Black women: The stigma associated with their hair

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Black women have fought the stigma of nappy hair since the slavery era. According to blackcommentator.com, the word “nappy” derives from Britain meaning a baby’s cotton napkin or diaper, in America, the word became racialized to mean unkempt wild and wooly hair associated with people of African descent-used to demean and to degrade African Americans.

The stigma of kinky hair as less beautiful than straight hair has haunted the black community since the slavery era, where enslaved people with straighter hair often reaped the advantage less rigorous work inside the main residence instead of the fields, according to cnn.com commentary: Why it matters how black women wear their hair.

A century ago the legendary Madame CJ Walker built a multi-million dollar empire on the premise that black women want to look like white women and that "good hair" is the key to independence and prosperity according to endarkment.com. One of her first inventions, a metal straightening comb, was one of the first inventions that gave black women the opportunity to level the playing field between “good hair” and “bad hair.”

“I remember after my mother would wash my hair I would run around the house with a towel wrapped around my head pretending that it was my hair,” says Tiobany Bruce, of Gladewater, TX who is a proponent of chemical relaxers. “I would never go more than six weeks without a relaxer,” she says.

During the 70s many African Americans tossed out their straightening combs that, once tamed their hard to manage hair, and went natural as a statement of pride. During the 80s the emergence of the career woman brought back the use of the metal straightening comb and other concoctions to tame black hair giving it a neater more career-like appearance.

“We wore our hair in afros. The bigger the afro the better,” says Jesse Crawford of Longview, TX, who has since settled into a straight style. “Back then it was all about black pride,” she says.
Today, in the new millennium, natural hair has reemerged for a variety of reasons. Some see it as a statement of pride, while others prefer natural because it’s convenient and more than anything it’s the “in” thing, very stylish.

Venitta Howard, of Longview, TX, says that while she isn’t one to conform to style or social pressures, she chooses to wear her hair natural because of the convenience.

“I can wear braids one day and that’s a style and then I can take it down the next day that’s another style, or I can comb it out and it’s really easy,” she says.
According to Howard, whatever the reason a woman chooses to go natural she has to be comfortable with whom she is when it comes to social acceptance.

According to afrotoronto.com, Black women who decide to stay true to their roots barely see any positive reflection of themselves in the media or anywhere else.

One of the most famous incidents to date is the Don Imus incident. According to denverurbanspectrum.com, Imus calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed ho’s” was the same as calling them “nappy-headed slaves.”


On the flipside of this is a movement among the African community called, “Happily Nappily” and some black critics within this movement say that black women shed the ancient racist shame and stigma of nappy hair by adopting white beauty standards, according to mlive.com.


“I remember when I first went natural I had gone home for the holidays and my hair was going through a transition. Before I walked out of the door my mother whispered in my ear, ‘Laqueshis, now when you get back home you take a straightening comb through your hair,’ I laugh now, but at the time I was furious and felt like no one understood me,” says Laquesha Lemons of Longview, TX.


African American women being bombarded by commercials and campaigns that glamorize European beauty standards is just one of the many reasons there is a lot of social pressures one must face when going natural. However Howard has a bit of advice for any woman who makes the decision to go natural, “Remember why you made the decision to go natural and when you look in the mirror if you like it it’s a thumbs up!”