Me, My Hair, and I Read Online Free PDF Page A

satisfying. The impact of the natural lasted about a decade. Then straight hair came back with a vengeance, while I kept my own hair natural, except for one or two times when I used a relaxer just for a change. But the chemicals always damaged my hair. The natural revealed, in ways that more traditional styles did not, what I now had come to know was an attractive face. It fit my busy lifestyle, and I liked the way I looked and felt wearing a natural—free and comfortable in my skin.
    Whatever Black women do to their hair is controversial. The straightening of Black hair was controversial when first introduced at the turn of the twentieth century. The technique was loudly criticized by the Black elite, even though many of them had straight hair that afforded them higher levels of acceptance by Whites than other Blacks received. When Blacks moved north during the Great Migration, women with braided hair or unstraightened hair were criticized as “country” and considered an embarrassment to their recently migrated yet suddenly urbanized cousins. Fast-forward half a century, and the Afro and natural were in some corners criticized as unkempt and uncivilized. Even today, many feel that natural hair is questionable as a legitimate hairstyle. The talk show host Wendy Williams criticized the actress Viola Davis so virulently for wearing her hair in a natural style to the Oscars in 2012, you would have thought she had attended the ceremony with a bag on her head. Recently, I was invited to speak to a group of high school girls who wanted to wear natural hair and who had formed a support group to sustain them in their decision. They shared heartbreaking stories of parents and friends who questioned their judgment because of this choice and predicted all manner of ruin and disaster for these girls. Yes, Black women have been fired from corporate jobs for wearing cornrows (too ethnic) and for putting a blond streak in their hair at Hooters (Black women don’t have blond hair). But the CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns, wears a natural, and the real world of corporations has learned to make room for constantly changing expressions of racial and ethnic beauty, even as there is ever-present pushback, attempting to enforce a unitary beauty and hair standard. This twixt and tween is simply called reality.
    Black women never really win the hair wars. We keep getting hit by incoming fire from all sides. Today our hair is as much of a conundrum as ever. While Black women spend more on their hair than anyone else, they are routinely less satisfied with results. Weaves, wigs, and extensions are mainstream, from the heads of high school girls to those of TV reality series housewives.
    The cultural skirmishes over the significance of Michelle Obama’s hair and her look signifies just how important these questions still are. Just as in the minds of many Whites, there is the image of the “angry” Black man and “angry” Black woman (usually brown to black in skin tone, hands on hips, often but not always full figured), there is also “angry” Black hair. During the 2008 presidential election campaign, when the
New Yorker
magazine wanted to capture the paranoia that some Whites felt about a possible Obama presidency, the magazine ran a cover that featured Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim cleric and Michelle Obama sporting an Afro, an AK-47 strapped over her shoulders, and a “shut your mouth” glare. While clearly the cover was meant to parody mindless racism, many across the political spectrum took offense.
    As First Lady, Michelle Obama has been crowned, quite justly, an American queen of style and glamour. She is considered by many ordinary folk, as well as those who are the arbiters of fashion and style, to be beautiful and elegant and a premier symbol of American female beauty, as influential as Jacqueline Kennedy. And her hair, whether it’s bone straight that day, straight but curly, or straight