward at the salon, as if I’d missed out on something special my whole life—a space in which black women often chit chat and share product ideas.  Yet, as soon as I sat in that salon chair, black women told me my hair was “good.”

My father—a Jamaican immigrant and Rastafarian—had dark chocolate skin and strong, thick hair.  I’ve never considered locking my hair because I associate locks with his Rasta spirituality.  There are many people that choose to lock their hair because it’s in style and not necessarily because they aspire to have a higher social consciousness.  In order to lock my own hair, I’d feel obligated to change my entire way of life.  For example, I’d likely become a vegetarian, dress modestly and devote myself to the Rasta ways.  This isn’t to say that I don’t consider myself a revolutionary at this moment. My father’s philosophies—although some of them I did not agree with—paved the way for my own sense of self and urge to unlearn oppression.  And that is what hair can be all about.  Learning and unlearning at the same time; learning about ancestry while unlearning the idea that there is a “good” way for hair to exist.

When I lived in Jamaica for the second time at age sixteen, I was eager to learn how to braid because it was a style I admired (this was when Alicia Keys made braids popular).  I spent hours trying to weave rows into my little cousins’ hair.  I should mention that they wouldn’t sit still half the time.  My grandmother even asked me to do her hair.  I think she thought I was a professional, but as soon as she figured out I didn’t know what I was doing she took it out.  In Jamaica, they call braids “cane rows.”  This fascinated me because I’d remembered hearing them called “corn rows” by African Americans my whole life.  Again, hair can be about discovery.  The braiding styles in Jamaica were nothing short of amazing.  People rocked zigzag patterns and gorgeous long locks.  I started to notice a pattern in hair texture on the island.  This is because many black folks of the Diaspora can trace their ancestry to West Africa wear hair is thick, strong with a tiny curl.  Yet, let us remember that Africa is a continent.  I noticed that my East African homegurls had hair that was a similar texture to mine.  Sadly, we don’t know very much about the thousands of textures of hair our ancestors have, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find out.

On a final note, as black women, we should try our best not to judge one another based on how we choose to style our hair.  Just because someone has natural hair doesn’t mean they got their mind right and just because a woman rocks a weave doesn’t make her ignorant.  One thing I will say is that black women should have the opportunity to enjoy their hair in its natural state at some point in their lives.  Giving very young children relaxers could strip them of the experience of the range of curls that black women posses—not to mention actually strip them of hair from their scalp.

By Maddy Clifford