A little more than three years ago, I embarked on my return to natural.
For those of you who have no clue what that means, I stopped putting relaxers in my hair to chemically straighten my curl pattern. The decision came when I realized I didn’t need a relaxer but has transformed into meaning much more.
After three years, I’ve grown tremendously and I can say that, as a black woman, wearing my hair natural is more empowering and liberating than anything. It’s a testimony of who I am and how God made me.
In the black community, you could almost say putting your first relaxer in is like a rite of passage. It’s a tradition — Grandma did it, Momma did it and now I’m going to do it. We want to get our hair as straight and easy to comb as possible and will go to creative, sometimes harmful, lengths to achieve our desired look.
Relaxers and sometimes weaves are society’s way of making black hair “normal” or acceptable. Society’s view of beautiful hair is long, straight and flowing, not big, curly, kinky or afro-like. Commercials, television shows, and magazines glorify society’s black beauty norm as being light skinned with “good” hair.
Black men and women worship celebrities like Beyoncé, Lauren London and Rihanna. Don’t get me wrong, these are all beautiful black women, but they are not the only beautiful black women out there. Women like Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe and Lupita Nyong’o are all beautiful women with gorgeous, natural hair.
Black hair has a stigma attached to it, which makes it hard for black women to go with the flow and accept their natural hair.
It’s a tough decision to wear your hair natural when kinkier textures are discriminated against. Not only is black hair discriminated against in schools — especially when 12-year-old Vanessa Van Dyke was asked to cut her afro or be expelled from a school in Orlando, Florida — it’s discriminated against in workplaces and in the black community itself.
But it starts with us first. How can we expect the rest of the world to accept something that we ourselves can’t even accept? In the words of Marcus Garvey, “Take the kinks out of your mind, not your hair.”
As a black woman, it’s heartbreaking to know there are young girls who think they are ugly because of their hair texture or skin color. And it hurts to know there are black men who cringe at the thought of natural hair.
As a black community, we need to break away from what society says is normal and acceptable and teach our young girls and boys what real beauty is. We don’t need relaxers or weaves to be beautiful. Instead of spending hours perfecting techniques that mask our true selves, we need to get in the mirror and learn to care for what naturally grows out of our heads.
And as for the “good hair/bad hair” debate, we can go ahead and throw that out the window too. All it does is continue to divide the community, cause tension and continue to add stigma. There is no such thing as bad hair.
We need to teach our young girls that beauty isn’t outer appearance but that inner beauty is what counts. The most beautiful person in the world can instantly become ugly with a bad attitude.
Whether you wear your hair natural, relaxed or weaved, is up to you. But don’t make that decision according to what other people think is best for you, make that decision because it’s what you think is best for you.
Our new generation can’t grow up thinking they have to change for anyone and it is up to us to embrace what we have and how we were made.
Taylor Simien is a 20-year-old mass communication junior from Lafayette, La.
Opinion: Natural hair can show women’s beauty, individuality
November 4, 2014
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