Acceptable Blackness

I searched up natural hair on google and wasn't too pleased with what I found. At first glance, I ate up the beautiful coils of hair that popped up on my laptop screen, but as I kept scrolling, I realized that despite the fact that there were new pictures, their composition never changed. Visually, I only saw the same woman over and over again. Light-skinned and bouncy, loose curls--I've been seeing this woman around for years.

Natural hair is having a moment once again. For many black women, long gone are the laborious days of relaxers, hot combs, and flat irons. Nowadays, you can hear us conversing about Cantu, Denman brushes, and our baby hair. Ditching the chemical, many are in search of a natural alternative that will promote the growth of long healthy hair--something we can remember having in our childhood. Yet, in the past when I scrolled through the natural hair hashtag on Instagram and checked out our hair gurus on YouTube, I'd begin to feel that the journey to natural hair could never happen for me. It didn't matter how many times I did the LCO method or how many protective styles I wore, I'd never have the defined curls of the social media community.

It wasn't until the summer of my senior year that I finally realized that I needed reexamine my understanding of healthy hair and where that came from. When I thought "healthy" I thought loose, springy curls. Well, I have 4a/b hair, so that is basically just not a viable possibility with my hair type. But the association between healthy hair and loose curls isn't something I came up with on my own, it was a correlation I had formed from all of the hair influencers that I have been following online. Similarly, in her interview, Annie Auguste mentioned how she would always see how type 3 girls would transition from relaxed to natural hair and talk about how they could not believe that they've been trying to hide their beautiful hair. Very rarely, do you see a type 4 girl transition and say a similar statement--not because these girls don't exist, but because they aren't as glorified as the women with looser curls.

As we can imagine, this preference for looser curls follows the trend of appreciating euro-infused black culture. Looser curls are closer to white hair; in fact, it isn't uncommon for white people to have type 2/3 hair. Furthermore, while this isn't necessarily a privilege, society tends to fetishize features associated with multiracial people: wavy hair, caramel skin, hazel eyes. This fascination follows the demeaning narrative that mixed race people are exotic, but not too ethnic. The features offer opportunities for social mobility not available to the black women who lack white features. Dark skinned girls with flat noses and dense are the lowest of the low and no part of them is accepted or enjoyed by white society.

To be honest, they aren't even accepted by black society most of the time either. We love Yara Shahidi, Beyonce, Solange, Amandla Stenberg, Meghan Markle, Ciara, and other light skinned women. We sprinkle in some Viola Davis and Lupita N'yongo and call them "queen" too! But let's also look back at black civil rights leaders of the past: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Dubois, Rosa Parks, Thurgood Marshall, Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, and Medgar Evers. Along with outlier, Martin Luther King, these are the figures we often learn about in our whitewashed history classes, and they are all light skinned black people. So what about the figures the textbooks didn't want us to read about. Ok, shoot: Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Katherine Cleaver, Huey P. Newton... the list goes on. Guess what, they're all light skinned too! I remember looking back at these movements that celebrated blackness to find people that looked like me because I surly was not finding them on my television screen and in most of the pictures of black panthers, most of the pantheret women had fair black skin.

This is all to say, that this isn't new. As black people, we have a habit of glorifying black people with european features. While going natural is the hip thing to do nowadays, the people we appreciate for embracing their own hair is not. Don't think that this issues is just hair because it remains consistent with our ideas about who is beautiful and who is not, who has followers and who doesn't, who has a platform to stand on and who doesn't, and who has a voice and who is forced into silence.

I need to see more type 4 and dark skin love. Need. I'll be honest, in my experience and even in history's (refer back to the list of famous black people above), we often see lighter skinned, curly haired black people representing the entirety of the black race.