Why I Stopped Calling My Big Blonde Hair An Afro

As far back as I can remember adults have been saying this weird, rude thing to me: “Your hair is gorgeous. Do you hate it?”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember a birthday party in fourth grade. We saw The Princess Diaries. Like most incredible movies, this one features a make over. Anne Hathaway plays Princess Mia, whose grandmother hires a (white male) stylist to pluck her eyebrows, toss out her chunky shoes, and relax her frizzy curls. Voila! The hapless dork becomes a princess. The birthday girl’s mother pulled me aside to reassure me that in no way should I interpret this plot point as an objective condemnation on curly hair like mine. It had not occurred to me to do so.

After that I started to notice that tween idols had straight hair. The female leads on Disney Channel when I was a kid were Fi (So Weird), Ren (Even Stevens), Lizzie (Lizzie Maguire) and Xenon (Girl of the 21st Century). Even cartoon characters like Kim Possible had straight hair. The few exceptions were Kayla from The Famous Jett Jackson and Penny from The Proud Family. Notice anything about these characters? If you were on one of the “white shows,” you had stick straight hair. If you had curls you belonged on a predominantly black show. The message I subliminally perceived was: you’re in the wrong lane. I felt like there was no place for me. I think a lot of children do.

I don’t know if that mother created insecurity or simply foresaw that the movie would seep into my self-perception. I don’t know if any of the strangers that approached me were complicit in or effective protestors of this standard for frizzless, shiny curls. But a season later I was headed to middle school and hell-bent on pubescing into smooth hair.

I tried gel from a green glittering bottle. I tried painstakingly straightening my hair for six hours and not washing it until it smelled like roadkill. The July before sixth grade, my stepsister suggested I try leave-in-conditioner. She sat on the toilet and I in the bath tub, curls dripping with shea butter. On the crest of puberty I achieved what I hadn’t even known I wanted: the Anglican fairy tale version of curly hair. The conditioner made the curls shiny and soft but low volume. Basically, as close as you can get to straight hair without having it. 

Maintaining this look was exhausting. Everyday before high school I woke up at five to comb conditioner into wet hair and let it air-dry for hours. Some winter mornings it would freeze.

When I went to college I started getting interested in my undoctored texture, and even in playing it up. I brushed it dry and discovered that the shape it formed was roughly round. I started wearing it puffy when I went out dancing, and then to class when I didn’t wake up in time to shower and comb conditioner through it. I can’t describe what a relief it was to like how I looked from the time I woke up. Undoctored, no taming of my hair or myself to feel acceptable. I don’t think I had felt that way since before that fifth grade birthday party.

Soon afterwards an ex-boyfriend compared me to Erykah Badu, which for obvious reasons was incredibly flattering. And I’m embarrassed to say that without a thought, I began calling it an afro.

Part of it was an efficiency thing. “Afro” is more succinct than “gravity-defying pouf.” There didn’t seem to be another word for my hairstyle, and it was a few years before “cultural appropriation” became a colloquail phrase. If I’m being honest, though, the main reason I called my hair an afro is that it was easier to believe that my texture was indeed beautiful by co-opting a term with an “exotic” connotation (I cringe to write this). Who wouldn’t want to feel like they had the same hairstyle as Erkyah or Diana Ross or Solange?

It also felt like an act of reclamation. As I learned more about feminism and began rejecting mainstream standards of beauty, I thought that the word’s positive connotation could help me embrace what Hollywood and magazines had taught me to suppress.  

The thing is, though, afros aren’t mine to reclaim.

In her viral video “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” actress Amandla Stenberg offers this excellent distinction between cultural exchange and appropriation: “Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes where it originated but is deemed as high fashion, cool or funny when the privileged take it for themselves.”

I have witnessed what Stenberg describes. My best friend Andrea is Jewish. She has beautiful curly hair: dark, tight and more wiry than mine. She also has really full lips and most people who meet her assume she is mixed race. One day, we were walking in Atlanta and a man approached us. He was fawning over my hair, talking about how incredible my curls were, how amazed he was by the ringlets. He ignored Andrea completely. My Anglican curls struck him as so gorgeous he “had” to stop me, but hers were . . . what? Too “ethnic” to mention? It felt as though he was averting his eyes from her the way people often do when they don’t have change for a homeless person. He didn’t want to look at someone he perceived as different from him.

Though she is not African American, I watch Andrea being perceived as “other” a lot, and this experience was one of the first that made me wonder if I was comfortable with the “compliments” and attention lauded on my locks. And this summer, a national controversy made me wonder if I was comfortable with how I have been thinking about my hair.

Like a lot of people, the media coverage of Rachel Dolezal last June upset me. I felt that her cultural appropriation was a calculated effort to co-opt professional and creative opportunities from black people. Even more upsettingly, she co-opted an entire national dialogue on race. That same month, white police officers assaulted black girls at a Texas pool party, and I had to actively seek information on this story. Yet Dolezal’s face was everywhere! I thought, here it is on a national platform: evidence that cultural appropriation does very real harm. And as I saw her picture more and more, I asked myself in horror: do I look like this lady? Not just my hair, but in my heart? Am I so insecure that I can’t own my identity, that I need to take from a culture that faces struggles I can’t understand to feel good about myself?

The answer is no.

My hair is not an afro because I did not inherit a legacy of needing to Anglicize my appearance to attain basic human rights.

My hair is not an afro because the style doesn’t bring me closer to a history of resilience with my people.

It is not an afro because when people grab my curls it is not an affront on my culture. It doesn’t mirror a tradition of white presumption of ownership over my body, and that is because my body isn’t black.

I do not need to steal a rich and challenging cultural heritage to love my hair. I need it to grow out of a head full of compassion and appropriate anger and hopeful tenacity. Then I can say I love it, and myself.