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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 you can probably tell, places like twitter are all abuzz. Like Karina, I understand the desire for a much needed dialogue about black hair but acting like these dialogues can just happen any ol’ where and any ol’ how and outside of discussions of particular sociohistorical experiences and political realities is problematic. Those of us in NYC know that Union Square gets marked as a hip spot given the characters the park attracts, its radical history, the statue of Gandhi, and the close proximity to places like the New School and New York University. However, you gotta also know that the rents in that area run at about $2500.00 per month for a small studio. Yes, I said a studio apartment: one small bathroom, one small closet, and an open space (maybe 15X30 feet) that will include your kitchen. What might it mean to be a black woman, standing in THAT space, holding a sign asking for folk to come feel on you? While folk take pictures. This sounds like the neo-racial (usually misnamed post-racial) version of an auction block during slavery… mixed with the infamously racist exhibits at the 1893 World Fair (which celebrated Colored People’s Day by giving all African Americans a free watermelon)… mixed with the 19th century exhibits of and experiments on Sarah Baartman, otherwise known as Venus Hottentot (as depicted in the drawing above). You really can’t deny the similarities here. 