Won’t You Celebrate With Me?: A Personal Analysis of Black Women’s Visual Media Culture and Black Beauty Liberation
won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in Babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
-Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me,” 1993
Introduction: a personal experience and reflection: where am I celebrated?
1. THE TRANSFORMATION OF MY HAIR throughout my adult life has been a definitive and concentrated effort, on my part, to simultaneously untangle any notions I’ve held of beauty that erase me, and challenge and subvert the gaze (and erasure) I’ve felt reducing me and my hair. It is a constant revolution, simultaneously situated in my ability to see myself, allow myself to be seen, fully in my natural state, and force others to see, and acknowledge me. It is also a tiring performance, not by way of my weariness in cultivating a better sense of self, but in the seemingly ceaseless conflict the totality of me, and bodies that look like me must rally, perform, cheerlead—essentially petition—for space. Perhaps, the best way I can describe the routine is a constant request to take up space. Not space that encroaches on others, but the unassuming space we are allowed, as humans, to be present. I am not, nor have I ever been concerned with taking a seat at the ‘dressing’ table; I simply want to be. Being, to me, is freedom. It is an allusive state that allows me to create my own table, with a mirror, that welcomes and invites opportunities to celebrate me—unadorned, unadulterated. Invitations that do not come by way of another, like European beauty ‘co-signors’ of my worth, but encouragements that come simple because I am (here).
2. It can be argued that beauty for any woman living in western culture is wrought with complicated standards that align narrowly to what America has collectively deemed beautiful. Breasts, buttocks, even a women’s most intimate, inner possession, her labia, has been attacked by surgeon’s knives in an attempt to assume some remote, unrealistic image and performance of beauty. I do take issue and seek to subvert these nonsensical ideas of beauty and femininity. Yet, when I stand in a full length mirror, unadorned by clothes, make-up, or artificial hair styling, it is not the slackened state of my post-nursing breast, the lack of full buttocks or thighs every woman in my family carries, or the chestnut hue of my skin that arrests my gaze, it is my hair—defying gravity, standing wide, taking up space that I turn and wrestle—What am I going to do with you, today? What business does she have, showing off? Who told her she could expand, and engulf the space above my head? Why would she refuse to fall, demure, kissing my neck and shoulders, silently? Though it is not easy to admit, I am a contradiction, wanting her to experience full freedom, yet also wanting her to be quiet, soft, and unobtrusive in our world. I am first to admit I love the cottony softness of my hair, and receive real comfort tunneling my fingers through my kinks and coils, but I wrestle with the work of her—physical and mental.
3. In America’s punitive beauty environment, why turn my gaze towards hair—an easily manipulated idea of beauty we can all transform, painlessly? First, I argue there is nothing easy or painless, nor least expensive or time-consuming for a Black woman in transforming her hair. There are many hair transformative acts we can take, and none of them leave us unscarred—physically, emotionally, financially—in their process. I’ve spent hours, I reckon what amounts to weeks, perhaps months of time over a lifetime, lamenting a burn from a pressing comb, lost hours at the beauty shop or in Mama’s or Grandma’s kitchen, or thousands of dollars in products and service fees, forcing my hair to perform and accomplish American beauty standards. These standards, and a host of others acting as a supporting cast/e system of American beauty, have long plagued and troubled Black women and our ideas of and experiences with beauty. Barbara Summers aptly pins it, stating, “Black women in White America have been called many things: Mammy and mule, radical and religious, Sapphire and sexpot, whore and welfare queen. We have been many others on a too-long list. Beautiful was among the last” (113 quoted in Camp).” As Stephanie Camp states, “the perception of [B]lack women’s bodies as a problem that cannot be reconciled with Western concepts of the beautiful has proved to be exceptionally tenacious (113).” Like Summers and Camp, I am concerned with the persistence, endurance, and resilience of these driving standards, as well as the dismissive troupes of Black women—mammy, mule, sapphire, jezebel, angry and welfare queen—that ride shotgun alongside white standards of beauty. I am also, standing with Clifton, wondering, if and when America will “celebrate with me/what i have shaped into/a kind of life…born in Babylon/both nonwhite and woman (Clifton).” I suppose this dual stance locates my contradiction in being able and wishing to celebrate natural me, while also growing weary of the work it takes to dismantle constrictive and silencing standards.
4. The beauty of Black women, the celebration of our bodies, unadorned and unadulterated, concerns me. Where can Black women go to feel beautiful and whole? Where shall we place ourselves to experience “being,” where we may go and take up space without feeling the burdensome gaze of class, race, ethnicity weigh our heads and shoulders down? In my own unadorned reflection, I wonder if we allow ourselves, at least, the peace to be in our own silent spaces. I am interested in both historical narratives, images and assumed identities of beauty that have forced Black women to assume acts of beauty performance, as well as contemporary trends, narratives, and re-imaged identities and ideas of beauty Black girls and women have begun to adapt and embrace. I ask, of myself and my sisterhood, are we residing in a permanent, cyclic-fashion return of the 60s and 70s’ “Black is Beautiful” movement that gave us “naturals,” and “say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud,” or are we soon to circle backwards towards a preference of weaves, perms, presses and blow-outs, that burns and disintegrates our state of being that persisted in the 80s and 90s?
5. Wherever we land, a question of Black equality exists and persists. Though on its surface it is concerned with the adornment and adulterated state of our hair, our bodies, which position beauty with culture, ethnicity, class, and race, in the larger schema, ideas of Black beauty are entangled with our collective ideas and experiences with inequality. Camp makes this point, alongside other progressive-thinking Black intellectuals, recognizing “aesthetic values that have excluded [B]lack bodies from the realm of the beautiful,” and that these exclusions concentrate and perpetuate human inequality, “linking perceptions of essential concepts of physical beauty and ugliness to inner human nature and character mark[ing] a turning point in the history [and modern continuation] of American racism (116).” We cannot dismantle the effects of colonization if we do not begin to decolonize bodies, identities, personal narratives, and daily and lived experiences of Black women—often named the mule of America. When Black women, in totality, are decolonized, all oppressed people’s freedom follows. For if we can unleash the lowest among us, we can unleash those who straddle higher positions of worth and visuality.
6. This complex nexus of self-contradictions, genuine concern over the future narratives and identities of Black girls and women, current colonized state of Black beauty, and as a result, Black inequality, pushes me to analyze what has gotten us, collectively, here, and what forces this system of external and internalized racism to endure. I wonder, what strategies have Black women taken historically and contemporaneously to subvert and circumvent the oppressive gaze of white standards of beauty. We, as Black women, cannot achieve these performances of beauty without scars, without silencing, without ceasing to exist wholly. No other woman finds herself precariously and perilously situated between self-harming and self-eradicating herself as the Black woman positioning herself on a stage surrounded by American, white standards of beauty. While other women may experience an affront to their femininity and womanhood, Black women live in a constant state of injury to their humanity, womanhood, livelihood and collective community through affronts based on race, gender, ethnicity, national origin, class, and intellect. Essentially, American beauty standards have not only defined us in terms of beauty and ugliness with standards we can never achieve, but also utilize these standards to ascertain our worth, standing, and intellect. This work is both a selfish pursuit to decolonize my own ideas of self, and a desperate attempt to survive, whole.
Racializing beauty/Racializing bodies: Locating perpetuated visual media ideas and histories of Black beauty
To begin detangling the sorted history of Black beauty we must posit it against ideas of white beauty, for “[b]eauty is subject to the hegemonic standards of the ruling class…and definitions of beauty vary among cultures and historical periods (Patton 25).” What Patton gets at is the subjectivity of beauty, centered from the dominant and standardized people of a community. This work of confronting and challenging white standards of beauty is not a new endeavor, but one historically taken up by Black women. The totality of experience Black women have lived since arriving on the shores of America have included subjugation, oppression, and erasure of our identities. This act of violence and destruction was first afflicted on African women arriving on the shores of America, with their hair being shaved off, erasing central visual identities of their differing ethnicities. Stripped naked, clean-shaven, and shackled, African women were immediately cast in a beauty caste system that utilized race to support and uphold ideas of inferiority that perpetuated slavery.
Though this cruel arrival certainly shaped the experience of African women arriving to America shores, we must also acknowledge the origins of this act of violence, which is complex and at times contradictory until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ancient Europeans frequently depicted Africans as “half-men, half-beasts” males, culminating in the Middle Ages with black and blackness equated with sin, temptation, and fear (Camp 114). Likewise, some travel accounts of Africans created images of beauty depicting Africans’ fuller lips, textured hair, and darker skin, which were met with others struggling with the seemingly “chaos” of African life that differed from the European social and family structures. This contradictory and paucity of understanding led to Africa being characterized as a wild woman, capable of being both beautiful and grotesque.
During the late 18th and early 19th century a shifting of narratives about Africans and Black bodies begun to emerge that posited white ideas and standards of beauty against its antithesis, Black bodies and [the lack] of Black beauty (Camp 114). “Whether the idea manifests as a “white standard of beauty” or its resistant antithesis, “Black is Beautiful,” black and white Americans have, since the early nineteenth century, held fast to the idea of racial beauty: the idea that human bodies possess racially specific forms of beauty and ugliness (Camp 114-115).” With this turn towards a dichotomy of beauty balanced between white and Black bodies, we see an increase in ideations that position Black bodies as “otherly/animal,” which removed humanity as well as beauty from Black bodies. This is best witnessed in the descriptions of Black bodies as apes and creatures, women defined as mules, and Black hair described as wool. These animalistic traits ascribed to Blackness supported the performance of chattel slavery on American shores, allowing whites to remove the humanity of Blackness to ease the guilt and contradiction with Christianity, and Environmentalist ideas with the institution of slavery. The burgeoning idea of Environmentalism positioned “man” as capable of rising above any and all circumstances, yet the need of Black bodies for slavery presented a problem of conscious and justification. The answer and defense of slavery was to attack the physiognomy, or the biological racial differences between white and Black bodies, and to classify humankind by ethnic/racial looks.
What developed from this “scientific justification” of racism, was acceptance of race as a synthesis of physical differences in body parts, and a lasting perilous discourse of inequality where Black beauty (or lack thereof) was conflated with Black culture/intellect and its deficits. As Camp states, “the turn to linking perceptions of essential concepts of physical beauty and ugliness to inner human nature and character marked a turning point in the history of American racism (116).” This turn places us well into the 21st century with antiquated and absurd ideas of beauty, race, and intelligence that continue to plague and color race relations in America.
Earlier, I questioned the tenacity, endurance, and resilience of negative troupes and ideas of Black women—they are located in the historical and systematic entanglement of beauty and race, where Black bodies are ranked and classified according to a structure and standard of white beauty we could never assume or embody without full and absolute violence and erasure of ourselves. This classification of Black beauty is a deficient-definition that seeks to define or experience something (Blackness) in relation to its deficient or absence to another (whiteness).
How do we separate racial formations of beauty? More acutely and urgently, I ask, how do we, as Black women, redefine beauty, our Blackness, or ourselves in a manner that repositions us from the margins to the center? As I work earnestly at decolonizing my own personal experience of myself, I wonder if we, collectively Black and white people, are able to detangle the entire concept of beauty and race we’ve entwined with humanity. At this point, we must dismantle our collective ideas of what it means to be human, and where we are locating the value of humanness.
This work is complicated. It convenes in the contradiction of Black beauty as experienced in extremes by white men and women, as well as Black people. One look at the variations of skin hues, eye colors, and hair textures of Black people, and the historical desire of Black women (and men) becomes apparent. Black men were and still are sought and fetishized by white women who lust for Black men and “brown/bronzed” babies. Slaveholders routinely raped Black women they viewed as tempting, sinful, exotic, yet never “beautiful,” a term held in high esteem for pure white women. Black women, having endured the repeated trauma of rape by white slaveholders know a favorable white, male gaze can be dangerous (rape) and costly (harsh subjugation of white women). This complex positioning means for Black women, beauty is experienced as inferiority, unwanted desirability, and cursedness. These ideas and lived experiences linger, endanger, and inform Black women biopolitics, making the need to dismantle race and beauty a heightened struggle for Black women.
We must study and demolish the history of deficient ideas of Black beauty within American culture because its survival is married to the survival of slavery’s most lasting scar on American ideas—racism. Racism, which we experience as the lasting legacy of slavery, is also a marriage between white standards and myths of beauty, intellect, and worth heaped, unnaturally, on Black bodies. Camp states, “[t]o dismantle racial beauty would entail a transformation, if not the dissolution, of American ideas of race. It would also mean releasing the equally essentialist idea of racial beauty, even its resistant version of Black Is Beautiful (123).” As I face my own struggles and contradictions, I am not sure I am ready to call Black people to turn from resistant strategies of Black Beauty Liberation. While we live oppressed, we need to hear, regularly and loudly, Black is Beautiful.
I Am Not My Hair: Black Women, Masters at Subverting the White Beauty Gaze?
We must survive. Despite the pernicious history of beauty, identity, and racism in America, Black women have sought and constructed ways to own space, celebrate themselves, and redefine/invent their own standards of beauty. Though we struggle with a handful of white beauty standards—skin color, hair texture, full bodies and facial features—we have managed to resist (to some extent) white narratives of Black beauty. Whether a Black women prefers to assimilate into white ideas and concepts of beauty by straightening her hair, or chooses to challenge this idea by going natural or donning braids, plaits, or twists, collectively, Black women have carved out space to exist in a community of Black sisters where we can be celebrated. I think of Black hairstylist and salons and Clifton’s invitation to “come celebrate/with me that everyday/something has tried to kill me/and has failed,” and cannot help but understand the Black salon as a gathering space for Black women to celebrate survival. Patton aptly identifies “[h]airstyling sessions [as] a bonding time for [Black] women (27).” These sessions are rift with creativity that harken back to African beauty aesthetics that whites attempted to erase during slavery by shaving African’s heads.
As we celebrate, however, we must also acknowledge the implications of varied Black hairstyles and hair practices, paying keen attention to how some ideas and variations perpetuate and echo practices held and maintained during slavery. For example, a slave’s hairstyle was often determined by their position and proximity to white slaveholders, with field slaves wearing scarves and/or short hair, and house slaves wearing straightened and well-coifed hairstyles. Further, the more European a slave’s looks (skin color, hair texture, and facial features) were, the higher the likelihood they served their masters from a higher position of house slave. This distinction carried with it better living conditions, ideas of eventual freedom, and higher chances of being educated, yet it also isolated the house slave from the field slave and created divisions. These divisions and ideas of “whiter=better” still plague Black Americans now, as seen in terms of “good hair” and “bad hair,” or the “paper bag test.” As a result, when Black women decide to straighten their hair, wear wigs/weaves, or alter the natural kinkiness of their hair the assimilation is not always met with acceptance in the Black community. Straightening Black hair is and always will be met with a combination of backlash and understanding. On one hand, it is viewed as a form of creativity or a necessity for work, and on the other it is seen as a rejection of Black pride and the 60s and 70s mantra of “Black is Beautiful.”
Black women have adopted many different definitions of beauty, as realized in hairstyling, that challenge white beauty standards and uplift Black women. Braids, afros, dreadlocs, Bantu knots, twists are all styles meant to display pride, boldness, beauty, self-confidence and spiritual consciousness. They seek to overturn the three common standards of White beauty: long, curly or wavy hair, ideally blond; styled hair, which is not wild or free in its natural state; and feminine hair that is the opposite of men’s hair (Patton 30).
The lack of conformity in thought and approach, as well as acceptance illustrates there continues to be tension and underlying challenges for Black women, as a collective, to celebrate the beauty of our hair, and resulting beauty. We straddle a fence between self-acceptance and self-erasure, and collectively hold standards of white beauty as central ideas of beauty. I accept and appreciate this contradiction, despite my own ideas that Black hair in its natural state is the very definition of Black beauty. I recognize that Black women, like Black people, are not monolithic. For some Black women, employment and social norms in their location necessitate hair straightening, and for others, the ease of caring for straightened hair overrules the appeal to embrace natural, kinky hair that requires a lot of special tools, products, and time.
Black Beauty Liberation: #naturalhairdoescare
In an attempt to coalesce community and reinforce positive hair attitudes, Black women with natural hair have turned to social media platforms to engage, promote, and educate natural within a natural hair care community. Natural hair is defined in this instance as naturally kinky, coily hair that has not been chemically straightened or altered from its natural state. Although there is crossover from Black women who are bi-racial and possess a more European texture of hair (wavy, loose curls, or straight), the impetus of the natural hair movement was to support Black women with kinky, coily hair traditionally viewed as ugly and unwanted, and fostering a celebration of the natural state of Black hair. As social and digital media expanded to consume our daily lives, these sites have become a primary ground “for engaging with social and cultural norms and racial, gender, sexual, and class ideologies…[f]or marginalized communities, in particular, [where] representation in mass media can both reify and challenge stereotypes of their respective communities ( Lindsey 22).” This empowerment of Black girls and women have led to a multi-billion dollar industry that has grown, steadily over the last five to seven years.
While this is welcome news that seems to address the paucity of positive beauty standards of Black women, I cannot help but pause, reflect, and ask who is benefitting from this industry, but more importantly, where does it place Black women in relationship to ideas of “natural” beauty, and yet again, what is deemed acceptable, good, and bad. Throughout the years, a number of Black women have voiced concern that the growth of the popularity of “natural” haircare has been dominated by higher visuality of Black girls and women with European-influenced beauty features (wavy and curly hair that is not defined as kinky or coily, and lighter skin complexions). While the voicing of this concern does not mean to isolate and further perpetuate the “tragic mulatto” troupe, it does mean to refocus the movement towards rebuilding and reinforcing positive images and ideas of Black (non-mixed, or Eurocentric) girls and women, which have historically and contemporarily been attacked and deemed ugly and unwanted.
The primary location of this tension is found in the often-applied hair typing system that numbers or “grades” hair by its level of kinkiness. Straight hair is classified as “1,” loose and wavy hair as “2,” loose and curly hair as “3,” and kinky/coily hair as “4.” The use of this numbering or grading system eerily echoes the perpetuated ideas of “good” hair grades (straight, wavy, and curly, which would be numbers 1-3), and “bad” hair grades (kinky, coily, which would be number 4) historically perpetuated within and without the Black community. This feeling of isolation is further disseminated by the higher followings, re-shares, re-tweets Black women with lower “grades” (2-3) of hair receive on digital media than Black women with higher a number grade (4). The problem with this hair typing system is that it begins by setting European hair as the first standard from which all others are compared. A number “1” in the hair typing system reflects straight Caucasian hair absent of any semblance of curl or wave. In comparison, the last number in the system, “4,” corresponds to the most kinky, coily hair absent any semblance of straightness. Essentially, this popular hair typing system locates white beauty standards in the center, and moves outwards towards the marginalized locations of Black.
If we do a close reading of Black girl/woman visual media, we see a need to develop “tools and resources to develop self-schema that affirm the uniqueness of [B]lack girlhood (Lindsey 26). I agree; we need our own tools and standards of beauty that dismantle existing stereotypes of Black identity, and disrupt the connections and conflation of race with beauty. Despite the natural haircare movement taking place globally, Black women and Black beauty still moves from the margins, around a centralized, white standard of beauty. In hair we see it as long, straight blond hair. Black women will continue to struggle with ideas of beauty as long as the predominance of images and visual media perpetuate and favor long, straight hair (coupled with European-influenced features).
How do we overcome popular visual media and its preference for European beauty standards? We must work to continually reinforce and perpetuate images that affirm the unique beauty of Black girls and women. “Black girl empowerment within public/popular culture stems from the creation and centralization of [B]lack girl-centered spaces in mass media. It is important that [B]lack girls [and women] serve as authors and producers of the mass media-circulated content [they consume] (Lindsey 29).” In this way, social media allows Black women and girls to subvert white beauty standards, allowing for true empowerment that disconnects race and beauty, and instead creates spaces for being and empowerment. In these spaces, I hope, Black women can celebrate themselves, as Clifton calls for, while locating themselves at the center of beauty.
Public and Visual Anthropology: Instagram, Hashtags, and personal productions of beauty.
With the increase in personal multimedia sites (Instagram, YouTube, SnapChat, FaceBook, blogs) that allow users to share and document their lives, a new public and visual anthropology has emerged that is poised to foster positive personal productions of beauty among Black women. Through social networking, users are able to create “networks” of community where they are centered, instead of marginalized, and where they can be content creators and consumers on their own terms. The biggest challenge facing these productions is “the discipline’s [anthropology] failure to take people’s media productions seriously as equally valid forms of cultural representation. (Collins, et al 360).” As the authors state, these productions may not be standard institutionalized creations, but they hold value to the communities they are produced within and for, and intersect with anthropology and ethnographic fields.
I am interested in the “indigenous content” of these productions, and whether they perpetuate Euro-standard myths of beauty, or whether they align with the historical placement of Black hairstylists and salons in the community, offering a social critique and challenge of white beauty standards. To answer this, I turned to Instagram to locate the most popular three hastgags focused on the natural hair community, and analyzed the top images and image-makers:
#naturalhairstyles (2.7M)
Within the top hundred posts for #naturalhairstyles the predominance of images center around Black people (women, men, children, and babies) with a range of hairstyles from braids, locs, twist-outs, and wash n’ go free form hairstyles. Though this cross-section seems to highlight a range of different hairstyles, the textures of the most prized, top-rated, and liked images are women with Euro-standard features. For example, one image of a fair/passing woman with blue eyes, and long loosely curled hair has garnered over 28k views, while a Afrocentric celebrity photographed at the Oscars garnered just over 12k likes. This isn’t to say that Afrocentric influencers do not garner attention, because they do, but to point out that even in spaces designed and perpetuated by and for Black women, we are still not the center and exist in the margins of the definitions of beauty.
#naturalhaircommunity (2.1M)
Within the top 100 posts of #naturalhaircommunity the same lack of representation exists, with more examples of non-diaspora or Africana women ranking high in likes and views. The exception under this hashtag is the higher likes and views diaspora/Africana posts receive. For example, a video highlight reel of Black girls has been viewed over 28k times (one of the highest), but in watching the montage, the predominance of images situate Black hair that is typically classified as Type 2 or 3, with the only instances of a Type 4 being very long and straightened type 4 hair (that appears to be straightened without chemicals, holding some texture and still fitting the classification of “natural”). The other high-ranking image is one of an African man from an undisclosed country, with the title “Black is so beautiful” and heart-eyed emoji. The picture is further captioned with #melanin, which celebrates the brother’s dark hue. In addition to his rich skin complexion, he wears a full head of loose curls, and a bare chest. Although he is an example of a darker hued African being celebrated, I wonder if he is fetishized more so than celebrated.
#naturalhairdaily (2M)
The top 100 posts of #naturalhairdaily mirror the other two hashtags, but expand to include a wider range of images with differing levels of likes/views. The predominance still trends towards Black hair that is typed 2-3, but there are also images of type 4 hair. The images of Black hair typed 2-3 consistently garner numbers in the thousands (likes and views), while those typed 4 rank in the hundreds, with the exception of a popular type 4 hair blogger who has garnered over 27k likes. Out of all the hashtags, #naturalhairdaily seems to represent a wider cross-section of hair types and views of Black beauty, though the presence and (arguably social preference) still remains for Eurocentric standards of beauty. As a Black woman, I feel most affirmed within this hashtag and its ideas and representations of Black beauty.
Epilogue: Decolonizing Black beauty, Black hair, and Black women—starting with me.
Celebration of self begins and ends with self. In the twenty, plus years I have been natural and resisted straightening my hair, I’ve witnessed my own contradictions as I try to decolonize my thinking about beauty. Most of the past twenty years I have spent with my hair in locs, allowing me to challenge social norms and ideas of beauty, while maintaining a hairstyle that is low-maintenance and easy to care for. However, in the past four years I’ve worn my hair short, natural, and un-loc’ed. This decision has forced me to confront my own ideas about beauty, as well as pushed me to further dismantle any ideas of beauty I have that are Eurocentric. I recognize now, it is easier for me to be natural with loc’ed hair than with loose hair, that asks of me daily, to re-consider it. I wish I could say I am fully at home and at peace with my natural coils, but I am not. I love her coils and kinks, and have even learned to love her silver strands, yet I still struggle with the “need” to “do something” to make her the best public version of herself. I cannot, by any means, wake up, wash and go out with my natural hair wet. I must spend hours conditioning, oiling, combing, and twisting my coils so they will not tangle and knot, especially as it lengthens.
Despite “the struggle,” the past four years have taught me to honor my own representation of beauty. I have had to adopt my personal narrative of beauty to expand and include hair that shrinks, kinks, and coils, and have found I prefer textured Afro hair over the wavy or silky hair I dreamed of as a little girl. I recognize now that my wishes for wavy or silky hair were manifested in poor representation of hair that behaved like mine, as well as the painful straightening process I underwent to make my hair acceptable. As an adolescent, I remember wondering what would happen if I stopped pressing my hair, and looked forward to the day when I could choose my own hairstyle.
Although I still feel most at home in locs, I recognize the care and keeping of my natural hair, the participation in the natural hair community, and the daily decision to resist straightening my hair is a celebration. Won’t you celebrate, with me, too?
Works Cited
Camp, Stephanie M. H. “Making Racial Beauty in the United States: Toward a History of
Black Beauty.” Connexios: Histories of Race and Sex in North America, edited
by Jennifer Brier et al., University of Illinois Press, Urbana; Chicago; Springfield,
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Clifton, Lucille. “won’t you celebrate with me.” Poetry Foundation,
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50974/wont-you-celebrate-with-me. Accessed
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Collins, Samuel Gerald, et al. “Tagging Culture: Building a Public Anthropology through
Social Media.” Human Organization, vol. 72, no. 4, 2013, pp. 358-368. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/44148730.
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Empowerment, and Popular Visual Culture.” Journal of African American
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Patton, Tracey Owens. “Hey Girl, Am I More than My Hair?” African American Women
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