[QUOTE=Antonia Opiah:]
“When it comes to hair — black hair is not just hair in America. There’s so much history that we carry on our heads, so to speak. For the longest time we’ve been told that our hair isn’t acceptable in its natural state, so we’re always encouraged to straighten it or wear weaves.”
[/QUOTE]
FU
I used to wear my hair in a big fro, all picked out perfectly, and when someone touched it, I was PISSED. Nowadays, I wear my hair in a smaller fro…in other words, when I wear my hair out, I don’t bother to pick it out big…I prefer it to shrink up to its full kink potential, all dense and thick. If someone touches it now, it doesn’t really ‘mess it up’. It just sproings back down into its kink. Most times, I have it pinned up into some kind of swoop or poof or whatever, so if someone touches it, no big deal.
Every other black girl in NYC has natural hair nowadays. It is no longer the perfect fros of the 70s, it is a more…wild style? I can’t explain it. It is just more likely that the black girls I know nowadays are totally cool with folks touching their hair. Also, it is pretty common for black girls to shave half or all of their heads, which really begs for someone to touch it, and they mostly seem cool with that.
I’m so glad a white man chirped in to give his useless-as-fuck opinion.
Anyway, in answer to the OP, this does happen with some regularity and is pretty annoying. Picture if it were the other way around. Let’s say that most of the land had some measure of kinky hair, and you were in the minority that many people could merrily go their entire lives without ever knowing personally. So your straight hair is an anomaly to most, with familiarity being solely via passersby or television, but to you, it’s just your hair and the hair of everyone in your family. How fucking annoying is it for people to keep wanting to touch you because you don’t look like them?
I get that it’s different, but is it so hard to understand that people don’t want to be poked at because their appearance isn’t like everyone else’s, as if that therefore warrants random strangers to ask if it’s okay to touch them? “Oh, but if they ask then what’s the problem?” Uh, yeah, I don’t want to be asked if it’s okay to touch me just because I don’t look like you and you’re curious. I’m kind of a person and sort of like it when I’m treated like one.
And I don’t think the people who do this mean any harm. I think they see something different and are curious. Doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world, no, but betrays a complete inability to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. No one wants to be queried about their hair over and over again just because it doesn’t look like yours. It’s my hair. I was born with it. I’m terribly sorry that I don’t look like you, but there’s nothing I can do about it and would like to go on about my day that way you do. Thanks.
So okay, there’s touching your hair, and there’s touching your hair. Are you talking about girls with certain hairstyles whose hair people want to touch, or are you talking regular ass girls (um, not to say girls with more creative hair styles aren’t regular, but you know what I mean) being asked if their hair can be touched because they’re black and people are curious about their hair texture?
My previous message was a mistake. This is correct.
[QUOTE=Antonia Opiah:]
“When it comes to hair — black hair is not just hair in America. There’s so much history that we carry on our heads, so to speak. For the longest time we’ve been told that our hair isn’t acceptable in its natural state, so we’re always encouraged to straighten it or wear weaves.”
[/QUOTE]
My friend, Czarcasm, asked me to respond to this post. I am beginning to think he is racist.
I am black & ALL MY LIFE I have had men, women, kids of all races [mostly Caucasian] want to touch my hair. When I was a kid, my mom pressed my hair. In 5th grade, I wanted an afro [OMG!, why?] In 8th grade, my afro flopped & I started wearing ponies that turned into pom-poms. In high school, I went back to the afro the size of putting your arms in a circle over your head. Then I put in a part & patted it until it was round with the part missing. After I would wear braids, ponies/poms, twists, corn rows, french braids, straighten my hair, etc, etc, etc. I could do almost anything & people would ask to touch my hair.
I never ever EVER wanted fake hair, a weave, or hair added to mine EVER. EWwwwwwww! How ever I wore my hair someone wanted to touch it besides guys during sex.
To be continued…
I’m getting the impression from this thread that a lot of the problem isn’t having your hair touched by strangers per se, it’s being touched at all by strangers.
I’m a white girl who hates having people mess with her hair. Hello, I did not spend all that time styling it so you can paw me and mess it up!
So why anyone would be so freaking rude, I just cannot even.
I am sorry about this post. I was trying to preview what the quotes looked like. it required at least 2 letters in response to preview. I accidentally hit post instead of preview. I apologize for the mess up. I did not mean to post “FU”
I reported it to the mods for you, and one of them should be along fairly shortly to edit/delete that post. If you have future gaffes (I’d suggest using some other string of letters for testing, just in case) you can report yourself by clicking the red triangle in the upper right corner.
I’m white, and people (women and kids) ask to touch my hair all the time. Shit, I’ll let little kids braid my hair if the ask nicely, they usually do. What’s the big deal? Women like hair.
I guess there is a difference between strangers just walking up and asking/touching, which doesn’t happen to me, and people I’m friendly with asking politely in conversation, which does. The former would be annoying, although personally I’m so oblivious I’d probably just let them.
I can’t imagine touching a stranger, or even asking to do so.
I’m white. My hair is a medium brown and kind of wavy. In other words, completely unexceptional in the U.S. However, during the couple of years I spent in Asia, it got touched occasionally by strangers. I really didn’t mind that, but I was also very conscious of being the foreigner. I’m sure it would be a completely different story on my home turf. What did get me was the interest that a few very small children had in my nose. I’d never considered my nose to be particularly big before, but a couple of toddlers with curious expressions reaching out to grab hold will give you a complex pretty quickly!
More on topic - I’m a fairly reserved person. I can’t even imagine touching someone’s hair for the express purpose of seeing what it feels like.
I’m white and spent much of my childhood in Africa. Local kids would semi-regularly want to touch my hair. Mostly it wasn’t schoolmates, who were used to seeing various types of hair in an international school; it was neighbour kids who didn’t see a lot of white people. Like you’re describing, my straight hair was an anomaly, so they wanted to check it out.
It didn’t bother me because we were all kids, who have different boundaries, and because I was in fact an outsider (I’m not African), so it didn’t piss me off to be seen as one. But if I’d been an adult, and other adults - total strangers - had been figuring it was OK to touch me, and if I’d been in my own country and they’d been treating me as an anomaly…that would have been a lot less OK.
The only person whose hair I’ve ever found irresistible was a (white) friend of mine who had wonderful glossy corkscrew curls. Sometimes if we begged she used to let us boing them.
From her bedroom she yells out “I accidentally posted something. How do I delete it?”, and I yell back “You can’t!”
“Ohmygod!!”
This does remind me, when I was a volunteer English teacher in rural Mexico a long-ass time ago, the girls (say between age 8 and 16) really became interested in my hair. They spent the better part of a day playing with it, braiding it and taking pictures.
I’m sure being blonde/American had something to do with it, but knowing that girls just liked to play with hair in general, I thought it was rather endearing.
If everybody I ever encountered in Mexico wanted to touch my hair, though, including adults, that would get old pretty quickly.
Thanks for sharing your input guys. This is apparently a lot more common than I ever realized.
I have to admit now I’m wondering if natural black hair is at all like my husband’s hair. He’s of Italian descent but he has a fro - very dark, curly hair that grows out, not down, and he can stick pencils in there without them falling out (his record is 40.) I guess I always assumed that black hair comes in all different textures - is it all basically the same?
You’re asking whether or not all black people’s hair has the same texture? Am I misunderstanding?
I don’t really understand the physics of afros very well, is what I’m saying.
Look, there’s a lot many white people don’t understand about black hair. I remember in one of my classes having this protracted discussion with my black colleagues about how getting rained on can ruin their hairstyle, not in the typical (white) sense of just having wet, limp hair, but in the sense that they would have to go back home and spend hours to fix it, that it could literally ruin their day. I didn’t even know that was an issue, and I still don’t know how common something like that is among African Americans.
My husband’s hair doesn’t even get wet. I guess it gets a little damp but water has very little impact on it at all.
I love that hairstyle on every girl I’ve ever seen it on. There is a girl here at work that has this beautiful giant afro and I always want to tell her how great it is but I bet she’s sick of hearing people talk about it all the time.
My husband has silver corkscrews, and lets me boing them at will. 
Please say, “and then he goes outside like that.”
This was a high school experiment. And yeah, he walked around school the whole day like that. He says the high school girls were split 50/50 on whether he should keep his fro, but all the guys thought he should keep it.
Black hair is quite variable…even on the same head. Some of my hair grows out kinky, some of it curly, and some of it wavy. Which is one reason I keep it so short. The complexities of it make finding the right hair style and products quite difficult.
Almost all natural black hair is going to be some degree of curly. I know some black folks who have naturally wavy hair, but none who have straight hair. Features like color and thickness also vary from person to person.
Some black women go their whole lives without really knowing what their natural hair texture is like. They just assume that it will be “nappy”, and they go in for regular touch-ups at the salon to keep this “condition” at bay. But nappy isn’t everyone’s default…no more than straight hair is the default for white people. Especially given the genetic mix found in the US.