I don’t have a dog in the argument between you two, but I can answer this. Hair elastics destroy any kind of hair, but they are particularly damaging to already sensitive hair. It rips the hair shaft, making it weaker and more prone to breaking.
All this finger pointing about how Zahara doesn’t measure up to certain standards of appearance and yet in this picture Pax isn’t wearing pants? Why doesn’t anyone pick on that?
Jeez. kids will be kids and this is what kids look like. They are allowed to have messy hair, to not wear pants, to have dirt or stains on their clothes, to be picking their noses or scratching their butts in pictures. Granted, if you knew the family well enough to know that there was abuse or neglect, then those things might be a sign, but there is no evidence of that here. Anyone can take isolated pictures of kids looking messy and unkempt - that’s what kids do with much of their time. It isn’t fair to judge their appearance by the standards that we might want to uphold as adults.
I’m not an expert, but I’m practicing what we are learning in school. 
Her hair doesn’t look particularly dry to me. It is thick, with a very strongly defined curl pattern. It looks like it’s fairly strong, as far as African hair goes. I see some frayed/weak spots around the temple, though. You see that sometimes from tight hair styles/braids. Because it has such a strong curl pattern, it could be hard to get under control. It would have to be pulled tight if you tried to braid it or otherwise put it up, which can cause headaches and other discomforts, especially in the first few days.
I don’t imagine that washing it would be too terribly bad a problem. It just looks to me that she has a very tight and strong curl pattern, which is what’s making it look unruly. I don’t know that dryness is really the problem.
Again, I am not an expert, and you can’t be certain without getting your hands in it sometimes, so I’m willing to allow for the possibility that I am way off here.
My daughter was born with a head full of straight hair, I’ve never seen a newborn with so much hair in my life. She never shed one, instead they started growing a much lighter color, and fast they grew. I decided to keep her hair short, I had no business playing hairdresser to a little baby and gave her a crew cut (see the picture in my profile), I kept doing it until she was 1.5 yo, by then pigtails was a manageable proposition (still a waste of time, they lasted minutes). People around me also treated me like I had done something terrible and irreversible. I am sure my daughter was happy she didn’t have hair covering her face, or having mommy wrestle her down to tie her hair up.
I wash my hair, put on some Suave smoothing conditioner and rinse, and then every night for three weeks I’ll sleep with a silk scarf wrapped around my 'do before I do it all over again. Granted, I have a short curly cut. So black hair doesn’t have to be a headache to deal with, though my hair isn’t as kinky as it could be.
I have sported a big fro that wasn’t moisterized. I didn’t mind it, because it was the look I was going for, but I’m sure someone somewhere thought I looked like a hotmess. And truth be told, it was wild and crazy-looking. I couldn’t get away with it now, as a career woman and all.
The longer black hair is, the more work you have to do to keep it healthy. That’s why I chopped mine off. I was tired of gunking up my hair with product, and blow drying it to keep it managable. I did away with relaxers when I escaped my mother’s clutches; no way I’m going back. Creamy crack is wack, and my nape still bears the nasty scars.
The blogger is just being silly. I think Zahara’s hair is cool for a four-year-old, and I don’t see any harm in straying from the traditional pigtail, afro-puff, or cornrow look that most little black girls wear. I wish my mother had let my hair be free and wild at that age. My coolest kid pictures were shots taken when my hair wasn’t “done”.
A girl I worked with (black) had her hair really short, and while sometimes she’d just wear it like that, most of the time she’d just wear different wigs (she was studying to be a hairdresser). Most of them were pretty damned cool. I’ve sometimes considered doing that – even with my Irish-German hair. (Like I said, I HATE my hair).
I’m finding this thread interesting, as I’m learning a lot about black hair care.
Topic: Another thing that annoyed me about the article was Zahara being all depressed when looking back at her childhood photos. WTF?
(BTW, for the first year of my life, until it grew long enough to lie flat, my hair stuck straight up. My Craig called it my “electrical socket” hair. My grandmother used to put vasoline in it to make it lie flat and oh shit, did that piss off my mother!)
I am secretly completely jealous of black women’s hair. It may be because I’m also secretly in love with this lady.
Thank you for posting though, I am loving this thread for the technical talk on hair care. I had absolutely no idea how black hair was cared for. I also would never have guessed someone would look at the afros above and guess they were uncared for. I know little enough about it that I probably wouldn’t have guessed the first bad example you put up wasn’t a deliberate choice, either. I suppose I would have guessed it was some kind of superdread action.
I knew this, really only because of these guys. It takes a full day to dry them, and if you don’t do it thoroughly they rot (no es bueno).
What happens if you don’t use modern detergent-type shampoo, and you put a little coconut or olive oil in it once in a while?
In the OP link “Life is Good,” the little blonde haired girl’s hair is unkempt. I hope the author noted that as well.
Gee whiz, a four year old child goes out in public not looking like a black Jon Benet Ramsey during the semifinals of the Miss KiddyPorn Pageant, and bloggers go ballistic.
The crap people imagine they have a right to an opinion on…
Regards,
Shodan
When I worked at a pet store in Chicago in the 80s and 90s, the owner’s daughter (white) fostered a kid (black). A course she falls in love with the kid and ends up adopting him. Meanwhile, a couple of my coworkers are black guys, who grumble in the background that Danielle (I’ll call her Danielle because that was her name) don’t know shit about treating black hair or skin. Donzie kept using the word “ashy” in his rants. Danielle would walk through the store with her kid on a hip and Donzie would make eye contact with Lance, and go grumble mumble ashy grumble. Then they’d both shake their heads sadly.
Still. Newsweek? WTF?
ETA: I relate the above because it happened, not because I have any criticism of Angelina Jolie. Well, not on this account at any rate. She clearly has people in her life who can educate her on the specific issues involved, and the kid is clearly well loved and well cared for. The kid’s hair is obviously within the bounds of healthy and clean, and the “issues” that so upset the blogger are clearly issues of style, not race.
And also note that in the story I relate above, it was clear to all and sundry that the subtext of Lance and Donzie’s disdain was that the boss’s white daughter walking around with a black kid on her hip was just too strong a metaphor for their having worked for her white mother for years with no hope of advancement in the business. So their grumblings were not purely hair related, truth be told.
The solution is obvious.
Those guys should have gotten jheri curls; they’d have been promoted pronto.
Que stupido (the guys, that is)!
So Angelina’s girls are given crap because one of them doesn’t straighten their hair and the other wants it cut short like a boy’s would be but I see at least one little kid with a mullet or rat tail or other hair disaster every day and no one says anything to those parents?
What the hell were you searching for to dig up this nine-month-old thread? Did you just feel the need for a hair rant?
My wild guess is this is related to the whole “zOMG, Shiloh is a tomboy!” thing.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, which makes me gleeful.
It was linked in another thread and I totally didn’t realize it was an old thread. Sorry about that!
I have no problem with zombie threads. I just wanted to know how you dug this one up.
That would be me. I linked it in the other thread.
Hi, Shot what’s happening?
I just saw a “Tyra” show on this (hey! My TiVo suggestions recorded it, I don’t always watch that day-time talk show nonsense :D). I was completely astonished that the black women seemed to feel they were being judged by their hair and so many had such a love/hate relationship with their hair.
Where did they get the idea that they had to have (in the words of the article) silky smooth and straight hair? WE don’t think their hair is bad! And where did they get the idea that we white girls have any friendlier relationship with OUR hair? Those with naturally curly hair straighten, hot-comb and so on and so forth. Girls with straight hair hate their hair and constantly perm it. Girls who are blonde dye their hair more blonde, or darken it, dark-haired girls get highlights or go all the way blonde.
I was a teen in the 70s, and black girls of that era tended to wear their hair natural, in either afros, or adorable little pony afros (not sure what they’re really called). OOooooo I wanted pony-tail afros SO badly! None of my peer group ever acted or stated anything about it not being “white enough” or whatever. In fact, quite a few white folks got afro perms.
This is not a sarcastic question, do that many black women REALLY think they have to conform to some notion of “whiteness” when it comes to their hair? If so, articles like the one in the OP are NOT helping. sheesh.
I think white dopers are being much too snide and insensitively dismissive of the social complexities and interpersonal significance of hair care for black women as it relates to their children, especially their daughters.
When you invest a huge amount of time, money and devotion to making sure something is done “right” for your kids, you are naturally going to take umbrage at seeing someone blissfully ignore all the rigor and expectations of that tradition. The “Buckwheat” look might be no big deal to whites, but a black woman with a child who looked like this would be judged an incompetent mother at best, and possibly guilty of borderline child abuse at worst by other black parents
The right and wrong of the 4 year olds hairstyle is sort of beside the point. Seeing a little 4 year old black girl with unkempt hair rankles a very deep nerve in black women and brings out the hair care fundamentalist in them.
In the end this dismissive attitude by white dopers is mostly about white female privilege. Black women have never had the social and cultural luxury of having gleefully sloppy, unkempt young children without being judged very harshly for it on every level conceivable by white (and black) society.
Before ranting about black hair care fundies, white dopers should take a moment and try to understand where the deep feelings of black women are coming from on this issue. Not everyone gets to live in the world of white privilege where children can be “natural” and run free through safe spaces and manicured neighborhoods. For those on the outside of that window looking in, who have to make sure their children meet appearance standards or be subject to vile epithets and assumptions, to mock them for being concerned about appearances is a pretty nasty and ignorant thing to do.