I enjoyed the movie, but this would be my main critique as well. After showcasing the world of weaves and perms, he could have given at least 5 minutes of screentime to natural hair. Would have done a lot to counteract the myth that to be beautiful a black woman has to conform to the straight-haired aesthestic. There are options, in other words.
Well, sure, why the hell not. I don’t trust big money Hollywood folks to not be exploitive.
I’m white, and have decidedly stereotypically white, stick straight hair. Yesterday, a black woman was gushing over my hair, saying how she was trying to get a similar style, but had to wait until some of the damage in her hair grew out.
So while it may not have happened to you, it does happen.
I’m wondering about something Nzinga - if I recall you’re a man. Do you have daughters? Because if you aren’t that exposed to “women’s talk” I could see where this seems unlikely to you. On the other hand, it doesn’t strike me as that outrageous.
Another alternative is that the actual conversation involving the young Miss Rock, her friend, and others might have been longer and more convoluted and Chris Rock was distilling it into a quick soundbite because he know a longer tale would never get screen time.
Well…maybe vicious is the wrong word. They just come off as kind of obnoxious and annoying. Even when I agree with them I find myself kind of cringing because they’re just so self righteous.
I think the thing here is the little nuances and details that go on in black life that people can’t really grasp. Once in a while, someone will capture it and it will be amazing to watch on screen. I give film maker John Singleton props for this.
It is not that black women don’t have issues with hair (although, I can’t stress this enough, that is changing a great deal, and natural hair is very much adored in my culture these days). It is the little details that one leaves out of these films that make me give them the skeptical side-eye.
If a film maker is telling certain white audiences what they think those certain audiences want to hear, even if it isn’t true; that isn’t good. I think certain blacks who had insight to the real black culture, then crossed over to a mainly white Hollywood culture are in an easy position to be exploitive if they wanted to be.
See, it is hard to explain what ‘good hair’ is to white folks, because certain white folks may want to believe that we believe good hair = white hair.
I can’t speak for everyone. I can only speak in generalities of my own experience, so I’m not even going to bother with responses to someone posting, “I had a black woman tell me she covets my straight white hair!”
As a black kid, we weren’t even allowed to touch white people’s hair. (by not allowed, I mean certain family members and older kids and such would admonish us). We were told they had bugs and lice. The nurse would walk through the class and pick in their hair and give them special shampoos and just give our own neat cornrows a cursory glance.
We were taught that the smelled like dogs, wet dogs at that. We were taught a lot of mean and racist things about white people hair, but as a rule we were not taught that white hair = good hair.
Now, mixed hair was a different story. That was considered good hair. Lots of folks that had a white mom would have that long wavy hair. Many blacks that weren’t mixed also had that wavy type hair. They would say, “Yeah, you know we got Indian in our family”.
By the time a girl is old enough for weave, she gets the kind of weave that looks like relaxed black hair…it doesn’t look like white people hair. Unless you count Hollywood. Which I don’t. I count what I see in the streets, in the ghetto, in my family, in the schools, whatever.
Now, I am not speaking for all black people. I am trying to offer a peek into my own experience, after an entire lifetime completely emmersed in black culture.
Try to put yourself in my shoes for a moment. I have worn my hair natural for over a decade now. My daughter has known nothing but the kinkiest of hair her entire life. We go through life being told by our own people how beautiful our hair is. Then we sit down to watch Chris Rock being interviewed, and we are hearing things that sound…foreign to our experience. I feel compelled to speak my truth. That’s all. I can’t help it. I feel compelled.
Wow, that’s kind of an eye-opener.
Glory, let me sterrrresssss! This was my own experience in the black community, and not something I am speaking for all blacks on. Also, it is not something I am proud to remember.
You don’t have to respond to my post, I was only pointing out that something you find so completely unbelievable does sometimes happen. I was not trying to say that it is a universal truth.
Is the fact Rock is in California a factor? I mean, there are some very distorted ideas of “beautiful” out there on the west coast.
I’m not speaking of the black experience, I’m speaking as a white women who sees a “Hollywood ideal” for women of my race to be… bizarre. Lips plumped beyond what most black women have (what wrong with thin white people lips if you’re white?), unhealthy thinness combined with ludicrous breast augmentation, restructuring of faces so everyone has the same nose, same cheeks, same chin…
I’m not contradicting you here, just observing that if Hollywood has a standard of lips for white women that essentially says “you need lips like black people” it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a meme that said black women should have “white hair”. I’m not saying there is, just that it wouldn’t surprise me. Given that there seem to be some black celebrities with skin that gets lighter every year (and I’m not talking just Michael Jackson) and white celebrities that seem intent on making their skins as dark as possible I often wonder if the whole point of the Hollywood beauty idea is to make everyone as uncomfortable as possible with their bodies.
It’s not personal. I’m just exhausted of qualifying everything. It seems common sense that there exists some weirdo grown woman that would say something so bizarre to you (don’t you find that baffling? That she thinks she can somehow grow hair that is the same as white people hair? She sounds not-all-there).
Weirdos can say strange stuff, but it is has nothing to do with what I’m trying to say here. So it seemed pointless to even respond. Sorry if I sounded rude or something.
Well, maybe she meant that she wanted to get her hair styled or get a weave that looked like badbadrubberpiggy’s hair?
While that’s an interesting set of experiences, it is far from universal. And while you’re willing to make the disclaimer that you don’t speak for everyone, I don’t get the feeling that you actually believe it.
You did, and I appreciate the apology.
She didn’t sound weird, and I doubt she thought it could grow like that on it’s own, she was talking about processing it, which may not have been clear in my post. Of course it would be bizarre if she thought she could really grow it that way.
But I’d rather drop this at this point anyway, it was only an example, and not meant to be a big part of the discussion. I haven’t even seen the movie at this point, so I’m not sure if it even is the same thing as what Chris Rock said happened to his daughter.
I hear you. But that is all Hollywood. It isn’t real. Beyonce may wear bone straight platinum blonde hair, but if a girl comes to school with that in her head, she is made fun of. Seriously. I’m not kidding. A black girl with white people grade hair, platinum blonde, down to her waist. No. That is crazy.
Yeah, I thought of that, but no one has to wait for their damaged hair to grow out to get a weave. So I decided the lady was just loony.
Well, I’ve seen some seriously eff’d up people in my time, including an Asian girl who was quite explicit that she was undergoing surgery because she wanted to BE white. Not just LOOK white, BE white. But I also agree with you that’s weird, bizarre, and NOT typical of any group.
Some stuff is so obviously fake - like magenta or blue hair on anyone - that it’s clearly a matter of wanting to do something very different for whatever reason. I remember a time when a lot of black women around me started wearing “blond” weaves or bleaching their hair, but much of that was changing the color and not the texture or the braids or whatever. It was clearly black hair of a different color. But I think I’ve exhausted my contribution on this until I actually see the movie.
Whew! Good thing it doesn’t matter if you get feelings about what I believe!
You need a certain amount of healthy hair to anchor a weave. If the hair is damaged all the way down to the roots, and damaged severely enough, then removing a weave may be the last straw and she might, indeed, have to wait until sufficient health hair grows out for another weave to be done.
I remember during the punk hair craze people screwing with the hair to the point it entirely fell out. It is possible to mess your hair up that bad.
No, it doesn’t.
But the supposed conversation that Chris Rock says he overheard is much closer to my experiences than what you wrote. FWIW, while we’re about the same age, I grew up and have lived on the other side of the country. Things are obviously different here.