Straightening views on Black girls’ hair
Many moons ago, when I was a kid trudging barefoot up a hot stony path to India’s Tirupati temple, fabled for its benevolent god as well as its floor-toceiling sacks filled with gold, I watched men, women and kids coming back in the other direction, having been to the sanctum sanctorum, their heads shorn of hair in a mark of devotion.
I didn’t know, and I doubt those devotees did, that what they’d given up was “black gold,” widely used in the lucrative wig- and weave-making industry in Europe and North America.
I didn’t get my head shaved, but the fact wig-making is a multimillion-dollar industry reflects the importance given to what sprouts from your head. As always, what nature bestows is never good enough. The main problem for men may be loss of hair, but for women, not only must they have hair, it has to be straighter, curlier, softer, finer, lighter, shinier, bushier and above all never frizzy or out of place.
Of course, for Black women, that’s not all. It never is. There’s the judgment of the hair itself — poofy, unkempt, nappy, matted. Then hair gets tangled up with politics, identity and discrimination.
You would think we’re past this ignorance, but earlier this month a Peel District School Board teacher is reported to have posted on Instagram a photo of a Black child in braids and juxtaposed it with that of a gun-brandishing character from a movie.
The caption she wrote: “Who rocked it better? LOLOLOL.”
The Peel board apologized after the teacher was called out on social media.
Then there was a Toronto school principal who sent a teen home because her hair, which was usually in braids but was down that day, was too “poofy” and “unprofessional.” The few incidents that make it to the media include a Jack Astor’s employee being told to go home because her hair wouldn’t go “down” or a South African school banning Afros.
So the burden falls upon Black women to resist and to educate the rest of us to be able to say — and see — that Black hair is not just OK, it’s beautiful.
Last year, Toronto’s Ndija Anderson-Yantha released a richly written and illustrated children’s book, What Are We Gonna Do About Black Girls’ Hair.
Now, Toronto filmmaker Alicia K. Harris, 25, and her twin Venessa Harris, are making a fictional short named PICK. The film is about an 11-year-old girl who wears her Afro to school for the first time, on picture day.
The film — which is raising funds on Kickstarter — follows her as she deals with “racist comments and microaggression from her educators and then it comes time to take her personal photo,” says Alicia, who directed the film. Then she has to decide whether she wants to wear her Afro, which is the decision she made at the beginning of the day, or whether she has to kind of conform to what everybody is pressuring her to do, which would be to tie her hair back and not wear her Afro.
Unlike Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary Good Hair, this one is a personal, sensitive journey.
“The film is based on my own personal experiences growing up as a Black woman with a natural Afro,” says Alicia. “I felt from a very young age I wasn’t pretty if I had natural hair simply because there was very little representation of me … The white woman with blonde hair would be portrayed as a beautiful woman.”
On top of those subliminal messages came comments from people, strangers reaching out to touch her hair. “All of this led me to straighten my hair chemically for 12 years, starting at age 11.”
“For that one person asking that one question or touching it, it’s just that one question that they ask, but it’s one I have to deal with 10 times a day.
“It just feels very objectifying at times.”
It was only this year in the course of working on the film, questioning herself, that Alicia says she worked up the courage to go for “the big chop” and go natural.
Venessa, who is producing the film, doesn’t have the same Afro-texture as Alicia. She says she has looser curls. “So growing up we both had a really different experience with hair. Although I am a Black woman I didn’t experience the same type of discrimination that Alicia is describing.”
The Harrises are hoping to take the 12-minute short around the festival circuit and premiere at Sundance. Eventually they want to put it online, play it in schools and develop a program on microaggression around hair.
This is “an issue that has been completely overlooked even though it’s a story that’s very, very common for a lot of Black women,” says Alicia.