Body and Mind

We always put an emphasis on instilling a sense of pride in young African American girls where their hair is concerned. It is important that it is done starting very early in life and that it continues throughout their child and teen years. However, no one seems to touch on the subject of the ideas little African American boys harbor about natural hair.

Why’s it even important?

As much as we might not like it, little girls are going to grow up to one day to be women who sometimes change things about themselves to please the opposite sex. If a little boy grows up in a household where his mother, sisters, and grandmother are all rushing out to get a perm  on a regular basis and the word “nappy” is tossed around like acid, he’s going to grow up with the same ideas that a lot of the AA community has about natural hair: it’s unmanageable, it’s ugly, it’s not desirable.

This little boy is then going to turn into a young man. This young man will  go out and search for his ideal woman. This “ideal” will have come from years of magazines, movies, and television shows that all telling him that straight hairstyles, mostly weaves and wigs, are what he wants on his future mate. And what do you think the young women are going to do?

Some of you may be balking at this and you might argue that girls need to raised to love themselves no matter what a man thinks of them.

I agree…but I have to stay in reality. How many women do you see online who want to go natural or who try to go natural, but their husbands/boyfriends/fiances don’t want them to? Essence recently did a “Word on the Street” interview asking men what they thought of natural hair on a woman. There were some positive responses, but here were the negative:

“I think long hair is a good look for taller women but shorter women with a small face look nice with short hair. I don’t like that nappy, nappy hair all the time. If she likes long hair, I like it. But if she has short hair and it doesn’t fit her then we might break up.”

“I like long hair, the simpler the better. I’ve seen some shorter styles that work like Halle Berry’s cut but I’ve always preferred longer hair. Natural hair is nice on our women but it’s tricky because not all women can wear their hair that way.”

So, we have that natural hair appears unclean, is worse that straight hair, and that it takes special circumstances for some people to wear it (I’m assuming he means it’s ok if the texture is very loose).

We often marry our parents

I’m sorry for those of you who hate your mother in law, but there is a well researched theory that men grow up to marry women who remind them of their mothers. You will even find this to be true in situations where the mother was uncaring or the relationship was dysfunctional.

All you natural mommies who have sons, you are starting off his little life right by showing him that natural hair is so beautiful, even his mommy wears it. Seriously! There is strong evidence that we search for physical traits of the parent of the opposite sex when choosing a mate. From this CNN.com article:

Berkeley, California, psychotherapist Elayne Savage says familiarity is a big reason people may choose someone like Mom or Dad as a partner.

“When you grow up familiar with a certain type of person, you’re attracted to that same type of person because it feels comfortable, whether you like it or not,” says Savage, author of “Breathing Room: Creating Space to Be a Couple.” “That’s what people mean when they meet a potential partner and say, ‘It ‘feels like I’ve known him my whole life.’”

Anecdotal evidence also suggests that a parent’s physical or intellectual traits may have some influence. A Hungarian researcher studied the facial features of 52 families and found a significant correlation between the appearance of men and their fathers-in-law and those of women and their mothers-in-law.

Therefore, while you’re showing that little girl of yours how much you revel in your twists, braids, locs, and fros, don’t forget to tell that little man in your life how beautiful natural hair is too.

Let him sport it

Shearing young AA boys’ hair down to a fade is  the popular (and easiest) thing to do.  It’s a fact that in this society, males (both black and white and green) don’t wear longer hair. I understand that. But there is no harm in letting a little boy wear his hair a bit longer and maybe in twists or a little afro. In my opinion, it further enforces that idea that kinky hair is not something we just hide away.

Boys have self esteem issues about their hair as well as girls. How many grown men have I seen rub their head of hair that’s starting to grow back and say “Time for a hair cut, my hair’s getting nappy”….They never say, “My hair’s getting too long”. Again there’s nothing wrong with keeping it short. Just remind your little man that it’s not because his hair is “too nappy”.

Positive Role Models

As with girls, you want to keep a lot of positivity going in your household by providing action figures, books, and movies that include kinky  hair.

Dolls like Me has some great toys that resemble all different ethnicities.I know it’s hard to find action figures and dolls for young boys with natual hair (I mean, I think G.I. Joe has a perm!), but I’m convinced that in the coming years, things will get better in that department.

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Sorry there hasn’t been a  new post lately, I’m one tired lady! I’ll be back full force when I get some rest. But here’s an article that was on CNN.com a few months ago that I found interesting I wanted to share here.

NEW YORK (CNN) — For too many little black girls, it was a childhood ritual, like pouring make-believe tea.

I would take a pajama top, drape it over my head, and with its sleeves trailing down my back, pretend that the cotton nightshirt was, instead, a flowing mane of hair, like the Breck girl’s, or maybe Jaclyn Smith’s on “Charlie’s Angels” — neither of whom looked a thing like me.

Now mind you, I was no self-hater. I grew up with scholarly, professional parents who instilled in their children a love of blackness that ranged from the muted to the bellicose; from the dashiki my mother sewed for me to match the one worn by my father, to the Liberian middle name Monsio they bestowed upon me at birth.

But as much as I was black, I was also American and a girl who wanted to be called pretty, and in the 1970s, I knew that to be cute you were supposed to have long, lustrous hair.

Historically, long, straight tresses — along with pale, white skin — defined beauty in the United States. Black women, our complexions the hues of a cocoa rainbow and our hair often kinky and short, didn’t fit the Eurocentric ideal, and we were made to feel less soft, less lovely, less womanly.

Hair became a thing that we obsessed over, searing it into contrition with hot combs and lye, and assigning it the attributes of good (straight/wavy) and evil (naturally nappy.) Indeed, Madam C.J. Walker, a black woman widely regarded as America’s first black female millionaire, earned her fortune devising products and techniques that made our hair “behave.”

But while black women may spend the equivalent of a small nation’s gross domestic product getting our hair woven, twisted, or permed, it is not sheer vanity that drives us. Rightly or wrongly, the broader world sometimes sees our hair as a window into who we are. Right or wrong, hair does matter. And as Michelle Obama, a black woman who may become the next first lady, undergoes scrutiny, some African-Americans believe there is no better time than now to examine how black women are frequently prejudged and mischaracterized.

It’s not surprising. In a society where stereotypes remain a convenient shorthand to sum up others, something as simple as the way a black woman wears her hair could hardly be innocuous. Wear twists or dreadlocks in some circles and you might be seen as too independent, too different — too black. I know women who have purposely unbraided their cornrows before a job interview to ensure that a hairstyle didn’t cost them a job. It might have been a nonissue, but they weren’t taking any chances.

In my first book, my co-author, Dr. Kumea Shorter-Gooden, and I spoke of the “shifting” black women have to do, straddling the tightrope between race and gender, constantly having to put others at ease, and endlessly dodging the minefield of stereotypes. Call out a wrong, and you’re angry. Speak too loudly and you must have been raised “in the ghetto.” Perform a task less than perfectly and you’re unqualified.

Ponder for a moment the controversy surrounding Michelle Obama, most recently caricatured with her husband, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama, on the cover of The New Yorker. Her well-coiffed hairdo is not usually a topic of discussion. In fact, her elegant style is often likened to Jackie O’s. But on the New Yorker’ cover, which satirized many of the smears leveled at the Obamas by some conservative critics, she sports an afro — along with an assault rifle and battle fatigues.

Some blacks believe that Michelle Obama, with all her complexity, is being reduced to the age-old stereotype of the angry black woman. They view many of her detractors’ comments as updated versions of the critiques historically leveled at blacks who made whites uncomfortable. When some of her critics call her arrogant, do they mean “uppity”? Is she unpatriotic or simply “not like us”?

And yet, there is no denying that society’s attitudes and perceptions have evolved with time. There is a tolerance of diversity in personal style as well as ethnic background that didn’t exist even a generation ago.

Black women in particular are more fully embracing the versatility of that distinct aspect of their beauty — their fabulously kinky hair.

I doubt many little black girls today are putting nightshirts on their heads and pretending to be Britney or Miley. At least I hope not. As for me, I do straighten my locks, but it’s out of habit rather than any deep-seated feeling that straighter, longer hair is prettier than my natural ‘fro.

In fact, I’m contemplating a change — sporting my kinky crown of glory full-time. And I’ll greet anyone who questions it with a modified quote from the 19th century abolitionist and suffragist, Sojourner Truth — “Ain’t I — still — a woman?

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