I got African in my family October 27, 2009
Celebrating that good hair with a video from the sons of malcolm(www.sonsofmalcolm@wordpress.com). A wonderful video on Happily Natural Day in Virginia.
Sodium Hydroxide and You October 25, 2009
FYI, Sodium Hydroxide is an active ingredient in lye relaxers.
From a recent g-chat conversation:
Annie: dude, you know that chemical in straightening product — sodium hydroxide?
me: yahAnnie: do you know that it can be used to dissolve bodies?!me: WHAT? please send a linkAnnie: from wiki:me: things that make you go hmmmm.Welcome to the dollhouse* October 25, 2009
Welcome to the dollhouse
The line the new black Barbies won’t cross
*By Francie Latour | October 25, 2009
In every black family, there are two kinds of daughters: daughters who have good hair and daughters who don’t. For much of my childhood, knowing this was as painful as raking a comb through my own locks, whose strands fell into the “don’t” category: stubbornly short, easily broken, at war with the detanglers designed to tame them. And, like most black hair in its natural state, densely coiled and woolly. In the words of my aunties: coarse, bushy, difficult. In the words of history: nappy, picaninny, slave-girl.
It’s no coincidence that the first black American self-made millionaire, Madame C. J. Walker, made her money turning that kind of hair into straight, shiny, behaving hair. That was 100 years ago, and black women everywhere have been on the same, self-denying quest ever since. Years ago, a cousin of mine perfectly articulated the power of hair over the psyches of black girls. When I told her about a new college boyfriend, who was white, she said, “You’re so lucky. If you stay together and get married one day, your daughters will have the best hair.” I acted shocked, but I was intimately familiar with the longing and loathing that prompted those words.
Now I’m a mother of three with a 2-year-old daughter of my own. (Yes, she’s biracial and has smooth curls, but I swear that’s a coincidence.) When it comes to cultural clashes over girls, beauty, blackness, and hair, I worry and pay attention. The latest controversy? The arrival of the new “So In Style” Barbie dolls, brought to you by Mattel. Created by an African-American mom and launched in stores last month, Grace, Kara, and Trichelle are black, and they’re the new BFFs in Barbie-land. Like their fair-skinned friends, they have long, silky hair that is either bone-straight or loosely wavy.
Don’t answer yet, there’s more. To keep Barbie’s new friends in style, Mattel offers a hair-straightening kit, with which girls can fantasize about a ritual of black womanhood most of us would gladly avoid if we could: regular, two-hour sessions at the hair salon to have our woolly manes straightened with harsh chemical straighteners. When that news hit the blogosphere, black mothers, scholars, and childhood experts everywhere got loud, many of them condemning Mattel for reinforcing white standards of beauty. Can’t Barbie rock braids or an Afro just once? they cried. The controversy erupted up just as “Good Hair,” comedian Chris Rock’s new documentary about America’s $9 billion black beauty industry, hits theaters this weekend.
For those of you unfamiliar with the complexities of black hair care, straightening is a process in which a stylist sections your hair and applies a cream that starts out cool but becomes unbearably hot. The cream contains sodium hydroxide, commonly found in drain and oven cleaners, and so corrosive that stylists have to use rubber gloves. When you absolutely can’t stand the heat anymore, the stylist rinses it out. Straight hair, and sometimes scabs, result. The longer the cream stays in, the more you burn, but the straighter your hair gets; walk into a black salon and the most common thing you’ll see is a woman gripping the armrests of a chair to manage her pain. In other words, hair-straightening is no ride in Ken’s convertible or trip to your dreamhouse closet. (I’m not sure if Mattel was giving an ironic wink to the sisters out there, but like the real version of hair-straightening, “So In Style” hair kits are also wildly overpriced, costing more than a pair of the actual dolls.)
On the one hand, it seems that Mattel has finally awoken to the Sasha-and-Malia demographic of middle- and upper-class black America: The girls of “So In Style” have wider noses, fuller lips, and a spectrum of realistic skin tones. But one look at these dolls suggests that even in our so-called post-racial world, there are some places America’s culture-makers still aren’t willing to go. Among them, apparently, is the hair black girls are born with.
But is it really fair to expect a toy conglomerate to be at the vanguard of ideas about race and beauty? For that, we would presumably look to real black women leaders. And when we look up to them, what we find is more straight hair. Actually, straight hair with blinding sheen and cascading, otherworldly flow. Beyonce, Tyra, and Oprah all have it. Ditto for black women leaders in politics and business.
These are not dolls; these are the living, breathing role models of black America. But they all understand that straight hair is the key to unlocking mainstream success. It’s the unspoken, elephant-in-the-room euphemism that remains as true today as it was during slavery: Straight hair is “good hair” because straight hair is white hair. And when blacks were slaves, straight hair could literally mean survival: Slaves who looked less African were treated better, often lifted from the fields to housework, which meant food, warmth, and maybe even education. Over time, straight hair became synonymous with nonthreatening hair. And that is the black Barbie formula Mattel has counted on going way back.
Mattel birthed the Barbie doll in 1959, a period when the notion of a black friend, real or pretend, was unthinkable for many white Americans. It was the same year a white journalist named John Howard Griffin took extreme measures to darken his skin and write about his travels through the deep South passing as a black man. The stories of the intense hatred he experienced were eventually published in the landmark book “Black Like Me.” It’s safe to say that when an entire race is struggling for recognition as human beings, nobody quibbles over whether a toy reflects their daughters’ self-image.
I recently learned, to my amazement, that the first-ever brown-skinned Barbie Mattel dared to put on shelves bears my name. “Colored Francie” made a short-lived appearance in 1967, her dark-ish complexion painted onto a doll with the same features as her white counterpart, including a glistening mane of straight hair. Other versions came later, including the defining “Christie” in 1968 and the nameless “Black Barbie” in 1980. In 1997, Mattel took a turn that left some blacks outraged and others speechless when it teamed up with Nabisco to launch “Oreo Fun Barbie.” The African-American version (also short-lived, it turns out) was strangely blue-black, which I’ll chalk up to an effort to coordinate with the cookie’s electric-blue packaging.
When “Black Barbie” arrived on the scene in 1980, I was 9, well within Mattel’s target audience. But I never owned her or any other Barbie. I think it had something to do with the dolls I saw at my friends’ houses. Whether the dolls were white or any other color, I got a creepy, not so-stylish feeling: Barbie wasn’t black like me, or any other black girl or woman I knew. The makers of Grace, Kara, and Trichelle say the new dolls give black girls a truer mirror of themselves. But when I look at them, all these years later, that same feeling comes over me.
Here’s what I remember about the black girls I knew: They had Mickey Mouse afro puffs tied in giant gumball barrettes or tight cornrow braids, or hair that was bound by nothing at all. For a little while, they had no idea what the word “nappy” meant, until one day they knew exactly what it meant. The black girls I knew marked their entry into womanhood reluctantly, with a first trip to the hair salon that often lived up to their worst fears. Caught in an in-between time when they were too old to sit for their mothers and too young to know what to do themselves, they climbed into swivel chairs and waited for the smell and then the feeling of chemicals that seared their scalps, leaving clumps of hair and Afro-puff innocence to be swept from the salon floor. As time goes on and products improve, many make peace with their unnatural states. Others find their way back to the beginning with locked, coiffed, or otherwise regal crowns. What I call Toni Morrison hair.
I haven’t heard of anything in the works for a Toni Morrison doll. But I’m not waiting for one, either. Because here’s the thing about black girls and hair: Dolls and straightening kits can scar, but so can people. And we do. It’s easy to fill the blogosphere with Barbie commentary, and much more difficult to confront the messages we hand down ourselves. When we complain about how tough our daughters’ hair is to comb, when we run our fingers through their cousins’ smooth tresses and smile, when we drag them to the swivel chair before they are ready, we tell them how important it is to try to be something besides who they are. Those messages predate Barbie. They were shaped by blacks’ need to survive in a white world, but how the messages began matters less than taking responsibility for them now.
I still straighten my hair, although I often wet it and let it dry naturally, making it weirdly wavy. For a long time, I believed that while straightening didn’t make my hair “good,” it made it better. Then one day, a boyfriend (and now husband) perfectly articulated something that was totally new. He described a stray coil of my hair as “helicoptering” across his computer keyboard. I thought: My hair helicopters. My hair helicopters. And it occurred to me that a word of poetry could rewrite painful history. Straight hair may make black women more acceptable in the workplace or the White House. But straight hair can’t helicopter.
Was I magically healed? Did I go off to my happily-ever-after dreamhouse, never to question my hair (or beauty) again? Well, no. That’s for fairy tales. But for several moments, then and afterward, I felt detangled. It was the kind of hair balm you can’t get from a bottle.
Francie Latour is an associate editor at Wellesley magazine and a former Globe reporter. 
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Simpsonized Playboy October 21, 2009
This Friday, a Simpsonized issue of Playboy magazine hit the newsstands in an effort grab a younger and hipper demographic. They got me…but not for the reasons that they were hoping for. This issue is a clear nod to the magazine’s heyday–in the 70’s–and a homage to one of the most iconic covers ever:
In October of 1971, Darine Stern was the first Black woman on the cover of the magazine. Editors of the magazine wanted to re-create the issue because “Marge’s sexy blue beehive immediately made us think of Darine Stern, whose beautiful, voluminous hairdo was front and center on the October 1971 cover.” I always knew that Marge’s hair was a little different 
Black Barbie Uses Relaxer October 20, 2009
Since I have two nieces I am excited about Mattel’s new line of Black Barbies, which are not simply browner versions of the original. This new line of dolls seems to capture the nuance of ‘Black’ with dolls of varying skin tones,”fuller lips, a wider nose and more pronounced cheekbones”. Unfortunately, this doll also reflects the details of our relationship with and to our hair.
While two of the dolls (Trichelle and Kianna) have curlier hair so that black girls can” see themselves within these dolls, and…know that black is beautiful”, the majority of the dolls have straight hair. I don’t really understand how Black barbies with long straight hair are supposed to help young black girls (and the larger Black community) with the issues that Chris Rock describes in his movie “Good Hair”. I would really like to see Kenneth Clark’s doll experiment done with these Black Barbies. I don’t think that the “So In Style” hairstyling kit, which would allow girls the option of straightening their doll’s hair, is going to help either.
Trichelle and Vanessa
Despite the outcry that these new Barbie’s have garnered, many are seeing this new line (Why is it called So in Style?) as a step in the right direction. These dolls are interested in math, science, volunteering and mentoring (each doll is paired with a younger sister) and do give young girls of color different options for their possible future selves. I just wish those options included an equal balance of processed and natural hairstyles. These dolls are successful at painting a portrait that is a much closer approximation of the varied Black community but we still have a long way to go. I would like a Barbie with locks.
Blackhairstorians what do you think?
Zahara and Black Women October 20, 2009
There has been a lot of buzz about the October 9th Newsweek article published by Allison Samuels. I am actually getting ready to grease my own hair and get ready to go to class but I had to add my voice to the discussion. From the comments posted to the article and the space devoted by many blogs to responding to the article, it is clear that many Black women feel that Jolie’s handling of Zahara’s hair is a sign of disregard for something that is so important to the Black community: hair. Contrary to what India.Arie believes, we are our hair. Our sense of self is inextricably linked with what we choose to do with our hair, how we talk about our hair and what we tell our daughters about their hair.
Some have said that Zahara may resent Jolie when she grows up, look back on her baby pictures with sadness and be made to feel the sting of her difference when she enters schools. But are we talking about Zahara or ourselves? Others have said that Zahara’s mom could take cues from the hair of Madonna’s newly adopted African daughter or Sasha and Malia because she is a little black girl being judged by “mainstream standards”. However, what are these mainstream standards? I don’t find many white Americans responding in anger to these blogs. Who is imposing and reifying standards of beauty for Black women? From the looks of the blogroll, it looks like we have so fully bought into “mainstream” standards of beauty that we cannot even begin to think of other ways that a little black girl might be–beautiful.
Allison Samuels finishes the article with this statement:
“But there will come a day when this beautiful little African girl will understand what it means to be an African-American woman in this society and realize unlike her younger sister, hers is not a wash-and-go world.”
I am not so sure anymore of where our definition of “what it means to be an African-American woman in this society” comes from. I do believe that there are many different ways to be black and beautiful and that we need to really think about what Zahara means for us and why her hair is making us so angry.
I have to go to class.
Tyra’s “Real” Hair September 3, 2009
This September 8th, Tyra Banks will be unveiling her “real” hair on her talk show. Her twitter posts show how she has been preparing for and thinking about her debut–the presentation of her natural hair to the world:
- reminder: i’m savin the real tresses for sept 8th on my talk show. i can’t wait for u to see it! free at last!!!7:22 PM Aug 29th from web
- tomorrow, i’m gonna be posting a sneak TEASE pic of my real hair on TWITTER!!! TyTy7:04 PM Aug 24th from web
- http://twitpic.com/f9mqb – Here’s me rockin my REAL hair, had 2 blur it so its still a surprise on Sept 8! Who else is sportin their rea …
I’m excited for Tyra–I really am– but her decision making process, as reflected on twitter is a testimony to the politics surrounding highly-textured black hair. The words that she uses in the first post from Aug 29th are most revealing. She says that she is “free at last!!!” However, while she is free, she is also bound by conventional standards of beauty, which will definitely factor into how audience members (regardless of skin color or hair texture) and viewers at home react and respond to her hair. When she does finally post a pic of her natural tresses on twitter, it is a blurred picture. While it is probably a simple picture from her phone that is doctored with some app on her computer, this picture speaks volumes about the relationship, or lack their of, that the world has with Black hair and the relationship that many Black women have to their own hair. Our hair is often a grey and blurry area for many of us. How should we feel about it? Is it just hair? What is the big deal? Are we more beautiful if our hair is straight? Would we offend our co-workers less if we adhered to “corpororate” styles? Why doesn’t our hair fit into the ‘norm’ for corporate styles? In blurring her hair, Tyra unknowingly makes a powerful statement about the important role that our hair plays in our identity and how people perceive us. Many of us, with chemicals, have also been blurring and softening the curly tendrils on our head, only giving people sneak peaks when we feel comfortable. I have to disagree with India Arie. We are our hair and always will be.
