As a black woman, anything I do to my hair is a political statement. However, my decision to get dreadlocks was anything but political. I was 12. According to my myself, and my mother, that was an age when I could start making executive decisions about my appearance. I was tired of unraveling the two-strand twists my mom put in my hair every two weeks, I considered myself too old for braids, I wasn’t allowed to perm my hair or get a weave, so that left me one choice. Initially, my hair was a manifestation of my laziness, but as I grew older, and became more aware of black culture, it slowly became a part of my identity. A recent photo shoot for Off the Cuff, a magazine I model for on campus, titled “On Hair and Race”, inspired to me delve deeper into how my relationship with my hair has transformed throughout the years.
Who I am is composed of many facets. My race is just one of the many things that make me, me. But in a world where white is often seen as the “default” race, being black has become an integral part my being. And as a result, so has my hair. To me, my hair is how I assert my blackness. Letting my hair do as it pleases; embracing it’s texture; not forcing it to assimilate into the European beauty standards that so many black women are brainwashed into believing, all of this enables me to indulge in what it means to be black. What it means to be beautiful.
My journey with my hair has been more like an odyssey. For as long as I can remember, I associated hair with beauty. Long hair even more so. Long, straight hair was the pinnacle of perfection in my eyes. The pinnacle of perfection to a young black girl in a predominantly white, all-girls, private school. Among a sea of little white girls with straight, blonde hair, that everyone could braid and understand…my hair seemed to mark me as an “other”, more than my skin color already did. I hated my hair. Every year, I chose Halloween costumes that required me to wear a long, straight wig. I’d flip it, and comb it, and tuck it behind my ears. Somehow, convincing myself that the plastic hair I bought from the Halloween store was more beautiful than the hair that I naturally grew. The hair that was a part of me.
Middle school made things even harder. With the coming of puberty, I was hyper-sensitive to how I looked in comparison to the other girls in my grade. Hyper-aware of how I was different. Being one of the only black girls in my grade definitely didn’t make things easier, and being 5’10, taller than most boys, made me stick out like a sore thumb at middle school dances. Unable to throw my hair into the messy buns my white friends could, or decide if I wanted to straighten or curl my hair, or participate in the “french-braiding-hair-trains” that took place so often in the utopia of an all-girls’ school, convinced me that my hair was something I should be ashamed of.
But somewhere along the way I began to realize that while, yes, my hair and skin did set me apart from my white peers, that difference was beautiful. That difference was something a lot of my white classmates admitted they wished they could revel in. I don’t know if it was the slight increase in the amount of black students once I got to high school that made me feel less alone. Or the recent police brutality cases in the news that have caused me to so desperately cling to my black roots in an effort to maintain solidarity among the black community. Maybe I just got tired of hating my appearance. But I slowly began to fall in love with my hair and all that it represented. A crown, a badge of honor, a marker of my heritage. My hair transformed into something I proudly wore. Something I could never imagine changing. Who could’ve thought that something as seemingly trivial as hair could play such a huge role in how I saw myself and how others saw me?
I am entering my seventh year of having dreadlocks, and it’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that a decision I made as a lazy 12-year-old, had such an impact on my journey of becoming a woman. While my story has a happy ending–a young black girl learns to love her hair, and in the process, love herself–there are way too many black women whose experiences with their hair don’t wrap up quite as nicely as mine did.
Photo Credit: Madeline Carpentiere
And while I doubt that a “black hair movement” will ensue just because one black college student wrote an article on a Boston University blog, my hope is that conversations about the beauty of black hair and black culture never stop. Straight hair is beautiful, curly hair is beautiful, nappy hair is beautiful, dreadlocks and braids and twists are beautiful. Small and big afros and every size in between, all beautiful. And I hope that when little black girls, teenagers, and women look in the mirror, they sincerely believe that brown is beautiful.
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