qu'ality - "na-tu-ral"

you can touch my hair

Well... not MY hair.  Not unless I know you and we're that close.  Or I barely know you and the vibe somehow makes me feel amenable to the idea.  Depends.  On so much.  See, I'm torn on this.  While I don't want to feel like a petting zoo animal, a healthy and ongoing conversation about hair can serve as a bridge towards cross cultural understanding, right?  And isn't understanding what we want in the end?

There are no easy answers in this realm, which is why I'm intrigued by You Can Touch My Hair, an interactive public art exhibit being held by the folks at Un'ruly, in New York City, during which "...strangers from all walks of life will have the welcomed opportunity to touch various textures of black hair." (Un'ruly)

Where+When: Union Square, June 6th 2-4pm and June 8th 2-4pm

With all the buzz and the "hell no" commentary I've noticed on facebook about the exhibit, I'm gonna need to at least take a peak at what happens.  You?

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hairstory: pitstops on the road to the glorious coil

Even though it’s completely opposite to my natural texture, straight hair is where my story begins. In childhood memories around hair, first came the hot comb, and then later, the no-lye relaxer. There were times when I wore my hair in African braids, beautiful intricate styles that lasted for months at a time. Even so, soon after the braids would come out, in would go the relaxer. The idea that hair needed to be straightened was such a given, it was like a fundamental part of the way I was wired. I was born into that world, knew nothing else, and didn’t find my way to questioning any of it until decades later.

When I first started experimenting with changing my hairstyle, my ideas were variations on it in its relaxed state. Like the period in high school when I decided I didn’t want my hair tightly curled with a hot iron and stacked into an impossible looking asymmetrical sculpture (It was the eighties). I stopped curling my hair. I would part it on the side, and let it fall, which I will admit, in retrospect, left it looking more like an interruption on the way to a hairstyle than an actual hairstyle.

Another phase in my hairstory was the summer of the weave, in the middle of college. The only evidence I have of that now is a set of photo negatives, and the vague memory of how quickly the excitement of having that new hairstyle faded. Once I got the weave, and lived with it for a bit, I didn’t get it anymore. The maintenance was too involved for my taste and I had answered my wonder about what it would feel like. It felt exactly like what it was: someone else’s hair sewn in strips to mine. Not for me. Now when I see those negatives, I can’t help but laugh and think, Damn it looks like I was trying to give Chaka Khan a run for her money on the hair tip.

In my 20s I got curious and courageous enough to cut all my hair off. By that point I had done all I was going to with a relaxer, and I started to notice Black girls with amazing natural hairstyles. I wanted to experience the ease of a wash and go style. At the same time, I was becoming more aware of societal beauty norms, how little they coincided with how I felt and thought, and how automatically, often frantically, people subscribed to them. It all seemed a tad on the bizarre side to me because my hair changes felt in a sense like I was trying on selves for fit. And when the fit wasn’t right, I didn’t linger.

Nowadays, I wear my hair in long dreadlocks and I absolutely love it. I love my hair in its natural, coarse, texture. I love the myriad styling options available to me. I love the strength of it, the coil of it, and yes, the feel of it. I know I’m not supposed to, if I want to fit in with my land-of-the-free society. Every day, several times a day, I encounter billboards and all kinds of ads that basically say, as if it’s a given fact, that what my hair does naturally is not what hair is supposed to do, not what I should want it to do. I get the message. I just disagree. Highly.

It wasn’t some mystical, magical, beyond-us force that came down and decided that a European beauty ideal would be the law. Those kinds of ideas came out of human minds, like mine. Like yours. Like the ones it will take to eventually get mainstream media to reflect our society’s beauty in its gloriously diverse actuality. Once I got conscious of this, it became impossible for me to blindly ingest beauty ideals served up by mainstream media, or anyone else.

locrocker brittany on stylelist

While a lot of ladies go natural for reasons having to do with authenticity and/or identity, Brittany Thomas, who blogs at LocRocker.com, did it because she was broke and tired of spending so much money maintaining her perm in Florida weather.  She cut the relaxer out and ended up in love with her natural hair. Featured on stylelist's natural hair bloggers series recently, she writes:

"There's something about not running from the rain and being able to work out without fear of sweating out a perm that just feels good. Being natural means I don't have to schedule my hairstyles around my life. I can't be the only lady who wouldn't work out before a wedding or an event. My natural hair isn't on a calendar. I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. That's just freedom!" (stylelist)

Check out the entire article here to see Thomas' top 5 natural hair care tips, products AND a tutorial on her favorite natural hair style.

natural AND professional, oh my!

photo: getty images

That the appropriateness of natural (and yes, in many cases nappy) black hair in professional environments is still  questioned and debated,  says it all:  We may have come a long way baby, but we are nowhere near there yet.  In a lot of ways we have simply moved sideways and not forward.  Over at Black Enterprise, a recent article tackles the subject, stating:

"The reality is that your chances for getting a job and getting promoted are lessened when you don’t conform/assimilate to an ideal, predefined standard of appearance in certain industries. Is it right? No. Is there something you can do about that? Yes. If you’ve demonstrated that you have an incomparable work ethic, you can tame your company’s most challenging projects, and you’ve dotted every I or crossed every T on your resume but you still aren’t getting hired or promoted, then you have three choices: 1) Change industries 2) start your own company or 3) conform and straighten your hair and/or cut your locs."

It's sobering to remember how real the third choice is.  I have walked out of interviews that seemed to have gone beautifully, not heard back and wondered if my locs had anything to do with it.  It's an unspoken thing.  A thing you notice at random times, like when your white co-worker catches herself saying something about how dry her hair got, after she colored it for the second time over the weekend; when she touches her hair, her eyes fall on your long dreadlocks and her voice trails off just as she finishes saying  "It had the most horrible texture."   

It was only four years ago that former Glamour magazine associate editor, Ashley Baker stood before a room full of lawyers and presented a slide show on dos and don'ts of corporate fashion, during which she reportedly made remarks about dreadlocks being "truly dreadful ... No offense, but those 'political' hairstyles really have to go." (Howard University News Service)  The ensuing media storm included myriad debates on racism, and Baker's resignation (which says nothing about whether or not she has come to see that the way my hair coils out of my scalp is just as natural as the way her hair grows).  And then, just like that, everyone moved on.

We've come a long way, but we are still right here.  The law may say companies can't discriminate in their hiring practices, but let's not get it twisted:  The only place racism has gone is officially out of style.  If the person interviewing you or the one in charge of your promotion has some deep seeded view that hair is 'appropriate' or 'kept' or 'beautiful' or 'professional looking' only when it it straight and flowy, then you (and your locs, 'fros, twists, etc...) are out of the running, unless you conform and change your hair.  

Here's hoping you never have to.