When I’m teaching, I have to be careful about revealing my personal opinions because a primary goal is to help my students develop logical support for their opinions. Revealing my own opinion might stunt their intellectual development. However, I write this blog because it gives me a chance to voice my opinion and dialogue with those who agree and disagree with me. In yesterday’s blog, I asked, “Is beauty, specifically, the way you wear your hair, political? Does your choice of hairstyle say anything about your politics?” I think that the answer is YES!
For example, blonde hair is a fixture of the White beauty standard. I almost fell out of my seat when Chris Rock appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show to promote Good Hair and famously called out the blonde women in the audience. Pointing at them individually, he outed them and said that they were new blondes out of a bottle. Women who wear their natural hair color (even, shriek their natural gray hair!), and those who choose NOT to dye their hair blond are likely saying something about just wanting to be themselves, who God created them to be. I thoroughly enjoyed Chris Rock’s appearance because he broadened the discussion beyond a conversation about how Black women weave and relax their hair. This is an issue that affects most women whatever their cultural or ethnic background.
In a society where women are constantly told to change, adjust, nip, alter, color, straighten, lengthen, bind, curl, crimp, highlight, cut, themselves it is a political statement to voluntarily step out of that fray. I see women who choose to wear their natural hair color and women who embrace their natural hair texture as making a political statement because it challenges the notion that women have to change how they naturally look in order to be beautiful. What do you think? I’d love to read your comments. Thanks!
If you want to learn more about a natural hair life style, check out a few sites that I find particularly helpful: http://www.nappturality.com/, http://www.curlynikki.com/, http://www.youtube.com/user/kimmaytube.
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