I have had this unfinished piece on black hair sitting on my computer for months now. However, considering that this past Tuesday was Toni Morrison’s 83rd birthday and her novel Tar Baby has one of my absolute favorite descriptions of black hair, I felt compelled to finish the piece.
Morrison’s oft-cited quote is one of my favorites because she strikingly captures the politics, history, and controlling images that are imbued in black hair. Describing one of the main character’s, Son’s hair, she writes:
[H]is hair looked overpowering--physically overpowering, like bundles of long whips or lashes that could grab her and beat her to jelly. And would. Wild, aggressive, vicious hair that needed to be put in jail. Uncivilized, reform-school hair. Mau Mau, Attica, chain gang hair.
By referencing colonial reform-schools, prisons, and the whips and lashes of slavery, Morrison invokes some of the harshest and most oppressive sites and symbols of black oppression while also invoking the radical political resistance to those oppressions. These were the sites where black bodies were not only exploited but disciplined and controlled.
Morrison’s personification of Son’s hair as “uncivilized” and “wild” plays on the controlling images meant to justify black exploitation. During slavery and colonialism black people were rendered uncivilized, primitive, savages in need of regulation and taming. In addition to being “tamed” and “civilized,” “wild” black bodies were paraded around on public display. This regulation and exotification of black bodies represents two different sides of the same dehumanizing coin.
It was this same history of public dehumanization and exotification that caused many black women to excoriate the “You Can Touch My Hair” exhibit a group of black women from unruly.com put on in NYC last summer. The most notorious case of public exotification of black bodies, though it certainly wasn’t the only one, was that of Saartjie Baartman, a Khoisan woman disparagingly dubbed the “Hottentot Venus.”
Baartman was paraded around Europe and put on display because of her “exotic” “grotesque” and “abnormal features.” Describing some of the more disturbing “exhibitions” in her book Medical Apartheid, Harriet Washington writes “[Baartman] was made to stand naked at parties of the wealthy and to impersonate a chained animal in garish Piccadilly, where the mob paid a shilling a head to gape and shout vulgarities.” In 1814, Baartman was sold to Reaux, an animal trainer where she was forced “into a cage and made to behave like a ‘wild beast.’” Even in death, Baartman’s body was still subject to dehumanizing exhibitions, as her skeleton remained on display in a Paris museum until 1974.
“Cult of True Womanhood” and Eurocentric Beauty Standards
The racialized, gendered, and sexualized images that justified Baartman’s vile dehumanization were constructed in direct opposition to the notion of the “cult of true womanhood.” According to the controlling image of the “cult of true womanhood,” docile, pious, domestic, and sexually pure bourgeois white women were the paragons of femininity and beauty.
These ideas about womanhood and beauty are not merely relics of the 18th century, but they are always finding expression in the contemporary moment. For instance, in what can only be described as racist and sexist filth masquerading as science, in 2011, evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa tried to scientifically “prove” that black women were less attractive than all other races of women. According to Kanazawa:
The only thing I can think of that might potentially explain the lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women is testosterone… women with higher levels of testosterone also have more masculine features and are therefore less physically attractive.
Kanazawa completely ignored the fact that beauty is subjective and informed by ideas about race, gender, and sexuality. The whole premise of Kanazawa’s “research” was informed by this long history of controlling images about black womanhood and beauty.
It is in fact impossible to talk about white supremacist beauty standards without talking about black hair. Sheryl Underwood, comedienne and one of the hosts of CBS’ daytime talk show The Talk, made egregious remarks about kinky hair and beauty in a segment on the show last September. The segment started with Sharon Osbourne sharing a comment Heidi Klum made about saving her biracial children’s hair. In an interview, Klum said that her sons have big afros and when she gets their hair cut, she saves it. With a mix of bewilderment and disgust, Sheryl Underwood responded “Why would you save afro hair?!” Sara Gilbert interjected and said that she saved her son’s hair from his first haircut and Underwood responded: “[his hair] was probably some beautiful, long, silky stuff” implying that white hair is worth saving while kinky afro hair is not. Underwood’s comments were received with thunderous applause and laughter and no push back from her co-hosts.
What was even more disturbing in the aftermath of Underwood’s comments were the attacks on her weight and her skin color, ironically feeding into the same beauty standards that spawned her initial comments. In no way can Underwood’s comments be excused or justified but I wonder if constant taunts about her physical appearance have compelled her to grasp at whatever signifiers of beauty are available to her. Or perhaps I am projecting my own experiences onto Underwood.
While I would like to say that cutting off my hair and going natural was a radical political choice to throw off the shackles of white supremacy, it was really more of an accident. After a hair-do gone wrong I decided that instead of salvaging the mess, it was just better to cut it all off. I was mortified. As my good friend can attest, I was in tears. I was afraid of losing some sort of femininity that society had long decided was outside the reach of black women myself anyway. Cutting my hair made me realize just how much of my sense of self was bound up in an unattainable standard of beauty.
Embracing my queerness helped me to combat feeling compelled to fit into some sort of hegemonic standard of beauty that was intended to exclude me by design. As a gender non-conforming black queer woman, I especially reject Kanazawa’s attempt to conflate masculinity in women as inherently unattractive. I have even confronted these ideas about beauty and femininity at barbershops when male barbers have tried to deter me from getting certain haircuts or edge-ups because they would be “too masculine.” In no way do my haircuts detract from my beauty.
There are debates among feminists as to whether women should even aspire to “beautiful.” Trudy Hamilton at her blog, Gradient Lair, summed it well when she wrote:
Thus, anyone, White, Black or otherwise, who suggests that Black women should ignore their own beauty (which really means to never consider themselves beautiful) and never affirm it for themselves or other Black women, in a White supremacist capitalist patriarchal society, is asking Black women to commit psychological, emotional and cultural violence against themselves and other Black women.
Neoliberalism, Black Hair and Discipline
It is important that we are unapologetic in affirming features such as hair texture, skin color, and broad noses, but as hip-hop artist Boots Riley once wrote on his Facebook page, “A rebellious aesthetic is not an actual revolutionary movement. An aesthetic is always absorbed and used by the class which is in power.” This is an especially important point considering that neoliberal capitalism is extremely malleable and adept at co-optation. For instance, in an article for Clutch, Danielle C. Belton noted that though black companies -- specifically those run by black women -- were the front-runners of supplying natural hair care products, larger white corporations were quickly trying to capitalize on what they previously believed to merely be a natural hair fad. This demonstrates that natural hair movements, especially in the absence of radical political struggles, can easily be enmeshed into the cultural logic of neoliberalism.
The Black Power movements of the 1960s and 1970s pushed large numbers of black people to come to revolutionary conclusions about racism and capitalism in the US. However, a conservative form of Black Power, often equated to black capitalism, accompanied the more revolutionary articulations. Nixon latched onto this conservative co-optation of Black Power to promote his Black Capitalism initiative as a way to dilute revolutionary consciousness. In a 1968 speech, Nixon remarked “[w]hat most of the militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in -- not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs -- to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action.” This was certainly a far cry from black radicals that denounced capitalism, private property, and exploitation. In 1969, Nixon established the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) as he claimed that the creation of more black businesses would be the way to cure the social ills that plagued many black communities. While OMBE largely failed to create new black businesses, it was successful as an ideological project.
By the 1980s, this sort of neoliberal ideology, specifically the worship of markets, began to reign supreme. Lafayette Jones, executive director of the American Health and Beauty Aids institute, illustrated this ideological shift in 1986 with his comments about black consumers and the hair care industry. Jones claimed "Where in the '60s, the fight was for civil rights; in the '70s, it was legislative reform and voting rights; in the '80s, it is on the economic front… The black American is like a sleeping giant. We must learn to marshal our dollars like we do our votes."
These comments were made in the midst of the Revlon boycott after Irving Bottner, president of Revlon’s professional products division, told Newsweek “In the next couple of years, the black owned businesses will disappear. They’ll all be sold to white companies.” Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH launched a boycott against Revlon and even held a mock funeral with trash cans of Revlon’s products to protest Bottner’s remarks. While PUSH and other civil rights groups demanded that Revlon cease its operations in apartheid South Africa it also demanded that the company employ more blacks within the corporation and support black businesses.
Black hair played an important role in the economic shifts that occurred within the neoliberal era, specifically the shift from a manufacturing to a service economy. Since the 1980s black women, like most women, have been concentrated in service industries. In the 1980s, there were waves of black women facing work place discrimination (and it certainly continues today) for wearing natural and protective hairstyles such as braids and cornrows. As Ayana Byrd and Lori Tharps note in their book Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair, “majority of braids discrimination cases involved women who worked in the service or hospitality industry” Labor attorney Eric Steele estimated that over a thousand women had been victims of bans on braids and cornows. Natural hair bans were treated as a worker’s rights issue by the Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union. Local 25 of the union held petition drives to demand that the Hyatt and Marriott Hotels end hair discrimination, reinstate the workers, and financially compensate all workers affected by the hairstyle policies.
As we’ve noticed recently, these bans on black hairstyles are not relegated to the 1980s or even workplaces, as schools have started to implement these racist bans on natural hair. It is important to note that in the case of 7-year old Tiana Parker and the natural hair ban at Ohio Horizon Academy, both cases involved charter schools.
The bans and punishments for natural hairstyles in charter schools are reflective of the increasingly punitive and disciplinary privatization measures deceptively championed as progressive school reform. The draconian disciplinary policies implemented in predominately Black and Latino charter schools have nothing to do with holistic education but everything to do with taming and regulating students all too often considered “unruly“ or “oppositionally defiant.” In Chicago, a city that has served as a laboratory for the privatization of education, parents and students have been subjected to exorbitant fees that are upwards of $2000 for minor infractions such as an “unkempt appearance and “not making eye contact.“ It certainly is not a coincidence that black students’ hair become targets in these larger neoliberal disciplining regimes.
The justification for grooming and hair policies in charter schools are similar to those found in prisons arguably the most disciplinary, violent, and coercive institutions in the contemporary moment. Prison officials claim that these policies are about hygiene and safety. They argue that it’s a safety concern because prisoners grow their hair out as way to show gang affiliation. It’s interesting that prison officials claim to be concerned about the relationship between hair styles and gang affiliation considering that shaved heads, often a sign of affiliation with white supremacist groups are not usually banned in prisons. While all sorts of justifications have been given for the regulation of grooming and hair policies within prison, it’s been argued that the true purpose of restrictive hair policies is to “use the state’s coercive power to prevent the practice of unpopular religions within […] prisons.” What cannot go missing from this argument is the intersection between religion, race, and politics. Considering that prisons in general have become warehouses for large numbers of black people, the “unpopular religions” in question are often those practiced by radical black and Native American political prisoners.
As neoliberalism will increasingly find new ways to profit from the resurgence of the natural hair movement, we must connect struggles around black hair to other radical political struggles that question and fight against the exploitation and dehumanization of black bodies.
Nikeeta Slade is revolutionary socialist in Syracuse, New York. She is an editor both at Red Wedge, where she occasionally writes the blog"AfroBlazingGuns," and at a local peace and justice newsletter The Peace Newsletter in Syracuse. She can be reached on Twitter.