Just Because You Have A Silk Press Doesn't Mean You Hate Your Hair Or Blackness
Natural hair warriors, don't jump me.
When did loving straight hair or a bouncy roller set equate to not loving your Blackness?
We’ve been going hard on the natural haircare front for quite sometime, and I love to see the progress we’ve made with hair expression + acceptance with the C.R.O.W.N Act. (Even though Black hair needs no tolerance.) But somewhere along the lines, the tides shifted to everyone frowning upon the girlies who don’t wish to convert over to the natural side.
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I came across this TikTok from content creator (@charisma) who eloquently put my thoughts together that I hadn’t been able to quite communicate. “Don’t let one of them [natural hair warriors] see you with straight hair,” she says in the clip. “They gon’ think you Anti-Black, Anti-Fro, you hate your Blackness.” And honestly, these sentiments are quite true.
Before the real boom of natural hair, when I was in undergrad at my HBCU, wering your hair in its natural state wasn’t the trend as it is today. When it came to “Chapel Wednesdays” and formal programs in campus, I’d be in dorm rooms slaying the girls hair down with a quick roller set, quick weave or traditional sew-in install. Even during probate szn for the sororities, the girls who had gone underground would emerge with a fresh body wrap (silk press) or sew-in for the occasion. Sure, some of this could have been rooted in respectability politics, but most of the styles were in an engrained continuation of the “Black Ivy” style that many of my classmates adopted from their parents being in upper class service organizations such "Jack N Jill + The Boule.
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The overall idea of the “Black Ivy” was adopted during the Civil Rights Era to dispel the notion that Blacks were lesser than our white counterparts. For those Blacks that modeled themselves in the manner, the terms “white acting” and “Anti-Black” were formed — but how does this relate to hair? Spike Lee’s School Daze moment touched on the battle of chemically-treated + naturally expressed hair in the scene “Good And Bad Hair” with the faceoff of the “Jiggaboos” and the “Wannabe’s.” This is a fight that has been happening since the dawn of our ancestors during slavery with the racial intermixing.
But in the day of our Lord + Savior in 2024, why is this still a point of discussion? haven’t we learned that ALL hair is good hair and just because you may prefer silky strands over a twist-out, that doesn’t mean that you’re any more or any less Black??
Blackness supersedes the texture of your hair. So put the hot combs and spray bottles down, sistercats. There is no battle or war to win on this. I promise you, we’ve got bigger fish to fry — like why yt people still can’t do our hair, no matter the texture!
Think on that.