Clutch Magazine: Hair Raising Anxiety

For Clutch Magazine Online, The Snob penned a piece on how the move to natural hair has opened up a whole new bag of anxieties for many women who were already anxiety prone when it comes to black hair and what it symbolizes. How can you separate your politics from your hair when human nature is all about about putting meaning on what others see as meaningless? How do you embrace a movement based on "acceptance" on the one thing you can easily change?

From Clutch:

I used to write about my hair quite a bit, but found myself wanting to write less and less about it because, as a black woman, you always get one of two responses – “It’s just hair” or *insert lengthy explanation on why it is not*.

One side was either “over it” or completely lacking in empathy. (Or was in serious denial, depending on who you asked.) The other side was so caught up in their hair drama it had turned into a greater metaphor for almost every problem ever created by growing up in a minority-majority culture.

I was having a conversation with St. Louis hairdresser Debra Small recently as she did my hair, and Small asked me what I thought was going on where women, who in every other aspect of their lives were confident and self-assured, turned into complete emotional messes when it came to hair.

I surmised that unlike if you were born with dark skin or a rounder than average butt or nose or thick lips or almost any other feature often ascribed to Black American women, and if you were made to feel “bad” about these things, the road to self-acceptance was slightly less complex if it was something you knew you couldn’t really do much about it without drastic, expensive and sometimes deadly plastic surgery.

But unlike a nose, a butt or skin tone – hair is (somewhat) malleable. And if not malleable, the cost of drastically altering ones hair was within reach. Hence – the insanity.

Hair was something anyone and everyone could pass judgment on because, technically, hair was something you could “fix” – if you looked at all black hair as a “problem.”

And pass judgment many, many people did.

Read the rest at Clutch Magazine Online.

Comments

[swiv]

muy sexy.

[BluTopaz]

Oh God. Is this still an issue? Do these women channel their angst into something productive?

[M. Slade]

Girl, you look all kinds of good in that picture. If you were gravy I'd take me a buscuit and SOP YA! (I think my grandfather used that line on my grandmother back in 1942)