My hair has always been my Blackness. My link. Absent skin any darker than your average post-tanning-salon white teenager, absent a discernibly Black nose or fuller-than-average lips, I am not-obviously-Black. Except for my hair.
Add that I was raised in upper-middle class white culture, that my native tongue is Standardized, Academic American English, that I tend to dress more like a stereotypical white hipster than a stereotypical Black one. When my hair is covered or cut short, I might even "pass."Â
The above is, at least, how I believe I am perceived by the average white person. Black folks, by contrast, tend to spot me as kin quite readily, asking "What are you mixed with?" rather than "What are you?"
To white people, my hair is not Black enough; it is curly but not more so than a particularly curly-haired Jewish person's might be. In white community I live with an ambiguity, an exoticism.
All of this is present when I am complimented on my hair by white people; as a result a compliment is always something else. A compliment from a white person exists somewhere between a benign othering and outright fetishization.
In Black community, however, my mixedness provokes a similar reaction, a similar othering. But the difference is both slight and prodigious, and is the focus of this essay.
When I was a child I spent my elementary school years with my mother, a white woman, in a suburb in the east Bay Area. Most of my schoolmates were white. It was the 90s; I watched the Cosby Show and My Brother and Me and Fresh Prince on TV, Bill Clinton was the "first Black president," I strain now to remember whether there were any non-white kids at school though I'm sure there must have been. I think the dream of post-raciality was so tangible in the 90s. I wonder what it would have been like to be an adult then? Anyway, it really felt like race never came up. I didn't think of myself as different, really; I like most kids had a bad haircut (I think of Asian-American friends with the ubiquitous "bowl" cut, white friends with frosted tips, etc). Once in a while, though, I would think about my peers' straight hair and envy them.
In high school, I lived with my father, a Black man, in a south Bay Area suburb similarly devoid of Black people. I don't remember meeting another Black person aside from the one or two at school, a football coach, and one of my dad's friends or members of his family we would see on certain occasions. There was another mixed girl at school and we talked about being mixed on literally one occasion. It was awkward.
I do remember once dying my hair black like the singer-songwriters in the "emo" bands I listened to; I remember once straightening my hair. Aside from watching Spike Lee's Malcolm X, or passing conversations with my father, race was still largely not on my radar.
All of this is to say that I never knew much about my hair or what to do with it. White mother and Black father whose hair experience was just clipping it short. At least until college.
That's when I actually started meeting some Black people (at my predominantly white university, naturally) and began being exposed to Black hair. I never knew what to do with mine, because it wasn't like the white folks' and it wasn't like the Black folks' either. My envy grew - I wanted to either have the straight hair of white and Asian peers or the dope curls or afros of the naturalistas in the BSU. I had neither.
In my adult life I've had three main hairstyles.
1. Because I rarely cut my hair, most of the time it has been between a few inches long and long enough to reach my chin - but always the same loose, curly ringlets that grow out of my head naturally if I condition heavily and let it mostly air dry.
I learned that trick, by the way, from a barber at the SuperCuts-type place I went to down the road from my university, and I never looked back. Suddenly, instead of being a fuzzy mess on the top of my head, it started looking good. And I started getting compliments.
It wasn't until many years later that I learned a lot more about Blackness and about hair, and so for a couple years I basked in the affirmations - white people's compliments felt genuine, and being appreciated aesthetically for something that had caused me so much stress and anxiety growing up was astounding.
I didn't learn until later what exoticism was, how institutional, culture-pervasive racism is manifest, what "passing" really was, or about white culture beauty standards and respectability politics and proximity to Blackness being a criterion for determining beauty and worth.
And Black folks' compliments felt like cultural affirmation, felt like belonging and being seen. I didn't know about internalized racism or "good hair" or that "natural hair" was a thing and had to be a thing given how heavily policed Black women's bodies and specifically hairstyles are. But eventually I learned.
And compliments became microaggressions.
2. I became tired of the compliments, unable to feel them as not infected with racism, no matter by whom they were delivered. As a means to subvert the complimenter's gaze, I twisted my loose curls into dreadlocks and said, "fuck it." I wouldn't play into these good hair games. For a year I rocked the locs. And then they started to backfire.
I began to notice a lot of white peers with "dreadlocks." They were popular, were "cool," gave off an air of antiestablismentarianism. I looked down on these cultural appropriators with subtle condescension, but wondered, aside from blood, what separated me from them. Why had I chosen locs, again?
Compliments, or even mentions, of my hair were muted, which was kind of what I was looking for. But that might be because my hair looked dirty, like the street kids with banjos asking for "traveling money." I was, am, Black, but was my hair Black hair? Was I sporting locs? Or "dreadlocks?"
As I compared my locs to Black peers' locs, I realized more and more that mine looked a lot like these white folks'. And when I looked in the mirror, I further realized that because of my white features, I was, to an average passerby, potentially just another white boy with dreadlocks. Another Bob Marley listening, trust fund crust punk, privileged cracker with no real fight and a complex of some kind.
I think there's a lot more complexity there and there was more to explore. Regardless, I cut them off.
3. After cutting my locs, my hair was back to its natural, curly state, but I never got comfortable. About a year in, when it got as long as it had been when I first got locs, I decided to try something else.
At this time I was playing around a lot with my gender identity, and felt comfortable enough to take a few pages out of the Black woman's hairstyle playbook. I did some research on YouTube and, recognizing that my desire to wear my hair long gave me commonality with the "natural hair" movement, chose a seemingly easy first "protective style:" yarn twists.
And so about a month ago I bought some yarn and combs and went for it.
While I've gotten looks and words from white folks regarding my yarn twists, most don't mention them or express curiosity. I realize that there's very little frame of reference in white experience through which to evaluate my hair. But the response from Black folks and other folks of color has been monumental.
My hair looks magnificent, apparently; I get approving stairs at the rock climbing gym, the supermarket, on the street. Comments galore about how they are well done (they aren't), about how it's a good look, etc. to straight up appreciations for my whole appearance.Â
I can't effectively discern how much of the response is related to gender (Black men just don't do two-strand twists, unless they're at the tail end of corn rows, and even then braids are much more common), but from afar they look like fat locs (which are much more common) or skinny locs twisted up (though this still isn't a popular masculine look). And I can't divorce the potential dissonance between my light skin features and this very Black hairstyle.
So far, I'm not nearly as bothered by compliments about my hair. And that's because this hair was my own doing. I got the yarn, I cut it, I spent 10+ hours combing and separating and braiding and twisting and tying and burning the edges of this hairstyle I'm rocking.
I'm not being complimented based on the "blessing" of my mixedness, on the fact that my loose curls are evidence of my being one step closer to whiteness, free at least from the scourge of the nap or the kink; my twists are not "good hair," they are hair of my own doing.
In fact, you don't know how nappy my hair is under the twists! All you can see is what I've done. I am being complimented on my creation, not on the politically and racially fraught fact of my ancestry.
There's a lot to tease out here. But for now I feel like I'm being seen. And that feels good.
As folks with marginalized identities living in the white supremacist cisheteronormative capitalist patriarchy, it's extremely difficult for us take a compliment at face value. To be able to - at least, about my hair, at least, for the moment, at least, before I start to get deep into some self-analysis - is freeing. And isn't freedom what we're all going for?
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