What’s up with ‘Good Hair’?

This past weekend I saw "Good Hair", a new documentary narrated and produced in part by Chris Rock in which he interviews a lot of black celebrities, especially black women, including Maya Angelou, Al Sharpton, Eve, Salt N Pepa, Ice T, Melyssa Ford, Raven-Symone, and others… about their hair. Rock goes into the black hair industry to explain the ubiquity of hair care products for black women aimed at straightening out their hair and make it look more white or Asian, rather than the naturally curly. He starts in Atlanta with a black hair trade show and hairdresser talent competition, and explains to the ignorant the relaxer and the weave, and traces the hair that is used to make weaves all the way to India, where women give it away for free in religious ceremonies. He traces the chemicals from relaxer back to the plant where they are made. He looks at products, cuts, colors, weaves, perms, extensions. He looks at women who are teachers and grad students spending $1000 on one hairstyle.

I dragged along my friend to see this (who does not usually see ‘arthouse’ films), he thought a movie about hair would be boring. I had already decided to see it based on a glowing review Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post gave to WTOP. It was laugh out loud funny and both my friend, who is a male of South Asian descent and myself who is a male of East Asian descent both learned a lot and enjoyed it.

At the same time, I walked out of the theater feeling a bit disturbed because Chris Rock seems to be criticizing the societal pressures that black women face to conform to the cultural standard of beauty without actually offering a way out. In a larger sense I think it applies to all women regardless of race, even though it is more acute for black women in this case. For example, Chris Rock casts the weave industry as evil and catches at least one Asian hair merchant making an openly racist comment. He interviews black men who resent paying hundreds of dollars or $1,000 for their girlfriends’ hairs. He shows how having a weave prevents black women from being fully intimate, or getting their hair wet. He shows how acidic the chemicals are and how they burn away aluminum coke cans. But what does Chris Rock propose? It’s not clear. He says that he’ll tell his daughters that ‘what’s in their head is more important than what’s on their head’. That’s so true, and a good sentiment. But how does that change the pressures his daughters will face when they get older?

There is one scene in the movie where a bunch of black high school girls are sitting around a table discussing job prospects. The girls pointed out that although they think the afro is beautiful, if they didn’t ‘relax’ their hair, they were afraid that they wouldn’t be taken seriously by executives (or by implication by society).

I got the sense that the relaxer and weave is what gave a lot of black women confidence- not just the wearers but the many barbers. There is a lot of ambiguity in this film. Sometimes it felt like Chris Rock was glorifying the very thing he was criticizing, in the style of Devil Wears Prada.

Yet at the end of the day it seems Chris Rock is criticizing black women who modify their hair to look straight yet he hardly even dents the larger issue of beauty standards shaped by society that constrict black women and contribute to their "need" to do this in the first place. This movie can be used as a reason to criticize black women who wear a weave but it doesn’t really answer the question that if black women wore their hair more naturally, would they be accepted? It seems like ‘Good Hair’ offers sparse hope. And it really is no good without hope that things could change for the better.