What’s hateful about this stuff? What’s it used for? Is it perhaps used for straightening curly hair, and hence using it is considered trying to be white?
Google came up with several pressing oil hair products sold right now, the most popular appearing to be “Dax”, which is described to be for “premium styling” with a hot comb. I suppose that’s a hot comb in the Jim Crow Museum display.
There’s no entry in Wikipedia for “pressing oil”, unless it’s under a different name and there’s redirect set up.
Yes, both of those products were used to try to eliminate “nappy” (or is it knappy?) hair - the tightly curled hair that many black people have. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call them hateful, but then again I was never a small black child getting my hair yanked out with inappropriate brushes and slathered in lard to try and make me look more like a white child.
ETA: also notice how dark the skin of the smiling models isn’t. This was certainly within the same time period as the paper bag test.
Hair straightening products (which pressing oil would fall under) are not necessarily hateful. But back in the day, their marketing often fed people’s hatred of natural hair textures (e.g., “nappy”). Just looking at the labels of those products, I’d say they are the anti-thesis of “black and proud”.
Someone should tell that to Al Sharpton. Maybe he’s got recessive genes for straight hair or something, but it sure as hell looks to me like he uses some kind of straightening product.
Oh my god! That picture of the straightening comb brought back a flood of memories from my youth! I remember my oldest sister, running it through her long, thick hair. It made the kitchen stink terribly, and she often ended up with burns on her ears and neck.
It was definitely an act of self hatred in her case. She hated having hair that was kinky. Her hair was nowhere near as kinky as mine to begin with, but she wanted it bone strait.
These days, I think most black women and girls straiten their hair with chemicals. Also, I notice that it doesn’t actually seem to be the desire to have ‘white hair’ that drives the girls these days. As a matter of fact, the same girls that straighten their hair with chemicals are the ones that put weave into the hair of their white friends so that they can have hair like their’s.
The point of straigtening hair is to get it to a state which is unique to black people…it will not turn out like ‘white’ hair at all.
This essay indicates that the glass ashtray with the Coon Chicken Inn logo did not actually come from one of the restaurant, but if it was sold as such, it’s still racist memorabilia. I wouldn’t call any of the items fake without knowing how they’re being presented.
Well…how does your hair behave if you just “leave it alone”. Probably not very well. You have to groom it.
In my opinion, black people got lucky in that their hair is extremely versatile, if one is interested in different ways to groom.
We can get cornrolls. Anyone can, really, but the best cornrolls are on natural black hair. In my opinion. The same can be said for dreadlocks, “zulu knots”, afros, ‘press and curls’, twists, finger waves, just all kinds of styles.
If a black woman wants her hair to look like white people’s hair, she can get herself a lace front wig. The black women I know never do that though. That is something I only see from mainstream media, (Beyonce, Tyra Banks, etc.)
The black women I know that straighten their hair, are going for a look that can only be achieved when black, natural hair is relaxed. This as opposed tothis.
There are so many choices a woman can choose. Why would it strike anyone odd that relaxing our hair is one of the ways that we would express our unique beauty? I personally wouldn’t relax my hair, but I know for a fact that the black women I know that don’t “leave their hair alone” do indeed enjoy the unique beauty of their own relaxed hair.
I don’t doubt that someone made that sign a long time ago - maybe as a joke, maybe as a genuinely racist fixture for their own clubhouse, lodge, etc - but I don’t think those signs were ever publicly posted on parks, pools, etc. I’m under the impression that this is an urban legend, and it makes me cringe every time someone brings it (or the “no Irish, no dogs” sign) up in class discussions, which is a lot.
Seems to me women (and less so men) have spent a lot of time trying to get their hair to do something different. How many millions have been spent on hair-curling and hair-straightening stuff I don’t know, but it’s a lot (and sometimes by the same groups – for every Asian woman I’ve known who complained her hair was too straight and she wished it would curl, there’s another going to pay for Japanese hair ironing).
People of all stripes used to put a lot of gunk in their hair. E. Murphy’s “Coming To America” made fun of ca. 1980s Jheri Curl gunk (mind you, designed to do the opposite of straightening) with the sight-gag about the family getting up from the couch and leaving huge grease stains on the headrest, but if you’d go back 100 years you’d see refined young white ladies stitching anti-macassars to protect upholstery against the bear grease or whatever it was the fops of the day used to cement their coifs in place.
I saw video of Joe Louis the other night, styled in what I remember Malcolm X referred to as a “conk” (sort of the curled forelock look). MX (he would) decried this look as a legacy of racism. But maybe guys like Louis just thought it looked kind of cool to have an extra option that didn’t come with his natural hair texture (and God knows thousands of stupid white kids are sporting louse-infested dreads at any given moment in Bennington or Madison).
Actually, we call them ‘corn braids’. I swear, I never even heard of cornrolls, or rows, or whatever, until I think I started hearing it on t.v. or whatever.
In other words…I think you may be right and I am wrong.
Corn braids will work on your hair. You just need a very skilled braider, and you have to be crazy, too, because it will be painful for the braider to really get it looking neat and tight unless she pulls really tightly. Also, if your hair is fine like Caucasian hair, which is what I think you are saying, it will only last like a day before it starts to become all wispy and loose.
I always heard “rows” not “rolls” from classmates, etc. (though I’ve since heard both, so neither variant is wacky). Evocative, so I read it, of the alternating braid/scalp pattern resembling a plowed field’s furrows/mounds, and consistent with the agrarian background of most U.S. blacks.
Sure, but I think there’s a subtle (or not so subtle) difference: when I (Caucasian female living in America) try to curl my hair, or get braids (cornrows, whatever) put in when I’m on vacation in Mexico, I’m not trying to look more black. I’m not trying to look like the people that oppress me, that make me sit in the back of the bus, that say I can’t drink from the same drinking fountains their children do because I’m dirty and disgusting. That’s gotta do somethin’ to the psyche, doesn’t it?
I think today perms for black women and braids and weaves and whatnot are different, sociopolitically, because they’re coming from a position of reclaiming power and a position of, if not parity, at least greater strength and a desire to identify with other black women. It’s no longer about getting “white hair”, but, as **Nzinga **said, about exploring the vast options open to black hair. I’ve seen some amazing things I wish I could pull off - a woman at my nail salon last week had two shades of brown in 3/4 inch, probably 7 or 9 strand ribbon braids which were then woven like a mat into the coolest updo ever! It was stunning. And no, my hair will NOT do that, not even for the length of time it takes to finish the look. And, honestly, her hair probably wouldn’t do that, either - it was probably a pre-assembled hairpiece woven into her natural hair somehow. But it looked gorgeous, and if I, as a white girl, wore that 'do, it would look ridiculous.
Yes, I know straighted oiled black hair doesn’t look like white hair…but again, look at the pictures - that was the intent, the promise of the advertising, whether the product made that possible or not. Today McDonald’s designs their advertising so people think they’re making a healthy eating choice by eating there - whether or not the food is healthy, that advertising tells us something about what people want from the product.
