Black Women, Beauty, and Hair as a Matter of Being

Abstract

Since I was a teenager, I have chemically altered the natural state of my hair. At the time, I never really thought about why I did it, or the extent to which that chemical would rule over me. But my hairstory is not unique. For the vast majority of Black women, hair is not just hair; it contains emotive qualities that are linked to one’s lived experience. The crux of the Black hair issue centers on three oppositional binaries—the natural/unnatural Black, good/bad hair, and the authentic/inauthentic Black. On the one hand, scholars in the Caribbean, Britain, and the United States speak of the importance given to the dominant beauty paradigm, which privileges “white/light skin, straight hair and what are seen to be European facial features” (Tate 301). On the other hand, the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power Movement is that Blackness was redefined such that Afrocentric or “naturally” Black hairstyles became associated with the authentic. As such, “Within this Black anti-racist aesthetic the beauty that was valorized and recognized was that of ‘dark skin’ and ‘natural afro-hair’. . . the only authentic Black hairstyles would be dreadlocks, afro, cane-row and plaits. By extension, the only authentic Blackness would be a dark-skinned one. These are the valorized signifiers of the ideal of ‘natural Black beauty’” (Tate 302–03). This article uses causal talk about hair to examine how media and social interactive processes mediate one’s grooming choices while simultaneously ascribing an aesthetic value on one’s body.