crossposted from What Tami Said
Regular readers of [What Tami Said] know that Chris Rock, once one of my favorite comedians, is on my s*** list for the growing misogyny in his stand-up act. That’s why I’m a little nervous about Rock’s latest project: “Good Hair,” a documentary about the business of black hair. Rock weighs the pressure to conform to Eurocentric beauty standards; the personal economics of caring for black hair; the role of countries, such as India, in supplying hair that will be weaved onto heads of black women from Brooklyn to Oakland; and the spectacle of black hair shows like the annual Bronner Bros. International Hair Show.
“Good Hair” sounds like a lot of fun and like a film that is long past due. Buuutttt…I know I’ll be cringing in my seat when I see this, waiting for the demonization of nappyness that I fear will be all over it. [Editor's note: After watching the clip above, I'm even more afraid. Rock doesn't want his daughters to "start out" thinking that they have to change part of themselves to be acceptable, but once they are grown women it's okay for them to adhere to rigid European beauty standards. Rock's refusal to make any comment on the wrongness of black women and girls being encouraged to "fix" their natural characteristics to be beautiful works my nerves.] According to an interview on Salon, “Rock conducts frank, funny and sometimes startling interviews with superbly coiffed black celebrities from Maya Angelou and the Rev. Al Sharpton to Ice-T, Salt-n-Pepa, Nia Long and Raven-Symoné.” Hmmm…not a nappy head in the bunch. Al Sharpton? Really? But I’ll reserve my judgement on “Good Hair” until I see it.
In the Salon interview, Rock reveals that he was inspired to make “Good Hair” when his daughter Lola came in from playing outside and asked, “Daddy, why don’t I have ‘good’ hair?” Here are some other excerpts from the interview
I saw it the other night with a predominantly white audience and they
were laughing, and learning stuff, reacting … Speaking as a, you know,
middle-class white guy for all the other middle-class white guys out there, I learned a helluva lot from this movie. I knew that hair weaves existed and obviously I’ve been in the RiteAid in New York City and I’ve seen … that entire aisle full of hair relaxers, but I didn’t know what a huge scene it was.By the way, I didn’t know. I mean, the initial idea was just to shoot the hair show, and cover the hairdressers, and kind of make like a “Hoop Dreams” of hair. But the more we shot, the more other things popped up.
…
It kind of blew my mind, the idea that in an African-American household you got this Porsche that nobody can see, these working-class and middle-class black women spending thousands of dollars, or their husbands and boyfriends spending thousands of dollars … buying a Porche that nobody sees. There is a whole economic realm to this that I didn’t know about at all.
It creates a wedge, actually.
…
So somebody’s hair salon in a black neighborhood in Little Rock — probably their hair weave is coming from L.A. and India. That’s amazing … You know, one of the things that struck me is that if somebody had made this film in the ’70s it might have been, you know, a bit more a call to arms — nationalism, we can’t have this.
You know, we have that cut of it, and it just wasn’t that entertaining. I mean, it’s still my job at the end of the day to make people laugh. Other documentarians, they have other responsibilities. My responsibility is to make people laugh. So, yeah, that cut of the movie exists but it is not as fun to watch as this cut.
Read the whole thing or listen to the audio here.
It’s really sad that a little girl is already asking why she doesn’t have “good” hair, but I doubt that Chris Rock’s comedy routine or even a personal attitude change is going to have much impact on his girls wanting to follow whatever fashion trend is prevalent when they’re teenagers and young women. Only a very popular actress/singer with natural hair who is viewed as highly desirable by men is likely to start making other women wear their hair the same way.
It’s odd that I’ve started noticing hair more since reading this blog. I notice the way my white colleague puts her adopted bi-racial daughter’s hair into two ponytails (a pretty typical white little girl hairstyle) instead of braids. Her kid is extremely outgoing and she is always neatly dressed and her hair cared for. I noticed the elementary-age biracial girl in the laundromat this weekend whose hair was a mass of wash and dry, barely combed curls on top of her head and how self-conscious she appeared. Her mom is white and appeared extremely loving, but she also didn’t seem to know how to do the kid’s hair. To be fair, she hadn’t done much with her own hair either and I noticed that too. I don’t know how either of those girls will feel as they grow up in this predominantly white community, with white moms and a media that shows different images of black women and a black First Family. Hair seems to be a big deal for women regardless of what age they are.
I had so many different emotions when I read this thread. First, I thought how inappropriate it was for Chris to be so trite about something so serious in our community. The feelings we have about our hair require much more than a funny documentary but on the other hand maybe not. Maybe it takes someone silly like Chris to make us see how utterly ridiculous some of us can be when it comes to hair and our feelings about it. With all that said, we do need someone to do a serious documentary about Black hair. Something we can all sink our teeth in, a movie version of a therapy session for the masses.
“Rock’s refusal to make any comment on the wrongness of black women and girls being encouraged to “fix” their natural characteristics to be beautiful works my nerves.” – well said.
That’s exactly the problem. It’s almost as if they’re reinforcing it by not questioning its place in society further. This is just a clip, however, but I fear that it will be more of the same.
Has Chris Rock assessed his own image of what beauty is? Look at his wife and then ask why his daughter’s think there’s something wrong with their God-given hair.
Hmmm…how is it that Chris Rock “didn’t know”? Didn’t know about the huge investment of time and money black women put into their hair? Even if you keep it “natural” and have it cornrowed (which let’s face it, often involves fake hair being braided into real hair), it’s hugely time-consuming and requires a lot of maintenance. He never noticed this with his mom, his wife, cousins, aunties? Really? It wasn’t until his own child came to him and said this that he thought about it?
I’m flabbergasted. But maybe having a high-profile comedian come out with something like this will at least open a dialogue about the politics of hair. I don’t know. I’m just kind of speechless.
Hair is an issue for me, raising my two interracial girls. This film makes me cringe. But I wonder, did I miss the thread that mentioned Michelle, Sasha, and Melia’s straight hair?
I have been tenderly mindful of praising my girls hair. And I am pleased to report they LOVE their hair. In fact, the first (and only) time my daughter had her hair blown straight she cried and wet it back almost immediately. The hairstylist who did it was shocked and said she’d never seen a reaction like that.
As my own young daughters watch on over the next 4-8 years, I hope to see our First Ladies with natural hair one of these days.
Speaking of hair here is poem I wrote last night after taking out my daughter’s cornrows and afterwards trying to convince her to wear it in an afro. She opted for braided pigtails instead.
Hair speaks
My hair, my hair said to me
I just want to be free
Let me loose
Let me go
To a fro
Don’t tie
Or push me back
Don’t braid me or
Twist, I’ll shout
Ouch! your perm burns
Don’t loc me in
Or cornrow me down
Let me stand up
Not fall straight down
I want to be
Tall like the trees
As high as I can be
As full as a bush
Not ponytailed or pigtailed
Or plaited in a rush
Keep your gel
And grease
I’m aunaturale
As I please…
gm
In response to Elizabeth- Sasha and Malia Obama for the most part wear their in braids or twists as seen in many photos. I think they had their hair pressed for the special event and there was an article somewhere where Michelle mentioned that she didn’t relax her or her daughters hair I wish I knew where to find that article.
“…the wrongness of black women and girls being encouraged to ‘fix’ their natural characteristics to be beautiful…”
I’m not sure I understand this comment. Why is it any more wrong for black women to want to “fix” their natural characteristics than it is for a white woman? I was born with stick-straight hair that won’t hold a curl to save my life. When I was younger, I had perm after perm, trying to get those beautiful curls that I thought I needed to be beautiful. Was that wrong? My natural hair color is a very nondescript mouse brown, so I color it to have blond and red highlights. Is that wrong?
I hope I’m not offending anyone by saying this–I truly don’t intend to. As a white person, I am just trying to understand what is wrong with black people changing their natural characteristics, when white people (and other races as well) do it all the time and no one thinks anything of it.
Dgcsmom,
I explained it this way in a recent post on my blog:
(Note: I’m not ranting at you, but the post this comes from is kind of “ranty.”)
“The pressure that black women feel to go to extreme lengths to obscure the nature of their hair from the cradle to the grave is not the same as a white woman deciding to get highlights to look smart for her professional job. It would be the same if kinky hair was coveted and white families vigilantly watched as a baby’s hair grew in, hoping that the little might have “good” nappy hair. It would be the same if white women spent thousands annually and avoided everyday activities to obscure long, straight hair, deemed unattractive by the masses. It would be the same if the models in Vogue rocked big, kinky impenetrable ‘fros or crinkled locs. It would be the same if an editor at Glamour magazine caught heat for telling a group of female attorneys that “ethnic” styles like bobs and ponytails are “political” and inappropriate in the workplace. It would be the same if a white woman could be fired for simply wearing her hair down. It would be the same if long, straight hair were considered unfeminine. It would be the same if, to stress her dangerous radicalness, Cindy McCain was featured on the cover of The New Yorker wearing her hair long, blonde and straight.
ALL women suffer under rigid and often sexist beauty standards, but there is a beauty hierarchy borne of racism that puts women with African physical features at the bottom. To not acknowledge that is offensive. Few women’s physicalities match the ones that are sold to us as ideal, but it is hard to be further from that ideal that a black woman.”
I would add that most white women don’t live their whole lives having no idea of what their real hair is like or how to care for it.
Does that make sense? You may perm your hair because you like the appearance of curl, but if you leave your hair straight and wear it in style natural to that hair (ponytails, buns, hanging down), no one would recoil in horror. You wouldn’t have a problem getting a job at, say,
Goldman Sachs. People with straight hair are not deemed unattractive simply for the straightness of their hair. The experience of a black woman with longish, natural, kinky hair would be quite different.
Tami – again, you hit one out of the park. You should add your last comment as an update to this post or a post within itself.
Chris Rock is not going to do this subject ANY justice. The fact that he can even find enough ‘funny’ to slant the film from serious is all the indication I need.
If he really wanted to help his daughters, this film would go into why he had an s-curl early in his career.
And I’ll be really offended if he doesn’t feature women with natural hair styles. That’s like doing a study on nails and only featuring people with acrylics. How is that even logical?
I can only imagine how frustrating it must be for a black woman to choose a hair style. It seems that every choice is bound to be “wrong” in some one else’s eye. Even more frustrating to choose a hair style for a daughter, adding in age-appropriateness constraints for style and maintenance.
Even more frustrating for an transracial adoptive woman to choose a style for her daughter. I can only imagine that every wrongness would be magnified.
Choose something too “easy” – doesn’t know how to do black hair; too “difficult” – promoting vanity or oppressive beauty standards; something uncommon among black girls – trying to turn her daughter into a white girl; too natural – too political.
A question: Is very short hair on black woman viewed favorably or unfavorably (or both) in “the” black community? By very short, I mean shorter than when Halle Berry had short hair, more like Lisa Gay Hamilton from “The Practice.” I’ve always thought that it was a very attractive style. Or is it just out of style or a style that not many people can pull off?
I’m a teacher in a high school with a lot of black students. African immigrants are the largest group but there are also many of black-Caribbean or African-American descent. Since reading this thread, I’ve been trying to pay attention to how the girls are wearing their hair. There is quite a variety, particularly because of the diversity of communities. I can’t actually tell for many of the girls because so many wear head scarves. But I was saddened to see that most of the other girls are straightening their hair. I’m not knowledgeable enough to tell if they are ironing or chemically straightening/relaxing it. But I don’t see a lot of extensions and I see almost no short hair.
Karen…I cannot speak for the “black” community, but I will tell you what I’ve noticed.
You asked about very short hair on black women. It depends on the cultural context, as well as what the woman herself looks like.
Many black women have very short hair. It is a style that requires a lot of confidence because it displays one’s features. Long hair is something a person can hide behind.
Most of the black men I know from ANY culture prefer women with long hair. Some like short hair too, but the woman should ideally be either very attractive or have a terrific personality if her hair is short. Many black men like long hair and some black women wish they had it. This ties in with the notion of long hair=feminine, short hair=masculine. It is based on a certain ideal of beauty.
I’ve seen black women with pixie cuts and some that were nearly bald, but they carried themselves with sophistication and class. Very short hair calls attention to beautiful eyes, high cheekbones, lovely skin, a slender neck, and a gorgeous smile…attributes that many black women possess. The ladies I’ve seen with very short hair were typically very confident and secure within themselves. They wore feminine outfits and completely defined beauty on their own terms.
You’re correct…not everyone can pull it off. One needs to be confident and not care what others think.