Hair in the New World: How Our Africanisms Were Lost In the Midst of Imperialism

Many Africans believed that hair, “given its closeness to the skies, was a conduit to God” (Jahangir, “Black Hair History”, 2015). Styled in plates, knots, braids, and locs, adorned with gold, silver, and clay, hair had the utmost cultural and spiritual meaning. However, the significance of hair for people of African descent began to shift in the 1600s. Like many Africanisms, hair culture was lost for many Africans due to European imperialism and the Transatlantic Slave trade. In the United States, the hierarchy established by slavery not only classified African features from the white perspectives, but also categorized them as inferior to white features. During the period of American slavery, we see a loss of the complex hairstyles from Africa. Instead, for men, hair is cut short. For women, hair is covered in cloth or left in simplistic pig tails. In the archetype of black women and children, their hair is depicted unkempt, matted stocks, jutting out of the head in every which direction (Pilgrim, “The Pickaninny”, 2012). Around this time, white people began to refer to black hair with words like “woolly”. Both the caricature depictions and these adjectives revealed the attempt to dehumanize black people through their hair.