HAIR APPARENT
Walker tackled the politics of black hair — a debate that’s still raging
Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker Streaming, Netflix
“Hair can be freedom or bondage. The choice is yours,” Sarah Breedlove shouts to a crowd of black women as she shows off her homemade “hair grower” in the Netflix limited series Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.
In the scene, Breedlove isn’t yet Madam C.J. Walker — the first female African-american millionaire who employed nearly 10,000 workers, owned factories run by women and built a mansion next to John D. Rockefeller’s. But Breedlove emerges as the loudest voice in what we now know as the Great Conversation about black hair. Should it be straight? Natural? Judged? Touched? Left alone?
Society is still trying to answer those questions. And Self Made, a zip through Walker’s life, is part of a cultural groundswell about African-american women’s hair.
“This conversation about hair has been going on five years, 10 years, 20,” said Jamyla Bennu, co-founder of Oyin Handmade, an organic product line for highly textured hair. What makes this moment feel different, she said, is that the world might finally be catching on.
In February, the animated short Hair Love, about a little black girl and her father learning how to care for her textured curls, won an Oscar. The CROWN Act, a bill banning natural hair discrimination, became law in California in January.
“Lots of stories are being made about hair now, but it’s not really about hair. Not to me, at least,” actress Octavia Spencer, who portrays Walker in the Netflix series, told The Boston Globe.
That’s the thing: It’s all about hair. But it’s never actually about hair. Madam Walker’s great-great granddaughter, A’lelia Bundles, upon whose book the show is based, agreed: “This is about power,” she said.
“The story has been on the desk of Hollywood executives for many, many years,” said Bundles, author of On Her Own Ground: The Life And Times of Madam C.J. Walker. Her relative’s tale — she was born four years after the Emancipation Proclamation, then went from washerwoman to head of her own cosmetics empire — has been on its way to a screen since the late 1980s.
That’s when Alex Haley, author of the seminal saga Roots, first floated the idea. That fell through. Then in 2001, Columbia Tristar (now Sony Pictures Television) optioned Bundles’s book. That deal fell through. Next came HBO. And well ...
What has changed recently seems to be Hollywood’s attitude toward movies centred on black characters. Lee Daniels’ The Butler, 12 Years a Slave and other films proved that they could be sold domestically and overseas.
And Bundles thinks this might be the last time we talk about black hair.
“This does feel different to me,” Bundles said. “When I was a senior in high school in 1969 going from a perm to an Afro, I thought we had won this battle. But that pendulum swung back with societal pressure. Now there are laws preventing people from sanctioning us and policing us.”
Laws such as the aforementioned CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair) Act. First introduced by California state Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Democrat, who has been wearing her own hair in dreadlocks for decades, it bans discrimination against natural hairstyles associated with race.
Tiffany Gill, author of the book Beauty Shop Politics, echoed Bundles and Mitchell. “It’s hair as a means of mobility, hair as a means of black women claiming modern identity,” she said.
Black hair is personal and political. It always has been. Walker encouraged all of her sales agents to be politically active. She donated. She marched. She lobbied. Whether black women’s hair was straight enough to simulate white hair wasn’t Madam Walker’s real concern, but whether black women had access to income, education and independence was.
Despite advancements, pushback still remains. Yes, Hair Love won an Oscar, but remember teenager Deandre Arnold, who was invited to attend the ceremony alongside the producers after he made headlines because his high school demanded he cut off his dreadlocks to walk at commencement. Still, in 2020, is the power dynamic finally shifting?
“This is a moment, not the first moment, where there is a push to be unapologetic about blackness,” Gill said. “Things we use to only talk about in the beauty shops are now being talked about in the broader public.”