Good hair, bad hair?

Yesterday, I was driving with one of my friends who goes to school in Santa Cruz. We were talking about various people and one particular person came up. Apparently this guy used to wear locks while he was in college. My response was “I hate it when white people get dreadlocks”. My friend was a little taken aback because this had nothing to do with our previous conversation. But being a good listener, she asked me why. I told her that I have never seen a nonBlack person with nice looking dreadlocks. Usually people of other ethnicities (especially Whites) have a tendency to let their hair go wild, stop washing it and it ends up looking nasty, dirty, and ugly. After a short pause I decided to list some other things I hate when discussing issues about hair with white people. “I hate when white people say their hair is nappy, I also hate when white people say they have an afro.

I don’t feel like I can really do this issue justice because I can’t write all my thoughts about it. But I do get bothered when people say their hair is nappy, and this means uncombed and unkempt. It just seems so degrading to me to use a word that is a description of the texture of black people’s hair as a synonym for nasty and disgusting. I get really passionate about this issue in discussion because I feel that the whole issue of hair is intimately connected to racial identity and pride. Why do many black women talk about “good hair, bad hair”? To have “good hair” your hair should be less kinky and closer to the hair normally associated with white people. Having “bad hair” is a reference to those people who tend to be darker skinned and have coarser, and more kinky hair. These concepts are all intertwined in my mind so I take it as the utmost insult when people use a word that is supposed to characterize the nature of my hair as an insulting description of a person of another race. To me it seems like a double insult. And it is really hard for me not to go off on the unsuspecting individual who uses this word in my presence.

For me, part of taking pride in my racial identity was to start wearing my hair natural. I don’t think I have anything wrong with white people or their hair, but I refuse to change the way God made my hair so I can look like something I’m not. These twisted standards of beauty are a sick byproduct of a very superficial and minority driven media in the western world.