My Hair, My Decision: Why I Straighten

ripuree says:

Anyone who thinks that black women’ predominant preference to straight hair is simply a matter of personal choice (needing no discussion) should remove themselves from any serious discussion of why black people are disproportionately incarcerated in Prisons instead of Plantations; or disproportionately bear all the burdens of any society in which we live today. Since the chronic problems still afflicting the Negro/Black race or group; are deeply rooted and encased in many layers of premeditated race-loathing notions we were forced to engage, if we wanted to keep jobs, or simply survive. Such knowledge is present for all who want to see, or care to see the “bigger picture”. Therefore proper resolution will only come from those with serious commitment to the best interest for Negro/ Blacks. Those who will make no excuses to the necessary sacrifices necessary for a complete psychic overhauling. While, those who want to exclusively embrace altered hair, while claiming to care about their race’s problems can only add more corruption and confusion to what is already too much. Because; clearly; as of to-date no significant change has come from those who endorse the minimization of responsibility offered by original offenders. While their personal choices reinforce the root cause.

When Negro/Blacks show marked preference to straight hair and lighter complexion, (while concurrently despising our own unique Negro features) the default programming we’re downloading in our collective psychic is that the constant raping that our ancestors endured (to pass on those traits) are worth the generational plight that continues today. (Since our unique Negro Image is nothing to own and behold). Now; this would be good if while our subconscious was being driven by that notion, we were not claiming that We Must Overcome. But as long as our inner acceptance and our outer cries are not in alignment, the present status quo will prevail.

Today, too many Negroes who can trace White, Indian or Asian blood in their DNA line, (outwardly depicted in lighter shade and straighter hair) still see it as a badge of honor. Thus, by default, we’re the only race to completely honor the horrors our ancestors endured as worthwhile, since the aesthetics of our unique image was too horrible to remain. We have not overcome and will not overcome because we’re failing to truly appreciate that our female ancestors endured daily rapes, after a full day of exhaustive labor. And regardless -and in the full knowledge of her Negro husband and children- who had no choice but to accept that greatest wrong. When a pregnancy resulted from that raping, white women then punished Negro women for their husbands’ infidelity. Then once the baby was born, that physically and mentally defiled and disjointed Negro woman had to nurture a baby she didn’t want, for her master and child’s father to sell or use his own blood as he would any other slave.

Yet today, in-spite of the fact that white men bred and used their own children as slaves, white people are never made to contemplate that fact. While they manage to overwhelm Negro conscience with guilt and shame that some of our ancestors sold us into slavery. Therefore we don’t deserve compensation for the destruction of Africa and Negro Africans, for the benefit of Europe, Europeans and whites worldwide. No! the far worst history of white men breeding and using their own children to replenish their stock of slaves, they don’t have to ponder. (And I’m sure that there’ll be many to now tell us, that present day whites should not be held responsible for this monstrosity. But that rule they’ll still not apply when they continue to proclaim our ancestor’s wrongs, as justification to negate our right to Reparations or even: Official, Universal proclamation that what their ancestors did to ours; was, and still is wrong.

Consequently our acceptance, preference and addiction for the resulting conditions of our ancestors brutalization is at the root of all of our major problems today. It is no different than a drug-addict arguing for his/her right to continue his addiction. Even though it is evident to all, that his addiction is affecting the children he/she chose to bring into the world. No other race or group of humans have demonstrated such preference to the fruits of their oppression. We’re reconciling and making right the wrongs that have destroyed our people. We’ve given it wholehearted approval. And maybe that’s why so many financially stable blacks, use their clout to uplift those who are more uplifted and empowered than their own race.

In honoring the degree of inhumanity our ancestors experienced; is it any wonder that so many of us over-condemn and collude with others to increase stressful life-conditions on their own? From such gross race dysfunction, will our pathetic worldwide conditions ever change? From such a glorification of the results of the wrong implanted in our DNA, are we really wanting the changes we claim we seek? Did we really intend to overcome with the Civil Rights Movement? Should commitment to loving our natural hair not be seen as a first step in the necessary painful process of doing everything to Love, Honor, Accept and Care about our individual selves then race, foremost and first? Then let that foundation of self and race love naturally overflow to every member of mankind. (As every other race or group currently do?

Any study that states that, worldwide males have a preference for straighter hair and lighter skin is choosing to ignore the fact that white Americans made Race the big issue that it is today, in order to justify their dependence on Negro labor, Negro land and other Negro commodities in Africa. They are forgetting that dictionaries made their debut at the peak of North American enslavement of Negroes, and that the same meanings that whites attached to Negroes/Blacks then -to justify the evil of slavery- is the same dehumanizing meanings remains today. They are forgetting that white academicians have used a vast array of changing explanations to elevate and credit themselves, with features and artifacts that were more probably belonging to Negroes than themselves. Consequently, Caucasian ie. White Arab and Asian Egyptologists, Historians, Anthropologists and Archaeologists have even claimed that people with corn-rowed or dreadlocked hair depicted in Egyptian paintings were Caucasians wearing wigs made in Negro styles. So which is it? Was the hairstyle of indigenous Negroes once copied by Caucasians? And if so, how does that make Negroes the defiled class even then, according to whites and Arabs?

Or are such studies forgetting the great lengths that white race scientists engaged to overhaul: Religion, Literature, History, Archeology, Anthropology, Science and every existing and new area of academic discipline to ensure that all the groups of mankind get credits for everything, past, present and future? So that all of their successive generations see Negroes as white people claim that we are. (Knowing that instead of refusing to accept the nonsense that they tell us about ourselves, we’ll go to even greater lengths to fit ourselves into their design). They are forgetting that the white man changed the meanings of Caucasian and White in all of the world’s dictionaries to make Caucasian include all colors of humans with straight hair. Thus officially and universally corralling all human groups under the Master group of Caucasian, with the premeditated intention that all should join them in keeping Negroes Out and Down. Thus, today, because Negroes are subconsciously pitted against all others, many Negro men simply succumb to preference for all others over their own. Otherwise, constantly find themselves fighting the loosing battle to love and protect their race as other men are freely allowed and encouraged to do.

So while other groups silently decry Negroes, they constantly help Negroes stay focused on Negro/Black on Negro/Black Crimes. Because all know that we’ll be most loyal to their financial bottom lines. Whether in Church tithing, Hair styling, Clothes stores and other depreciating blings. All want us to remain the common Preys of humanity, while we’ll never get it that we’re the most precious commodity of mankind, and that can be a great position to capitalize on, if we learn to Love our race foremost and first. So please Black women! see that our hair (which we despise even more than others) can generate amongst ourselves the great wealth we’ve allowed all others to extract from us thus far. And in no book or era, can such a thing be right!!

newinsight says:

The reality- this argument is dated.

I honestly don’t give a **** what you do with your hair- relax it, shave it, grow it naturally, dye it red.

I honestly don’t give a **** what race you date – Black, White, Asian, Spanish, etc.

I’m more interested in what you are doing with your life. Are you in college? Do you plan to go to graduate school? Do you have a career? Are you taking care of yourself? Did you have kids too early? Are you in a healthy relationship? More important questions…

I feel like some black women (or maybe just people in general) always get caught up in the unimportant ****. I would rather here about Black women doing positive things for themselves that are not just related to their visual qualities or black men. I think its empowering to hear about minorities doing great things and growing professionally.

I wonder why I am the only black person in my office. The majority of my friends are black and run into the same issue. How about we discuss that?
Do you think Michelle Obama got where she is today because she was worried about the black male or was insecure because she relaxes her hair? Laughable. While others were discussing about their hair and nails, she was out their studying to get her Juris Doctor degree.

While you are chatting about this and CONSTANTLY having the same conversation (hair, black men, skin color, hair black men, skin color), other people are grasping YOUR opportunities and talking about their stocks and vacation homes– make a note of that.

Then again, I guess this can only be good for me right? Less competition.

Martine Shantelle Quinn says:

i am so late and i normally do better but here it goes….I moved to Philadelphia, PA in fall 2007 and discovered many things that were previously unknown to me relating to the Diaspora such as Black Jews, Black Muslims, Black folks who don’t eat bacon (or any meat for that matter) and the cult of afrocentricity. I am and always have been a race woman in a very old school way. i believe in respectability and helping to uplift the race via mainstream means such as education. I believe in self-sufficiency and self-determination and eschew these cultural practices that “give us a bad name”. yes, im very white gloved vaycaying at Oak Bluffs Black although i really don’t have the money for those things. Being raised a Baptist (although you won’t find me in anybody’s church now) the concept of non-Baptist Blacks threw me a little but even more than the religious preference was the cultural adaptation that accompanied it. Philadelphia is full of Black women in burkas, Black men with serious beards and Black folks eating matza ball soup. I often pose the question to them about this pointing out that you can adopt Islam without adopting Middle Eastern culture or that you can be Jewish without adopting Eastern European culture and that there are differences between the religion and the culture as a whole as religion is just a part of that culture. I posed the same question to the afrocentric clan. You can feel at one with Africa (although i got all kinda problems with this bc exactly where in Africa are you centering yourself) without adopting “African” culture. These are the same people who say things like, “you still eating pork? Don’t you know we’re free” or “Southern Blacks are so backwards” or “you gotta be your natural African self”. I tend to point out that I ain’t African and neither are they. I find that all of this is directly connected with SHAME that is associated with being the descendants of slaves. This adopting of the cultures of others, the natural self nappy hair nazism, the equating of certain behaviors with a lack of enlightenment and enslavement is all about SHAME. Women with naturals who are bashing those who relax are so ASHAMED of our history that they will do almost anything to separate themselves from it be it straightening their hair or talking down on Blacks from other areas of the country to romanticizing Africa to claiming some other ethnicity. All of this is done in an attempt to regain a identity they feel that has been lost. there is a concept in sociology that we call ethnic ethnogenesis. It explains how when one culture is transplanted to another place that a new culture is created that though has elements of the previous and current environment is different from both. That’s what Black americans are: different from both our African ancestors and our former slavemasters and if you are outside of the south different from southern Blacks and Northern ethnics though you share mores of both. Being Black is a culture in itself. There is no shame in that. There is no loss. You have a heritage though it may be fraught with issues you have a heritage. You are not loss ergo there is nothing to reclaim. If you want to reclaim something reclaim the pride of our brothers and sisters who were beaten for freedom and who held their heads high and educated themselves and their children and who uplifted their communities. Reclaim that. They were too busy sacrificing for the betterment of their people to be bothered with putting each other down and I’m sorry that you have so much self hatred that you have to actively work to separate yourself from your cultural heritage of being Black. Yes, as a sociologist who concentrates is race I know that since the moment we’ve stepped off that free transatlantic cruise that we were “less than” and that Black women we’re (and still are) written as the antithesis of what it means to be a woman and that this is baggage that we carry. included in this is the male gaze that tends to prefer the light bright and damn near white with straight hair and light eyes. In a racialized society EVERYTHING carries a racial component including love, aesthetics and cultural norms. The Black cultural movement should have placed us in a position where that all expressions of Blackness are equally accepted and valued but much like the feminist movement this is not so and it is unfortunate.