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

idea that they have to look White to be valued. And this does not mean that I want a world of Black women who have hair that only looks like mine.
    Yet who I am to judge? Who am I to assume that women who invest hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars in synthetic hair don’t or can’t have as much racial pride as I do? Maybe they know something I don’t, that what’s on your head is not necessarily a barometer of what is in your mind. I know that Black women make these hair choices for reasons beyond reflexive conformity to White beauty standards, reasons such as convenience and the practical need to “fit in” to a prevailing White standard of beauty for the sake of their careers. I know that Black women are damned no matter what we do to our hair. And we are damned, ironically and most cruelly, by our own people, who are not often the ones who hire and fire, but are the ones who accept us into or push us out of the tribe. But I know too how deeply the wounds of racism and self-hatred have burrowed into the souls of Black men and women. I still hear too many Black women, and Black girls of all ages, talk obsessively among themselves, on the Internet, in social media, and face-to-face, about their desire for “good hair” and how much they fear having “bad hair.” I am still waiting for that conversation to cease. I have been waiting all my life.

Sister
    ANNE LAMOTT
    O n a trip to St. Louis a number of years ago, something for which I’d waited a lifetime happened: people asked me how they could get their hair to look like mine. I have dreadlocks now. I finally have fabulous hair. Now, you may need a little background on this to help you see why this means such a great deal to me: you’ve got to realize I grew up with men and boys asking me if I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. Of course, it’s one thing when you’re a twelve-year-old girl with nappy hair and the older boys ask if you’ve stuck your finger in the light socket; this is certainly exhilarating enough and could give a girl enough confidence literally to
soar
through puberty. But it’s another when you have to keep fending off the question well into your twenties and thirties. Once at a funeral, an old friend of the woman who’d died actually asked me if I’d stuck my finger in a socket. At a funeral! And his wife had to stand beside him trying to look as if this were the most amusing thing you could possibly say at a funeral. I looked at her with compassion, and then at him rather blankly, and said as gently as I could, “What a rude, rude thing to say.”
    I was a towheaded child with bushy urchin hair. My father and some of my chosen mothers thought my hair was beautiful, but they were about the only ones who did. I got teased a lot. My mother took me to get it straightened for a while; I slept on rollers for years, brushed it into pigtails that I tied with pretty ribbons, set the bangs with enough gel to caulk a bathtub, and finally got it cut into an Afro in the late sixties. It looked better, but I loved having bangs, and they seemed to be forever a pipe dream.
    Industrial-strength mousse came along in my twenties and I could moussify my hair and bangs into submission with this space-age antifrizz shit that may turn out someday to have been carcinogenic. I used to worry about this, but then I’d think, I don’t really care as long as they don’t take it off the market.
    When I first started going to St. Andrew, most of the thirty or so women at my church who are African American processed their hair, and still do. A few wear short Afros, a few wear braided extensions; but mostly they get it straightened or flattened against their heads into marcel waves. When I got dreadlocks a few years ago, the other women were ambivalent at first. I think it made them a little afraid for me.
    Dreadlocks make people wonder if you’re trying to be rebellious.