Don’t Touch My Hair

A ten-year old me sat in between Ms. M’s legs as the smell of burning hair filled her living room. She was stroking my beautiful brown curls with two plates of metal heated to 450 degrees, the burning point for hair. I would cringe when she got too close to the scalp and a sense of relief would come over me as when the heat was released from the top of my head as she went down my strands. At the time, Ms. M was the first person to ever straighten my hair. She was a black woman who knew the struggles of managing black hair, and did my Filipino mother a favor by teaching her to “manage” the big fro on top of my head. The smell of burning hair soon became a Sunday night staple, and every two weeks my mother would run the iron through my coils and I was always so glad to rid my hair of the curls and kinks. I wanted to be able to style and run my fingers through my hair like the white girls did. I wanted my hair to flow down my head like the white girls’.  I wanted hair like silk like the white girls had. So I washed, detangled, blow-dried and flat ironed my hair, struggling to obtain—what I had convinced myself at the time was—the pinnacle of beauty.

Many of my black friends share similar memories and we look back humorously at the times we begged our mothers not to “bump our ends,” knowing they would do it anyways. We cringe intensely at those tender-headed memories of getting box braids as a child, the tugging and endless hours of sitting in the chair waiting for those Kanekalon hairs to be braided to perfection. Some of these memories I will repeatedly look back on with a smile on my face. However, part of me always looks in sadness at the moments when I was so unloving of my natural hair, and even deeper sadness to know that this was such a phenomenon for so many black women. 

So, let’s talk about hair—let’s talk about the politicization of these miniscule follicles of keratin that sprout from our heads. Let’s talk about the way our society has conditioned young black girls to look down on their beautiful selves.

And when we’re done, let’s talk about how black women are burning down every eurocentric beauty norm in favor of one that deems both them and their curls far more than enough. 

I stopped straightening my hair when I was thirteen and the reasons were endless. I was lazy, and hated spending two hours straightening my hair over and over again just to wash it again at the end of the week. My hair was also getting more and more damaged; every time I went for  a haircut, my locs became increasingly shorter and the split ends became more abundant. I think the ultimate deciding factor in my ending this cycle was that I was simply so tired of constantly struggling to meet a standard centered around women who didn’t even look like me. I needed to be beautiful for me, and I needed to seek a type of beauty that would represent girls like me. So one Sunday, I washed and detangled and didn’t blow dry and left the flat iron unplugged; the house smelled like dinner, and nothing else. 

 Now, this entire process was nothing short of a hot mess, mostly because I didn’t even attempt to style my hair, nor did I own a silk wrap. So I went to bed and woke up with a ball of frizz that was half curly, half dead ends. I went to school like that for a solid week, until I discovered leave-in conditioner, curling creams and styling gels. And bless my mother’s soul, but being a Filipino woman with hair as straight as a pencil, she had no clue what to do with my hair. It has been a long run of trial and error after error after error. I watched YouTube videos trying to figure out how to style my hair, and spent hours looking up hair products trying to decipher if my hair type was 3c or 4a (and I still haven’t figured it out). I didn’t do a big chop—in the natural hair community, this is when a person decides to “chop off” the dead ends of their hair in order for their curls and kinks to grow as healthily as possible. Instead I gradually cut my hair  off until it was all gone, which was a time-consuming process. 

However, I don’t think any of these things were the hardest part of going natural. For me, it was having to go out in public with a big afro. I was not deemed “beautiful,” according to the societal standards by which I raised. As a teenage girl who put so much value in  what others thought of me, I felt awkward and alone in a sea of straight hair and whiteness. I had friends who constantly complimented my new look; but there were also kids who thought it would be funny to throw pencils in my hair during class and see how long it would stay or the kids who would touch and grab at my hair without asking. So many days I wanted to crawl back into the smoke of burnt keratin and pretend and pray that I had naturally straight hair. The hardest part was never feeling beautiful enough, never feeling good enough, feeling as if my black was simply not enough. 

But I was also constantly reminded that my situation could have been a lot worse. On social media and in news outlets, there were horror stories circulating about black girls being barred from going to school for wearing their hair natural or in braids, women being chastised in the workplace after being told their natural hair was “unprofessional.”  There was even a Supreme Court case that ruled in favor of an employer who refused to hire a woman simply because she had locs. Though there has been constant pushback from the black community over these issues, I hardly ever saw these efforts supported by other racial groups. It angered me that these issues existed for so long and that so many people didn’t see the issue with policing black hair like this. But instead of suppressing my desire to wear my natural hair, it motivated me even more to do so. I refused to feel more silenced than I already had been.

As I hit ages fifteen and sixteen, feelings of insecurity about my hair slowly started to fade as I saw a rise in the presence of women who owned their natural hair and didn’t let anyone tell them that it wasn’t beautiful. And it was more than just the hair;  there was a movement mobilizing us to embrace all forms of black beauty. There was a noticeably felt shift within the black community. We were done being told that natural hair was unprofessional, troublesome, hard to manage, and messy. We burned down the walls that caged in our hair and our blackness was set free. For me, this moment of independence from the anchors of American beauty ideals came from several moments—seeing Uzoamaka Aduba wearing her natural hair on red carpets, Miss USA walking on stage to crown her successor wearing her natural hair, and the plethora of black hairstyles that graced the stage of Beyonce’s Formation tour. Solange sang and black girls everywhere declared “DON’T TOUCH MY HAIR!” It was a reclamation of our culture, our beauty. Seeing natural hair praised on these global platforms was such a new concept to me, another example of why representation is so important. Black women have since forced themselves into the media, allowing black women to be held as a standard of beauty. For black girls everywhere, this has shown us that our hair and our blackness isn’t just enough—it is magical. 

Don’t get me wrong; there is absolutely nothing wrong with straightening or relaxing your hair. What you do to your hair is your choice, and you deserve to wear it anyway you so desire. I do not claim to be the sole representative for the experience of growing up as a black woman in America. In truth, I can only speak from what I know. 

I know that I have a problem with black girls and women thinking that they are not enough just being their natural selves. And I do know that there is a constant depiction of what it means to pretty in America that is constantly broadcast to women of color. It is one that we will never and should never have to live up to. 

So I say to every black girl and to every black woman— to the ones with box braids, weave, wash-n-gos, cornrows, Marley twists, lace wigs, shaved heads, relaxer—you are enough. You always have been.