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“My Natural Sistas”
This is that time of year when I spend a great deal of time online watching videos and reading articles on how to moisturize my hair. Between the on-and-off again single-digit cold weather, my hair is dryyyyy. It’s the typical saga of natural hair for black women in cold winters. Because my hair has changed its length and texture since my no-heat commitment, it seems that what worked last year doesn’t work this year. This isn’t a lament about black hair though, because I actually like looking at these blogs, articles, and videos. The images are stunningly beautiful, the sistas are often funny as all get-out, and the advice is ON. POINT.
“Naturally GG”
It’s the language of it all that fascinates me. It’s always in the language, like these phrasings and positioning:
Protective styling (and headwrapping)
Avoiding over-worked hair
Understanding and mixing shea butter
Letting the scalp heal (especially if newly non-relaxed)
Working and nurturing the roots
“Cherish My Daughter”
I’ll just go for broke and say it straight out: only black women could and would talk about HAIR— their bodies— this way… and digitally so AT THAT! It’s a discourse wrapped in notions of freedom from work and destruction.
It should not come as a surprise that my conversations with black women, from the compliments to the sharing of styles and product purchases, are qualitatively and quantitively different. Those conversations are so foreign to most white women around me that this may as well be a language other than English. In many ways, this IS another language. We are talking Afrikan experience. What other women would make the healing of roots, self-protection, and rejuvenation with shea butter the road to survival?
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You can see then why I was so stunned by a recent blog article circling the internet about a young white woman expressing her turmoil when she realized, during yoga, that the “young, fairly heavy black woman” behind her must resent her thin, white body. Yeah. You can’t make this up! On top of living a racist delusion, she has co-opted a spiritual, non-western practice, YOGA (we seem to forget that yoga was not invented by middle class white women), to experience a false racial superiority.
Charyjay
Now, can sumbody please tell me why women who invent and design practices and languages just to maintain non-white alternatives to their HAIR—with digital tools to educate and sustain one another about it— would be pining away at white women’s bodies? If that weren’t enough, this white woman also configures herself as an advanced yoga practitioner, but if this is where her mind is during the process, what the hell kinda yogi is this? I enjoyed Kristin Iversen’s discussion who critiques the commercial white feminism of the journal alongside white colonization of yoga. I also value Tressiemc.com’s review of research on black girls who also have a critique of white standards of beauty at a young age. That’s why I am confused by the black women who perceive this moment as a possibility for good dialogue. Good for whom? Black women? This moment replicates nothing more than Sylvia Wynter’s now longstanding critique of white femininity in her analysis of the Tempest in its depiction of Miranda: the only woman in the New World/Island, the “mode of physiognomic being” that gets canonized as the only “rational object of desire” and “genitrix of a superior mode of human life.”
I won’t mention this woman’s name, because she is not worthy of that. Just trust that her own physical appearance in no way matches the admiration and awe that she thinks her body engenders. I ain’t sayin she ugly, but she sho ain’t cute. For black women out there who do aspire to whiteness, this ain’t the white woman they would be aesthetically mimicking (especially when she is sweaty and funky.) How does someone of such absolute visual mediocrity become convinced she is the center of physical attraction? As is so strikingly evident here, it is a pathologized, corporeal white-thinness alone that is supposed to mark aesthetic power and desire. Truth is, this little dumb blog post isn’t worth the attention it has received (and brought the writer into focus in ways she was perhaps too young to understand, though the journal surely did, with the intimacies of her personal life now publicly on display, i.e., drug abuse). For my part, I will keep moisturizing my natural hair and using a black woman’s language with black women to navigate the world. I won’t be standing behind any white woman any time soon with the desire of being that. I have my own self and black women’s language to sustain me. [/ezcol_1half_end]
As soon as that “meeting” started, I noticed the peculiar way the chair and her 
These women of color on my first campus as a tenure track professor were phenomenal and though I knew they were dope when I was there, I never fully realized that having a set of sistafriends on your campus to lift your head is a RARITY! Notice that I said: women of color who are sistafriends. That is NOT the same as having women of color on campus. I am not talking about the kinds of women of color who come talk to you in closed offices but never speak up in public settings, a strategy often learned early on because it is so handsomely rewarded in graduate school. These women might say they keep quiet because no one is listening to them but, more often, they choke their words to not lose favor with those in power, not ruffle white feathers, not take any risks, or not lose their token status (and many times go home to wealthy, breadwinning, and/or white husbands). They are, in sum, passing for white. I ain’t talking about THEM women of color.
”I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations” are the famous words of Sojourner Truth, the famous African American suffragist and abolitionist. Elizabeth Cady Stanton described Truth making this statement to her in a 1867 visit. I have pushed myself to think deeply about this phrase because it is one that my students continually re-mix 
My students’ reverberating references to Sojourner Truth also compel me to be a different kind of teacher-researcher. Part of me is responding to a tendency of mostly white teachers to describe mostly white students who reference a litany of white authors and novels in the course of classroom discussions. This gets marked as intelligent and well-read and I do certainly agree. However, within the scope of these parameters, I have never heard any black student be referenced in the same way for knowledge of black cultural history and persons (and what passes as KNOWLEDGE of people of African descent, even at the graduate level, is often so dismal that I am utterly embarrassed for all parties involved). At best, when undergraduate students of African descent reference black cultural histories, these are treated as personal connections, not literate connections (as if white students describing white authors is NOT also about personal connection). Alternatively, black students might be seen as activating their “prior knowledge” which is admirable and tolerated but that is not the same as regarding these moments as sophisticated analyses. 
My first day was staff development day. I had to attend various sessions like everyone else but, as the new teacher that year, I also had to pick up my keys and set up my classroom. As soon as I opened the classroom door, a rat the size of a terrier dog ran across the room and behind the coat closet. I was horrified (I don’t do rodents, insects, OR snakes!) but for some reason, I didn’t flinch. I moved the coat closet and saw a hole the size of a dinner platter in the wall. I went outside to the public pay phone, called my father to ask him the easiest way to plug up a hole in the wall (without needing sheetrock), went to the local hardware store, and bought steel wool, chicken wire, and plaster (I also bought roach spray since I have always seen roaches and rats travel in pairs). The local hardware store owner did not recognize me and so I introduced myself and my dilemma. He gave me a 50% discount on the materials and so I went back to my classroom and plugged holes. I had seen enough at my interview and the “teacher development” sessions to know that no one there would help or care.
Now some 21 years later, I wish I could say that things look different in my life as a college teacher, but they don’t. Not at all. The only thing that is new is the way that our newest technologies figure into just another one of them things that racially subordinated, working class/working poor students supposedly should not and cannot do. Same rats, new holes.
I have always worked at schools that serve large or ONLY serve working class, first-generation, working, and/or racially marginalized students. And for as long as I have worked there, I have gotten editorial and peer responses across the board that question how THAT student population, or how the university where I work, is relevant to the kind of classrooms most compositionists see— white middle class kids. The problem is that this is a lie. White, middle-classness is not what MOST colleges and universities today look like and it is not going in that direction either. 
