Hair Length: Who Does it Hurt?

"Every time a woman cuts off her hair, somewhere a little black girl cries!" 

-The Game's Tasha Mack

Tasha Mack uttered these lines when Melanie spontaneously chopped off some of her famously long hair. I grew up with a similar sentiment, in that I was threatened by friends and several family members throughout the years regarding my hair: "I'll beat you if you ever cut your hair!" That kinda thing. Of course, I never took these threats seriously, but they were meant to communicate that my long, "good" hair was important to people other than myself. That hair apparently meant something, and I dared not touch it.

Well, on November 1, I did touch it, after thinking about it for a long time. The experience brought those old threats back to mind and made me reflect on the various do's and don't's surrounding black women's hair. If I had long hair, I owed it to other people to maintain that length, but it only reinforces--in my humble opinion--more problematic standards of beauty that many black women have internalized: this idea that we have to strive for straight hair or long hair. I'm just going with healthy hair.

While I don't completely agree with the idea that "I am not my hair," I do believe that cutting my hair doesn't harm me or anyone else. It was, in fact, a liberating (if slightly scary) experience. More importantly, it was my experience to have, and I captured pictorial evidence of the whole thing! 

Freshly shampooed and conditioned hair

The actual length of my hair--some serious shrinkage!

It's about to go down.

First cut, off the top. I cannot lie, the result (considering shrinkage)
was shorter than I intended. My heart picked up pace at this point!

All the cut-off hair...that's a lot of hair.

The finished look

Back view of the finished cut

Conditioner rinsed out and leave-in applied, I headed out for the day
with the least amount of hair I've ever had in my life. I'm liking it!

"Our Love for Each Other": Gabby Douglas & Another Look at the Life Balance Conference

Really, this is not another Gabby Douglas post although I do want to congratulate Douglas's history-making accomplishments! Way to go, and keep doing your thing, young lady--correction: Gold-Medal-Winning Olympian!

Though this post is not about Douglas or her hair, the haterism about which has been covered here, here, and here in particular (where she directly addresses the silliness of all the talk), it is about black women's love for each other, and we'll start with this hair discussion briefly.

I mean, check the hardware!

Black women know all too well how sensitive the issue of our hair is, and the rest of the world is learning quickly. However, no matter where a woman stands on perms or gels, we have got to learn how to treat each other with love. For instance, I have a preference for chemical-free hair, but I don't begrudge anybody their choice to embrace relaxers. One of the wonderful things about living in the 21st century is that, while we still have a way to go, we're enjoying a time in which great strides in gender and race politics have been realized. That means we're increasingly able to rock perms, 'fros, locs, and sew-ins, and it's all becoming acceptable.

Yet, we still have women within our communities policing other women's choices and effectively causing division where there should be love. Why did we have black women taking to Twitter to tear down another black woman who was representing her country on the world stage? Where is the love and support for a woman seeking to make history and otherwise do something positive? As Douglas puts it in the HuffPo, "I'm like, `I just made history and people are focused on my hair?' It can be bald or short, it doesn't matter about (my) hair." Priorities, people. Priorities.

To return to insights gained from the Black Women's Life Balance and Wellness Conference, an important part of that weekend had to do with black women choosing to lift each other up in love--and it is a choice. As we performed the exercise in which we gazed at each other in pairs, as I described in my last post, Alexis Gumbs said something powerful: "This is a historic moment in the context of our love for each other." It was profound because we were taking time out to really see one another, without judgment, and only with spirits of affirmation.

If, then, we can support each other's endeavors and really see each other, how much could we accomplish together? If we could put aside the petty differences (like hair preferences) and cultivate "our ability to see the brilliance around us," as Alexis put it, to what extent could we change our world for the better? Ladies, please, let's cut the foolishness and love each other.

My World Has Changed: Revisiting the "About" Section

So it's been almost seven months since my last post...but I've been a little busy. See, I was preparing for, welcoming, and now taking care of the cutest kid in my world: my new daughter, "Mini Mo." I had plans--such plans!!!--for discussing the notion that black children were better off as slaves; controversies surrounding The Help, the book and the movie; the inspiring feature article on Michelle Obama in Essence's October issue; and more. But, my world was busy changing and is still in the process of doing so. And I couldn't be more excited--or scared. This child is the sweetest, smiliest (yes, I made that up), funniest little girl. She's a dream, but she's also very much real, as are the ideas that prompted me to start this blog in the first place.


Mini Mo and I during Thanksgiving weekend, 2011

I was just re-reading my "About" section here. (Feel free to do the same.) I realized that I've felt the imperative to take care of my "village" by loving my nieces and nephews, uplifting my friends and family, helping to raise my stepson (the Kid), and taking advantage of teachable moments beyond the classroom with my students. However, now that I have a daughter, her self-esteem, her body, her images, her hair, and her (future) men are now part of my world. The ideas that inspired my very first post will be tested and challenged in raising her. This is the deepest thing I'll know, apart from marriage, and that awesome task is something I'm still trying to wrap my brain around. I hear that doesn't really change...Lol.

From now on, I imagine my posts will be conceived with Mini Mo in mind, in some way, shape or form. In a way, she makes my purpose for this outlet even more real. Cheers to that. *Clink* Happy New Year, folks. I'm looking forward to this one for more reasons than I can count, but Mini Mo is at the top.

One Thing I Want My Daughter to Know: "Good and Bad Hair" Revisited

All right, I'm gonna talk about hair again, and then I'll leave it alone (until I get moved to talk about it again. That's right. I said it.).

I was watching a rerun of The Game on BET—don’t judge me—when an ad for Motions Silkening Shine Relaxer came on. I wasn’t paying much attention until I heard “Get pretty.” Then my ears perked up. The line continued, “…with shiny, make-them-stare hair.” Then it hit me hard: this is why little girls grow up thinking the hair they were born with needs to be fixed. Otherwise, it’s not “pretty.”

This ad reminded me of a recent conversation I had with my pastor, when he told me that we partly form our identities based on the models before us—that is, both fashion models and everyday examples. Little girls, for instance, grow up knowing what’s “pretty” without having to have it blatantly stated (although this ad is pretty blatant). We have Barbie dolls, TV, magazines and movies to tell us.

The thing is: the “popular” models, as opposed to the everyday ones, get more pull as kids grow up. We know this. And if we’re talking about models of “pretty” hair, the view is pretty one-dimensional. For black girls growing up today, their models are the likes of Beyoncé, Queen Latifah, and the model in this Motions ad: beautiful, influential women who relax their hair. I imagine the message for a little girl is that “shiny” hair like this model’s is the only way to “make them stare.” This type of hair is necessary to be considered beautiful.

I’m aware that these are arguably trite ideas--we all know that trying to be Barbie has screwed with quite a few minds--yet these ideas about "pretty" keep being recycled. In spite of all the conversations about multivalent versions of “pretty,” we’re still getting “pretty hair=straight and shiny” coming through the tube. To a little girl, who may have few, if any, models of naturally textured hair that is “pretty,” this ad provides the key to “pretty”! Shiny, blow-in-the-wind hair that correlates with all the other models out there.

I think we’d see a lot less negativity surrounding nappy hair if black females in their girlhood, where ideas about “pretty” firmly take root, can actually see more than one type of “pretty” hair. If they can see hair that looks like theirs as “pretty,” not just at home or in the neighborhood but on TV and in magazines, then maybe we can add a few more dimensions to the idea.

I’m not naïve, however. I know that part of kinky hair’s lack of visibility has to do with its paltry level of acceptability in the fashion, TV, and film industries. But we’ve seen kinky hair featured in the worlds of fashion and entertainment, as in this photo of Beyoncé. (Granted, I don't believe this is her hair, but the point is that the afro is getting some play!) World famous model Alek Wek is also an example of kinky hair in the fashion world. Kim Myles, of HGTV’s Myles of Style wears her hair in its natural texture. Jazz, blues, and folk icon Cassandra Wilson has been wearing locs for decades, and soul singer Leela James has a very prominent afro.

There are models of black women with naturally textured hair out there, but they’re nowhere near as prominent as models of straightened and relaxed hair. Where are the Carol’s Daughter, Miss Jessie’s, and Kinky-Curly TV ads? Maybe they’re on their way. They’re fairly new companies, after all.

With all this in mind, if I ever have a daughter, I’d want her to know that she’d be pretty no matter what she did to her hair, that there’s more than one type of “pretty” and that she wouldn’t have to change the texture of her hair in order to get it. But she could if she wanted to. It's one option and not the only one.

Black Girls: Still Big Booties and Pu**y? (That's not putty...)

OK, WTH?! This was my immediate reaction upon coming across the Google search results for “black girls” that are displayed in this image (right). (Note the sponsored links, too.) Mind you, I was searching for an organization, Black Girls Rock, Inc., that I had come across months ago and wanted to revisit. I couldn’t quite remember the name but knew that black girls was part of it.

Now, I really don’t want to get into a ramble about historical depictions of black women as lusty, animalistic, lewd sex-toys—trust me, I could go there—but the irony of this situation is troubling in itself. For the last few years, I’ve been mulling over the idea of a non-profit organization designed to help young black women combat the afore-mentioned negative images, particularly as cultivated in various aspects of hip-hop culture, music videos, films, and print media. Black Girls Rock, Inc. is an organization that does such work, and I wanted to peruse it for inspiration. (Adding inc. to my search got me to the right site, by the way.)

But alas, of the first seven entries that appear in these Google search results, only one of them does not relate to black women as purely sexual objects. And these are the top results of 276 million. What causes this particular content to appear first in a search for “black girls”? Well, I had to do a little research.

Determining search results and ranking them are complicated processes that involve some pretty fancy computing (all kinds of algorithms and such that I know nothing about), but the quality of web pages is an important consideration in ranking search results. In a newsletter called Librarian Central, Google gives librarians various teaching tips, one of which deals with search engines. In an issue titled “How Does Google Collect and Rank Results?” Google offers this information after having provided material on data collection:

Now we have the set of pages that contain the user's query somewhere, and it's time to rank them in terms of relevance. Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known. PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.

This is interesting information. According to Google, it prizes foremost the number of sites that link to pages containing the items in the query (in my case, the number of sites linking to sugaryblackpu**y.com and the like) and then the credibility of those sites. This leads me to wonder, Where are the “quality” portals of information that positively discuss black girls? That’s not to say they don’t appear somewhere in those 276 million results, but they’re clearly not as prominent as those sites linking to pages that perpetuate an idea of lewd black female sexuality.

Apart from the numbers and quality of web pages that link to the words in a searcher’s query, Google states that relevance is a key determiner in ranking results:

As a rule, Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we'll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to. Still, we'll often elevate a page with fewer links or lower PageRank if other signals suggest that the page is more relevant. For example, a web page dedicated entirely to the civil war is often more useful than an article that mentions the civil war in passing, even if the article is part of a reputable site such as Time.com.

Because the sites that link black girls with hot sex are so much more abundant than those that don’t, the relevance factor appears to be more important than the reputability factor here. What’s relevant regarding black girls appears to be those who are involved in porn. Hmmm…

I’m not out to attack Google, though. The company is only collecting and sorting data. My concern is that, in 2010, so many users of the World Wide Web are more interested in black girls for their big booties and pu**ies than, say, for their creativity, beauty, or anything not related to their anatomy.

It’s not like black girls are unaware of this interest. Any given day, you can see young black females in skin-tight, low-rise, hip-hugging jeans or shorts that look like underwear with their booty cheeks all out (check out Jill Scott's "The Thickness"!). Why? Is it because such looks are trendy, attractive to males, or plastered all over videos and magazines? It’s likely that all these possibilities hit the nail on the head, but the important thing is that so many of our girls want to emphasize their sexuality when they walk out of the door. The curves are given top priority, and this valuing of the body isn’t spawned in a vacuum. It’s cultivated by so many forces in the world we live in.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with females embracing their sexuality. In fact, the ability to do so is one of the triumphs of feminism and other movements that now allow females the freedom to express themselves. However, when that freedom privileges sexuality, then we have children growing up placing their self-worth in their curves and in attracting interest in those curves. Where’s the true self-love in that, the value of a woman’s essence that doesn’t reside in her anatomy?

That’s also not to say that young black females are the only ones who wear revealing clothing. Of course, women of all shades, sizes and ages dress this way. But I’m focusing on this style of dress in conjunction with the historical images of black women (that have not died) and the clearly continued fascination with black women’s supposedly animalistic lust, as evidenced by the associations that web users make between black females and their sexuality.

It’s clear that if we parents, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, teachers, preachers, and friends don’t educate black girls about their inherent value, apart from their bodies, then there’s a whole world, a whole culture out there willing to educate them instead. Maybe my now-foggy ideas about an NPO will eventually become a real entity that counteracts these views of black females. Thank goodness for programs like Black Girls, Inc. and Hot Girls, Inc. that are undertaking this work now. But the truth is this: we have to do this work for the good of our daughters and their progeny, or else we’ll never see the end of centuries-old ideas that encourage black women to love their big booties and their pu**ies while truly hating themselves.