I’d think this was manufactured drama if my wife who has a lot of black women friended on facebook didn’t have a lot of black women leaving nasty comments on pics of our son, which she deletes.
“Can’t you comb his damn hair!”
“Cut his hair”
ETC Like seriously what? I guess it could be other races or men using black women’s photos as their avatar, but I doubt it. Why does a wild and free natural baby/toddler head bug a certain demo?
EDIT:Before a dogpile starts this is semi-serious kinda humorous, I just don’t understand why anyone would care that a baby or toddler has a wild afro.
Some do, some don’t. The ones who don’t care do not post blogs about it on the internet, because, you know, they don’t care. grude is getting an incorrect impression.
ETA: That said, there’s some pressure in our community for women and girls to have “good” hair, which means relatively straight and easily managed. There’s also some backlash, as many people – my baby sister, for instance – feel that the very term “good hair” indicates buying into the dominant (read: white) model of beauty and also some self-hatred. That might be the source of the passion you’re seeing.
Nah I’m aware not every or even a majority of black women react strongly to a kid with natural hair, I just didn’t believe it would happen at all! I figured it would be a non-issue.
My wife was the one who was like we need to shave his head, or do corn-rows, but me being the hippie I am was like why cut or mess with a kid’s hair you know? That shit is something he can worry about at age 16 and up when he can decide for himself or jobs become an issue.
My wife was the one who was like every (black)woman who sees him is going to think he doesn’t have a mother, because no one would let their child walk around unkempt like that. As if it is a sign of neglect requiring a call to CPS heh. She even said you can always tell the girls raised only by their fathers, it is like a status issue.
But now I kind of believe her, I’ve been in shared taxis where black women will just start touching my son’s hair! Trying to push it down or style it or something, it was surreal for me. Also had lots of comments about being a single dad and I should take him to have his hair taken care of.:smack:
Racial insecurity pretty much sums it up. The fear that you will be judged less than if your hair isn’t perfectly straight and smooth–the Western ideal.
Of course, those who have this hang-up will only rarely come out and admit it. They will say they just care about being well-groomed and looking “neat”. But is there an online petition for Halle Berry’s daughter? No. Straight/wavy hair is allowed to be as wild as it wants to be, while kinks and naps must be strait-jacketed at all costs. We mustn’t let anyone catch us looking so negro. That’s unacceptable!
A long time ago I had long thick wild bushy hair. Every day it seemed like someone would ask me what I was going to do with it, as if just combing and brushing it every day wasn’t good enough. I was freed from the madness once I lopped it all off, except for a short period of time when I had to listen to, “Girl, I can’t believe you cut off all that pretty hair!!”
But it’s changing. More and more black women are rocking natural styles. Also, believe it or not, there’s more “outrage” about the petition than there is about Blue Ivy’s hair. No mainstream black publication is cosigning this shite. So I think it is overhyped.
This is evidently coming from so far in the peanuts gallery I need oxigen, but I wonder how much of it has to do with being so used to super-done hair that it’s hard to remember what healthy but not “done” kinky hair looks like; also, how much with the fact that hey, if you just let your hair be, there’s a whole industry you’re not feeding - publicity affects us more deeply than we think. Back when I was in my tweens I kept getting told either to straighten my hair or, more often, to perm it - waves were what most women had naturally, so they were “out” :rolleyes:. Nowadays I keep being asked why don’t I straighten my hair, or surprising people when they notice I don’t dye. Why should I? I don’t owe anything to Wella! It’s not my job to keep them in business!
The saddest thing to me is the vast array of products intended to fix extremely damaged hair targeted at black women who, really, destroy their hair in an attempt to achieve an ideal that is simply not possible for many of them, and for all of them not healthy long term when you consider the chemicals, the possible permanent hair loss, and the rest. They spend all that money on “product” and perms and tools then have to spend even more to fix the damage.
Someone is making a crapload of money off them.
Healthy hair looks so much better, no matter what the color or texture of that hair.
While I am not black and haven’t lived the black experience at all (duh) what people say here is absolutely true. I have severely curly hair and when I was a child my parent let the hair just curl like crazy. Wash it,comb it, etc. And I got nothing but comments on how cute it was. Meanwhile,little black children with very similar hair, except it was kinky, would get comments as stated above. “Clean up her hair!”
Little kids look adorable with fros. When they grow up is plenty of time to cornrow it. But, what do I know?
It’s not just black women who have a thing about hair. My mother is always commenting about hair, especially when it’s long or unkempt, regardless of the person’s race. Honest to goodness, the first thing she said about the Beatles involved their hair!
I think a big part of it is that hair is one of the first things one notices about another person - at least for me it is. Maybe I’m an anomaly. Another thing I’ve noticed - most people don’t like their own hair. It’s either too straight or too curly or too thin or too thick or the wrong color. Sorry - didn’t mean to hijack.
When I started to hear that there was flap about Blue Ivy’s hair I sincerely hoped that one or both of her parents would respond that they weren’t going to cover their toddler’s head with chemicals to satisfy a bunch of strangers.
From some of the comments I’ve read, people are not just irate that her hair is left natural, but that her parents who we all know have rooms filled with money spend it on their own appearance and not on their child’s.
I’m pretty sure I’d be more alarmed to see a two year old with straightened or dyed hair.
While I’m sure part of the issue is weird racial Western Ideal hangups, I think part of it probably is about the child looking as though it’s seen a hairbrush that day. I know shit from black hair and all, but I have totally different reactions to the picture in the very first link and the pictures in the Jezebel article, and respond pretty well the same to the Jezebel pics and the one you posted of Halle’s little girl. Halle’s kid’s hair doesn’t look wild–it looks like a ponytail with the bits at the hairline coming loose as it always does with super-fine hair. The Jezebel pictures of Blue Ivy don’t look wild–her hair is clearly kinky and just as clearly brushed/picked/whatever and shaped, although it may not be holding the original shape. But both babies have clearly, unambiguously been groomed that day. That first picture of Blue Ivy, not so much.*
This theory is totally spitballed, but I think that difference tends to trip some “this baby isn’t being taken care of” trigger in our lizard brains. (Or maybe I should say our proto-mammal brains, since lizards don’t really groom their infant young.) And the lizard brain doesn’t like when babies aren’t being taken care of. The lizard brain HATES when babies aren’t being taken care of, with the fire of a thousand suns. And so people respond waaay more negatively to something like that in a baby or toddler than they would in an older child or an adult.
*Maybe it’s obvious to people who are used to that hair texture that the hair has been brushed that day, I dunno. Like I said, I know shit from black hair.
I don’t think it’s a natural vs. perm issue for a baby or toddler. Only crazy people put chemicals in a child’s hair that young (though there could be some hot combing going on). It’s more of the unkempt nature of the child’s hair. My son had hair that we did not comb when it got a certain length, and he looked like a Rasta. We got lots of grief from the family about that.
Little Black girls often have their hair in plaits (my daughter does). Black folks will look at you funny if a) your child’s hair is not moisturized [grease] or b) it’s unruly. Sadly this is often the case for biracial children or adopted Black children. There was a flashback on Orange Is The New Black with Suzanne (“Crazy Eyes”) where she met a Black nurse who fixed her hair (her adoptive parents, as sweet as they were, had the child walking around with uncombed hair.
The first picture here Blue Ivy’s Natural Hair & the Right Of Black Girls To Be… Free | MyBrownBaby is a lot different than the black and white one further down on the page. I’m for natural textures and modern wild Afros. I don’t even think it’s good for very kinky hair to be combed that often, if at all, (which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be detangled), but her hair in the first picture looks matted.
That just happens after sleeping, also the hair can incorporate any lint or thread from clothes or sheets. Sometimes these natural ras are impossible to comb out, we just started trimming them off with scissors. They are like split ends that irrevocably coil.
I have hair that would mat just like that if I let it (I detangle mine with conditioner instead of cutting it or combing it and causing a setback in my quest to have the best afro ever). I’m not going to judge the parents for taking their baby out in public like that, but there are other people with kids who have unprocessed hair who wouldn’t take their kids out of the house like that. Which makes me think that think this particular case isn’t necessarily driven by self hatred for all the objectors, just a case of different standards, sort of like the people who are fine with their kids running around and getting dirty vs. those who aren’t.
