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“Each new curl howling a war cry”: Black women, embodiment, and gendered racial formation

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“Each new curl howling a war cry”: Black women, embodiment, and gendered racial formation

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“EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY”:
BLACK WOMEN, EMBODIMENT, AND GENDERED RACIAL FORMATION

By

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

May 2019

ii

Dedication
This dissertation is dedicated to my mom, Cynthia Guthrie Johnson, who was my first
and best example of Black feminism in action.

iii

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………..iv
List of Figures……………………………………………………………………….vii
Abstract……………………………………………………………………………....ix
Foreword……………………………………………………………………………..x
Chapter 1: Introduction…...…………………………………………………………..1
Chapter 2: An Historical Overview of Black Hair Politics……………………..…...49
Chapter 3: The Continuing Significance of Race and Hair in the 21
st
Century……...84
Chapter 4: Green is the New Black…………………………………………………106
Chapter 5: Hair and Gendering Racial Protest in the Social Movement Sector……145
Chapter 6: Whose Movement is it Anyway? ………………………………………174
Chapter 7: Conclusion………………………………………………………………222
Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...236
Appendices
Appendix A: Glossary of Popular Terms Used in Black Hair Culture……263
Appendix B: Participant Demographic Information...…………………….267
Appendix C: Informed Consent Form…………………………………….269
Appendix D: Interview Guide…………………………………………….272

iv

Acknowledgments
No dissertation is an independent venture. I could not have completed this study
without the mentorship of my dissertation committee members: Dr. Michael Messner, Dr.
Elaine Bell Kaplan, and Dr. Lanita Jacobs. I am especially grateful to my dissertation chair,
Mike, for being a calm, patient and reassuring presence whenever I deliberated a theoretical
framework, intervention, or logistical obstacle. After every conversation with Mike, I left
feeling more confident in myself as a researcher, theorist, and writer. Mike also generously
allowed me to participate in his own research process, which provided me with in-depth
insight on how to create rigorous and interesting work. It is a privilege to enter any space
as Mike’s student. His mentorship greatly broadened how I think about bodies, and I’m a
much more thoughtful sociologist for it. Likewise, Elaine’s commitment to the grounded
theory approach was central in moving me beyond the insights of existing literature, and
closer to the meanings women create in everyday life. Elaine makes sociology fun, and I
love that every meeting in her office becomes a discussion about life, politics, hip-hop,
film, art, and jazz. Elaine’s advice consistently reminds me that my work should reflect
life, and that living in the world comes first. Her encouragement of me to take a stand in
my writing gave me the moxie to firmly claim the stories my data reveals. Finally, I am so
appreciative of Lanita’s mentorship as my outside committee member. It means so much
to have someone who understands and appreciates the value of research on Black
communities, especially in a discipline where such work requires constant defense.
Lanita’s detailed and generous feedback, and her presence as a role model, are central to
this work. Thank you for going above and beyond. I am also grateful to the USC professors
v

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Sarah Gualiteri and Leland Saito who served on my
qualifying exam committee, nurtured me as a theorist, and supported my early work.
I have also been amazed and how many institutions believed in this project. The
United Negro College Fund/ Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship provided me early
mentorship and research training. The Social Science Research Council and the Del Amo
Foundation supported travel for my fieldwork in Spain and France, as well as my
participation in the Black European Summer School in The Netherlands. The USC Center
for Feminist Research provided grant assistance for my participation in the De-Colonial
Black Feminism Summer School in Bahia, Brazil, where I collaborated with scholars
across the Black Atlantic who contributed to my theorizing.
My cohort-mate Carolyn Choi deserves a special thank you for being my sounding
board and academic confidant. Carolyn has seen this project develop from the very
beginning. We wrote late nights and overnight together countless evenings throughout
graduate school. She fed me—literally and figuratively—with home cooked Korean food,
sisterhood, and creativity. From Hollywood School to CLC Collective, Carolyn constantly
reminds me that our work as women of color studying our own communities has real-life
implications and that we should never undervalue or ignore our aspirations to become a
scholar-activists and public intellectuals. Thank you for being a colleague and a friend.
Mike’s dissertation writing group patiently critiqued my work over the last three
years. Their feedback significantly shaped the trajectory of my thoughts. Kit Myers
encouraged my ideas and the connection between natural hair, biomedicalization and
biopolitics, and their enthusiasm for my work reinvigorated me every time we spoke. Kit
and Brandy were my first hosts in Los Angeles and became my unofficial parents while
vi

completing the dissertation. I am grateful to call them friends and family. Michela Musto
served as my graduate student mentor since my first week at USC, and she was a critical
guide for me throughout the doctoral program in helping me successfully compete in grant
competitions. Jeff Sacha, Nathaniel Burke and LaToya Council generously read my
working papers, armed with insightful critiques based on expertise in broad literatures and
their personal experiences. I am truly grateful for the collegiality among graduate students
at USC.
I could not have completed this work without the loving staff in the Sociology
Department at USC. Amber Thomas allowed me to sit at her feet in her office, sometimes
for hours at a time, to talk out my ideas about life and work. When I was on fellowship and
away from campus Amber remained my grounding force, connecting me to department
affairs and ensuring that I stayed on track. Amber, I love you so much and am so glad that
USC brought us together as friends. My academic advisor, Stachelle Overland fought for
me and my ideas countless times during my journey at USC. Every conversation with
Stachelle reminds me of my strength and purpose as a Black woman in academia. There’s
no way my coursework and qualifying exams, let alone a dissertation could have happened
without her consistent and loving advocacy. Melissa Hernandez and Lisa Losorelli also
made the department feel like home. These four women have been such blessings in my
life.
Thank you to all my family members, who have been unconditionally supportive
of me throughout graduate school. My mom is the best cheerleader ever. As I get older, I
have become more aware of the many times she’s fought for my accomplishments to be
recognized. As an adult, I am grateful to have learned to do that for myself through her
vii

example. I am also thankful for the men in my family, Paparuu, Alan and Brian. I felt their
support through all the distance and many moves to new research sites. My family was
quick to forward me any natural hair article, Facebook fiasco, and magazine spread they
came across. I would also like to express appreciation to my partner, Jonathan Rabb. I do
not take it for granted that I live life alongside a person who supports my dreams regardless
of whether my career path makes his life inconvenient or uncomfortable. Jonathan was
present for two full years of my dissertation fieldwork, traveling across the country and
internationally as I raced to events and to meet interviewees. He spent many hours next to
me in coffee shops, motivating me to just write one hour longer, and talked out my findings
with me many evenings. Thanks for believing in me enough to join this ride.
Finally, I must acknowledge the support of my chosen family. Thank you to my
friends Savanna Ramsey, Raven Evans, Kimberly Mayo, Rebecca Rougeau, Evita Castine,
Aisha Benton, Zuri Adele, and Su Jan Chase for sticking with me, checking in on me, and
celebrating every milestone along the way. An extra special thank you to “The Clover,”
my Spelman sisters Nia Newton, Dr. Melina Zúniga, Dr. Blaire Spaulding and Ashley
Martinez. We forged through graduate school, law school, dental school and medical
school at the same time, and I watched Nia, Melina and Blaire graduate with terminal
degrees in their fields while I was writing this dissertation. Their successes inspired me to
keep pushing on days when I could not see the light at the end of the tunnel. These women
are daily reminders of the power of sisterhood, and there’s something extra special about
working towards our dreams as a group. I love you each, and I love us.
vii

List of Figures

1.1: Cover of O Magazine’s “Let’s Talk About Hair” Issue (September 2013)
1.2: CurlFest in Brooklyn, NY (2016)
1.3: The Los Angeles Natural Hair and Beauty Expo (2014)
2.1: Afro-Surinamese women at the “Keti Koti” (Breaking the Chains) Festival in
Amsterdam, Holland (2014)
2.2: Wanted by the FBI poster of Angela Davis (1970)

2.3: Reverend Jesse Jackson at the Operation PUSH funeral for Revlon (November
1986)
2.4: Model and stylist at the Bronner Brothers International Beauty Show competition
in Atlanta, GA (2015)
3.1 United States Army Grooming Guidelines Visual Aid (2014)
3.2: Hair Nah Video Game (Pixel, 2017)
3.3: Transitioning hair

4.1: Screen shot of Chris Rock and Professor Berry, a “Chemical Genius” from Good
Hair (Stilson, 2009)
4.2: Screen shot of YouTube video Whitney White aka @Naptural85 (April 2016)
4.3: Sexual health quiz at a natural hair meet-up (2014)
4.4: Internet meme making fun of the “product junkie” persona in natural hair culture
(2015)
4.5: Photo of yoga session at CurlFest in Brooklyn, NY (2016)
4.6: Woman Looking at an Image of Her Hair Under a Microscope at a Natural Hair
Event in Atlanta (2015)
4.7: Sister Scientist Featured on Flyer for the International “Luv and learn Your
Beauty” Tour (2015)
5.1: Kyla Gray addressing Senator Hillary Clinton at the Democratic Town Hall
(2016)

5.2: Protestor at a Black Lives Matter March in Atlanta, GA (July 2016)

5.3: “You Can Touch My Hair” Social Experiment in Union Square, NY (2013)

viii

5.4: Protestors against “You Can Touch My Hair” Social Experiment in Union Square,
NY (2013)

5.5: Fees Must Fall protestors marching at the University of Cape Town to shut down
class instruction (2016)

5.6: Students protesting grooming policies that ban natural hair styles at Pretoria Girls
High School (2016)

5.7: Angela Davis conversing with Zulaikha Patel, a student at Pretoria Girls High
School (2016)

6.1: Facebook post by Rachel Dolezal (November 2013)
6.2: An “#AskRachel” Internet Meme (2016)
6.3: Screenshot of a viral Twitter reaction to SheaMoisture “Break the Walls”
campaign (2017)
6.4: Graphic of popular natural hair texture typing system
6.5: Angela Davis in the 1970s wearing an Afro, a style distinguished by its round,
picked out appearance.
6.6: Angela Davis in 2010 wearing today’s “natural look,” favoring defined curls.
6.7: Viral Internet meme posted on a natural hair Instagram page critiquing texturism
in the natural hair community (2016)
6.8: Screenshot of a post South African natural hair Facebook group critiquing
texturism in the natural hair community (2017)

ix

Abstract
The 2010s witnessed the rise of the “natural hair movement” among women of
African descent across the Black Atlantic. Millions of Black women transitioned to un-
straightened “natural” hair against enduring white-supremacist stigmas that kinky hair is
wild, unprofessional and ugly. This study uses their collective organizing around
“naturalness” as a point of departure for analyzing Black women’s contributions to
continuity and change in race, class, and gender relations. Relying on qualitative methods,
including 80 semi-structured interviews with women of African descent across four
continents and three years of participant observation at natural hair events and in online
networks, I examine the implications of Black women’s shifting body practices, political
praxis and purchasing preferences. I argue that Black women’s collaborative critique,
entrepreneurship, cultural production and embodied transformations through the natural
hair movement disrupt the racialized gender order despite the confines of the present
commercialized neoliberal era. Distinct from 20
th
century politics of respectability or
politics of Afrocentricity, today’s natural hair movement advances what I call a politics
authenticity, which focuses on the experience of transitioning to natural hair and hare care-
taking as much as hair itself as a practice of self-love and self-acceptance. Adding gender
and embodiment analyses to racial formation theory, this project revises the ways scholars
have understood the characteristics, scope, and outcomes of capitalist politics, beauty
politics, and identity politics.
x

Foreword
I received my first chemical relaxer when I was four years old with boxed kit of
Just for Me relaxer
1
that my mother bought for less than five dollars in the “ethnic aisle”
at our local grocery store. We had vacation plans the following week where I would be
swimming every day, and my mom was determined to let me play in the water without
spending hours detangling my thick, coiled hair each night. Neither of us considered that a
restful holiday. There were few other Black women in our predominantly white suburb, so
we lacked the resources and the time to get my hair braided. And so, with hands covered
in disposable plastic gloves, she parted my hair in quarters. My forehead was thick with
shine from the petroleum jelly that came with the kit, meant to discourage the chemical
burns.
For the next fifteen years, I regularly relaxed my hair to keep up my virgin “new
growth,” which would form a fluffy halo at my scalp to let me know that it was time for
my next treatment. During elementary school, my mom would braid my permed and hot
combed hair into neat cornrows, securing the ends with beads or plastic barrettes from the
beauty supply store. There were only two other Black girls in my grade at school. We were
never assigned to the same teacher, so I was mostly on my own when classmates got
curious about my hair. I struggled to explain why it was not necessary for me to wash mine
every day when they shampooed every morning. “It’s not dirty, it’s different,” I’d explain,
feeling unsure about whether this was true. My mom, like many Black parents, was the
queen of organizing everyday acts of resistance and arranged to braid and bead two of my
white kindergarten friends’ hair as a form of cultural exchange. I remember feeling special

1
See Appendix A for a glossary defining common hair terms in Black hairstyling.
xi

when the braids slipped out of their silky hair overnight but mine stayed in for the next
three weeks. (A decade later as a freshman in high school, I arranged my own “cultural
exchange” and relaxed two of my white classmates’ hair. My mom was part horrified, and
part relieved that I somehow managed to avoid inflicting catastrophic chemical burns and
baldness. The lesson? Not all forms of agency are resistant, productive, or wise.)
About once a year, when my mom could justify the expense, we would pay a family
friend from church to style my hair into braided extensions. I loved those rare occasions,
because I got to watch two or three Disney movies with the woman’s daughters while she
parted my scalp into a hundred tiny boxes, plaited each section until the synthetic hair
reached my waist, and dipped the ends in boiling water so the synthetic hair would melt
enough to keep the braid from unraveling. I’d wear this hairstyle for the next month and a
half, relishing in the ability to run in the rain and sweat without concern about my texture
reverting to its natural kinky state. If I wore my relaxed hair “down” it was for picture day
at school, weddings, Christmas card photos, or Easter service at our Southern Baptist
church. Despite a lot of creative hair play during my childhood and adolescence, I was
socialized to believe that long, straight hair was integral to preparing for important events,
and that looking beautiful required hours of work and pain. In other words, I learned that
hair straightening was central to “doing” respectable Black girlhood appropriately (West
& Fenstermaker, 1995). All the Black women in my life wore their hair straight too—both
those in my mostly white middle-class neighborhood and the those at my predominantly
Black working-class church who came to service each week wearing their Sunday best. By
the time I entered middle-school I no longer remembered what my natural hair texture
looked like. With few alternatives in sight, it never occurred to me to care.
xii

It was not until I began undergrad at Spelman, an Historically Black College
(HBCU) for women in Atlanta, GA, that I began to think critically and strategically about
my beauty routine. As upwardly-mobile Black women in training, my classmates and I
were taught through campus workshops that straight hair, navy blue suits, and Standard
English were crucial to our future professional success. This was typical for many HBCUs
at the time; Hampton University famously banned students in its five-year M.B.A program
from wearing dreadlocks and cornrows in 2001. Spelman lacked such an explicit policy,
but almost all my classmates at wore their hair straightened. I marveled at the many
different techniques they used to achieve silky hair that moved. In Atlanta, widely hailed
as the “Black hair capital” of the world, all techniques for “slaying” curly hair textures
were available at minimal cost. Some classmates had ceramic flat irons that reached
upwards of 400 degrees Fahrenheit, while others wore wigs and weaves made from
synthetic or human hair, installed at fifty-dollar weave shops or at the feet of enterprising
classmates. I quickly learned by example and became a master at wrapping my hair at night
or looping my hair into perfect silky pin curls. My hair grew longer than ever with so much
collective TLC.
While at Spelman, I met a pair of students at neighboring Clark Atlanta University
who traveled back and forth to India importing bundles of unprocessed human hair to sell
to discerning beauty connoisseurs in Atlanta. I took a trip to the duo’s apartment and bought
rubber-banded ponytails of three anonymous persons, whose hair color matched each
other’s and mine well enough. I then sat at the feet of Tokyo Stylez (now-famous weave
master to celebrities like Naomi Campbell, Kim Kardashian, and Rihanna) to get the
bundles installed. It was with this long, flowing weave that I won a campus homecoming
xiii

pageant. My look was forever memorialized in a photo accompanying the school
newspaper’s front-page editorial, which criticized the idealization of women with light skin
and long hair on HBCU campuses. I inadvertently became part of a long and extended
debate about color hierarchies, texture privilege, and exclusionary beauty ideals in Black
elite communities (see Craig, 2002).
Privately, I decided to investigate what would happen if I skipped a relaxer. I
rationalized that my hair was hidden anyway while cornrowed under my weave, and I had
become curious about what my natural hair texture looked and felt like. Alone in my dorm
room one night, I stumbled upon the online blog Black Girl with Long Hair. The images I
found were both inspiring and addictive. There were Black women of all skin tones and
hair types choosing to embrace their natural hair textures. This was 2010, and I discovered
that my personal natural hair journey was syncing up perfectly with what an emerging
chorus of online hair gurus had termed the “natural hair movement.” I searched
"#naturalhair" tags on social media and unearthed a host of other blogs, vlogs and message
boards filled with women who encouraged me to ditch my relaxer for good. I identified
online influencers with my same hair texture, and these women taught me how to concoct
mixtures of castor oil, honey and flaxseed gel at home. Forum discussions suggested I try
the new haircare products for curls by Mixed Chicks on the West Coast or Miss Jessie’s
from New York. I learned a new set of terminology and came to understand that by growing
out my relaxer I was “transitioning.”
The flourishing natural hair culture increasingly interested me. My changing body
forced me to confront how uncritically I had internalized and embodied a belief that
whiteness was more beautiful, more professional, more feminine. At the time, I was also
xiv

coming to womanist consciousness while writing an undergraduate sociology thesis on
Black women and the politics of sport
2
. My overlapping natural hair journey and scholarly
dive into the sociology of embodiment literature inspired a critical interest in how race,
class and gender ideologies manifest themselves on and through the body. When I entered
the doctoral program in Sociology at the University of California, I chose to research how
the natural hair movement might reimagine Black feminist praxis in an increasingly global
and commercialized field of race and gender relations. In what follows, I describe the
insights I garnered over the next six years. Through the voices of women who I met around
the world, this study seeks to expand the way sociologists, feminists, and critical race
scholars understand the meanings of beauty politics, identity politics, and consumer
politics. By fleshing out how the natural hair movement operates as a gendered racial
formation project, I hope to provide sociologists with empirical examples of how Black
women’s everyday practices contribute to social change.

2
My ethnography found that Morehouse cheerleading squad members deploy womanist
language, adopt a sexual politics of respectability off the court, and emphasize the
cultural constraint of choreography to negotiate a perceived contradiction between being
upwardly mobile Black college women and participating in sexualized extracurricular
athletics. This intersectional analysis makes visible limits to the liberal feminist ideal of
individual empowerment for women in sport and the importance of institutional context
in race and gender theory and was eventually published in the Sociology of Sport Journal
(Johnson, 2015).
xv

Writing this dissertation was both enormously rewarding and frustrating. The
natural hair movement is constantly evolving, with new businesses, films, websites,
conflicts, hashtags, and trends emerging all the time. I discovered so many interesting
themes through this research process, and I struggled to find space to discuss them all while
maintaining a coherent narrative and theoretical analysis. This was complicated by the fact
that while this movement felt transformative for some, others felt excluded or devalued
because of their class status, skin tone, or hair texture. I do my best to acknowledge,
describe, and understand these contradictions in what follows, and I look forward to
engaging with scholars who are studying the natural hair movement with other disciplinary
lenses, theoretical frameworks, and demographic foci. In addition, I would be pleased if
women of African descent who wear their hair natural or are thinking about choosing
natural hair styles reflect on their beauty work with new interest upon reading my work. I
feel grateful to write a dissertation that connects my own experiences to those of other
women of African descent across the diaspora.
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

1
Chapter 1
Introduction
Wild Crown

chop me from the neck up
& throw my head to the soft,
welcoming soil.

this is my ablution
permed edges,
burned forehead,
grown thick as wild crop after rain,
my hair isn’t made of undulations,
so i blanketed my scalp in a white god,
pulled out each ancestor’s song
until i met a new face in the mirror.
until this god harvested me with its greedy hands.
i was sewn a crown
of head sores & scorched earth & straw.
i looked kept & human now;
no one notices my split hoofs
or snout
or the deep bellow in my chest
when my fur is smoothed to someone’s perfection.

this is my baptismal:

god of coconut oil
of Black castor oil

forgive me of my trespasses
bless my barren scalp

return me back to my beginning
forgive me for undoing your delicate labor
for opening myself to a false god
that will never love me

no matter how many times
I break myself in its image

each new curl howling a war cry
each howl an eviction notice

EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

2
this is my ascension:

half rood, half glory,
all feral,
nothing that wouldn’t snap
the teeth off a comb
& neck for good measure—
all I know is how to break soft things
i do not know any other way
than to be present
for this homecoming
i lift my hands in ceremony
to open my scalp for water.
for my curls to bloom onto themselves,
here: i am growing a forest on my head
here: i am renamed in an ancestor’s hymnal.
listening to the rain for my Blkness,
i am a crown of what the heavens come to answer;

watch me king.

- I. S. Jones (2016)

I.S. Jones recited her poem “Wild Crown” to an enraptured audience at a 2016 Pride Week
event I attended at a small performance café in Downtown Brooklyn, New York. Given that only
a handful of people in the audience appeared to be of African descent, “Wild Crown” might seem
an unlikely choice for the occasion. And yet, those lucky enough to score a chair leaned in from
their leather cushioned perches. I sat cross-legged among the dozens of attendees in overflow seats
on the floor, who inched forward before the small raised stage. Though “Wild Crown” is not
explicitly about gender identity or sexuality, Jones’ narrative of coming out as her most authentic
self against cultural barriers to acceptance was a familiar one to many in the audience. And, as
Tinsley (2018) points out, beauty culture holds special significance in Black queer communities,
offering space for Black femme-ininity and femininity to share sisterhood and monetize cultural
skills to create wealth. Jones’ performance was particularly powerful at this Pride event, which
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

3
lacked any other explicit discussion of race as an overlapping “intersectional” identity that shapes
gender, sexuality, or the experience of disclosure (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1991; Collins, 1986).
I begin this dissertation with “Wild Crown” because it so perfectly introduces the themes
I’ll unpack as you read on. In the poem, Jones recounts turning away from the physical and
emotional violence beget by chemical relaxers and describes discovering what her body naturally
responds to and enjoys. She rebukes Eurocentric standards of beauty—“a false white god”— and
speaks of embracing her ancestry from the inside out. Jones critiques hair straightening as a form
of respectability politics—“i look kept & human now”—and mocks racist and sexist discourses
that oppress Black women by likening them to beasts. Through poetic allusions to the soil, forests,
and flowers blooming, “Wild Crown” reclaims the connection between Blackness and nature,
reframing this association as a sign and source of Black resilience. Jones’ natural hair ultimately
becomes politically significant to her. Transitioning to natural hair feels empowering for her. Each
new curl is not only a war cry, but a discursive tool she uses in her performance to make space for
herself in a political gathering that did not explicitly acknowledge her unique subjective, embodied
experiences as a Black queer woman. “Wild Crown” is a poetic distillation of this study.
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

4
This dissertation is about Black
3
women’s contributions to racial justice, gender equality,
and the global economy, asserted through beauty culture. It is about the hundreds of thousands,
perhaps millions of women of African descent who have transitioned out of chemically relaxed or
thermally straightened hair and embraced their naturally curly and kinky hair textures since the
turn of the 21
st
century. Through the voices of some of these women, this research aims to
contribute to sociologists’ understandings of embodied resistance as a strategy and impetus for
social change, and as an influential factor in both local and global processes of racial formation.
As Tate (2016) observes, “Black beauty’s Black Atlantic diasporic roots and routes has affected
whole cultures as it has involved the shifting of socio-political not just aesthetic boundaries,
transformed discourses and changed both individual and communal identities” (p. 1).
Specifically, this research considers “going natural” as political resistance against a form
of gendered racism in which white women’s bodies are considered morally and aesthetically
superior to all other women’s bodies. I use Wingfield’s (2008) term gendered racism to capture
the intersectional reality that women’s bodies are assigned disparate levels of protection, value,
and desirability, thereby naturalizing and legitimizing inequality between women of different races
and class backgrounds (Wingfield, 2008; Collins, 2005; Nagel, 2003). Systemic gendered racism

3
I use the term “Black” synonymously with women of African descent and Africana women. As
I will discuss in Chapter 4, identifying as Black is sometimes a new and political decision for
women who transition to natural hair today, especially in places like South Africa and Brazil
with distinct categorical terms for multiracial people with African ancestry. In recognition of the
variety of racial structures that exist across the Black Atlantic, I note participants’ additional or
other ways of racially self-identifying when I introduce them in the text.
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

5
has both ideological and material consequences, and a white-centric beauty standard that idealizes
long, straight hair is one manifestation. To analyze Black women’s experiences, especially
concerning hair, from the lens of race, class or gender alone would obscure their marginalized
position at the intersection of multiple systems of social stratification.
Black Hair Matters
Dating back to the transatlantic slave trade, the state and the media have deployed
controlling images of Black women to justify their marginalization under capitalist, patriarchal
white supremacy (Springer, 2007; Collins, 2000; Gilkes, 1983). Racist tropes that Black women
are inferior and sub-human have been mapped onto discourses about coily hair, such that it is
routinely described as wild, exotic, or needing to be tamed (Banks, 2000; Rooks, 1996). These
stigmas have persisted through to present day. Women of African descent face pressures to manage
their presentations-of-self due to a distance from valued forms of femininity and in response to
racist and sexist ideologies that deem their bodies closer to the earth, uncontrollable, and
uncivilized. Hair texture and style are often used to measure Black women’s worthiness of
economic, social, and cultural capital, such that when a Black woman chooses not to straighten
her hair, her natural hair is often viewed by employers, educators, and romantic partners as an
indicator of her inherent inclination to poverty, servitude, laziness, wildness, criminality or
backwardness (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Rooks, 1996; Mercer, 1994). Black women’s natural beauty
is denied by society, placing them beyond cultural understandings of womanhood as represented
by the media (Thompson, 2009). lack and multiracial women often feel shamed into disciplining
their bodies using chemical relaxers and weaves to keep their jobs and perform heterosexual
womanhood appropriately (Thompson, 2009; Tate, 2007). The treatment of Black women’s
natural hair as problematic demonstrates that “the allocation of power and resources not only in
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

6
the domestic, economic, and political domains but also in the broad arena of interpersonal
relations” is dependent upon “doing gender” per white standards (West & Zimmerman, 1987, p.
145).
Gendered racism is so culturally deep that notions that kinky hair textures should be
straightened are often internalized by Black women themselves and transmitted across generations.
Many Black communities consider hair relaxers (a chemical process that permanently straightens
hair) both rite of passage into Black womanhood and a sign of economic stability (Byrd & Tharps,
2014; Jacobs-Huey, 2006; Willett, 2000). Banks’ (2000) interviews with Black American women
in the 1990s reveal how understandings that wavy or curly hair is “good hair” and tightly coiled
hair is “bad hair” are learned by children at early ages in schools, churches and at home. Some
Black women and girls’ feelings about themselves are formed in relation to these cultural
discourses. Thompson (2009) finds that Black and biracial Americans continue to engage in
practices to align their appearance with white beauty norms and laments, “It is the 21
st
century, yet
Black women are still struggling to meet this standard” (p. 855).
A study by The Perception Institute (2017) investigated the prevalence and strength of this
standard. The researchers measured whether Americans hold any implicit or explicit bias toward
Black women’s natural hair to estimate the impact of hairstyle on how Black women are perceived
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by others and how Black women perceive themselves
4
. They found that while women of all racial
backgrounds feel some level of anxiety around their hair, Black women experience higher levels
of anxiety than others, and that Black women’s anxieties around their hair are substantiated by
white women’s devaluations of natural hairstyles; regardless of race, the majority research
participants showed implicit bias against Black women who wear their hair in textured styles.
Banks (2000) further argues that kinky hair is so devalued in society and so significant to race,
class and gender identity that Black women are socialized into a collective consciousness around
hair. It is no wonder Collins (2000) observes that “exploring how externally defined standards of
beauty affect Black women’s self-images, our relationships to one another, and our relationships
with Black men has been one recurring theme in Black feminist thought” (p. 82). Angela Davis,
Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, and Alice Walker and many other
women writers across the Black Atlantic have made hair a recurring subject.
Today’s natural hair movement took root and blossoms from this unlikely soil. Against
intersecting systems of racism, patriarchy, and neoliberal capitalism, and against an outpouring of
white supremacist language and xenophobia across the United States and Western Europe in the
2010s, natural hair has come to occupy an important place in Black women’s identity politics

4
The Perception Institute surveyed a national sample of 4,163 participants using a computerized
Implicit Association Test (IAT) that flashed images of Black women with textured or smooth
hairstyles to document whether and how quickly participants associate pleasant words (like
“love,” “peace,” and “happy”) or unpleasant words (like “death,” “hatred,” “evil”) with each
image. Such tests have become common in social psychology since the mid-1990s, and are
designed to detect the strength of association between concepts and evaluations.
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across what Gilroy (1993) terms the Black Atlantic—the diasporic African community that spans
North and South America, the Caribbean, West and Southern Africa, and Europe. An international
community of women have made embracing their natural hair textures both a popular and political
action over and against disparaging comments from family members, legally sanctioned dismissals
from jobs, pat downs from airport officials, and pets from strangers that treat Black women like
animals or public property. These women have self-labeled this phenomenon the “natural hair
movement” in the new local, transnational, and online communities and industries they have built
around natural hair culture
5
. This dissertation centers the women who participate in this movement,
the spaces for sisterhood they have created, and their ventures for serving Black women’s unmet
demands for representation, political influence, and consumer options. In what follows, I describe
what women say it feels like to challenge stereotypes about Black hair that they’ve internalized,
that their communities uphold, and that the mainstream media perpetuates through exclusionary,
white-centered representations of beauty and professionalism.
Today’s natural hair communities are sizeable. CurlFest in Brooklyn, New York and Taliah
Waajid’s World Natural Hair Show in Atlanta, Georgia both report upwards of 30,000 attendees

5
I choose to use the term “movement” throughout this manuscript to reflect how natural hair
communities have named their culture and described its meanings. This dissertation would be
illegible to those I interviewed and met in the field if I called the natural hair movement anything
other than a movement, even if it does not meet every sociologists’ criteria for one. I engage the
sociological literature on social movements to take seriously women’s claims that natural has
political implications. See also Saro-Wiwa’s (2012) article for The New York Times on natural
hair as a social movement.
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at their annual events. These natural hair communities extend online, blurring the boundaries
between physical natural hair meet-ups and digital natural hair forums. A quick YouTube search
of natural hair yields millions of hits, and a Google search for blogs yields tens of millions more.
#NaturalHair has been tagged in over 15 million photos on Instagram. There are countless
YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, Facebook groups, websites, blogs, Pinterest lists, and
Tumblr archives dedicated to natural hair culture. Natural hair movement social media influencers,
event organizers, and lay participants migrate regionally, nationally, transnationally and digitally,
circulating products, hair care practices, politics and Black feminist praxis along the way. With the
rise of visually oriented online social media platforms, long existing circuits of cultural exchange
among Africana women have expanded in the digital age. Through tutorials, aesthetic
entrepreneurship, and grassroots media production, natural hair has become the center of resistant
and Black-affirming aesthetics and culture across the African diaspora. Geographically distant
communities of Africana women collaboratively advocate for transitioning to natural hair through
coordinated events like International Natural Hair Meet-Up Day, where local hosts from Japan to
The Netherlands organize gatherings for Black women in their communities and discuss a set
program of topics.
The women I interviewed resist the idea that natural hair is just a consumerist fashion trend,
describing it as inherently political symbol. But unlike during the 1960s and 1970s, wearing natural
hair today is not necessarily a signifier of Black Nationalist commitments. Instead of aiming to
change specific policies or institutional structures, 21
st
-century natural hair advocates more often
aim to transform white supremacist cultural notions that kinky hair is ugly, unprofessional, or
unmanageable within Black women’s own psyches. Alongside encouraging women of African
descent to embrace the beauty in their kinks and curls, today’s natural hair movement spaces
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provide practical information about healthy hair care practices and consumer options, and how to
navigate pressures to straighten one’s hair at school, work, and in romantic relationships.
Disseminating practical information is crucial since many Black women have not seen their hair
un-straightened since childhood and have instead relied on professional stylists for regular thermal
presses and chemical relaxers. This dual goal of self-acceptance and knowledge distribution is
exemplified by the massively successful, touring worldwide hair forum hosted by beauty blogger
Taren Guy, entitled “Luv & Learn Your Beauty.” The natural hair movement’s focus on emotions,
interpersonal relationships, and consumer options challenge sociological understandings about the
defining features of a social movement.
Such initiatives are so influential that wearing un-straightened kinky hair is no longer a
niche style among Black women. A new economy for and aesthetic around natural hair has caught
the attention of mainstream media and transnational corporations. Even pop culture’s most iconic
symbols for feminine beauty have responded to the natural hair movement’s influence. In 2015,
after decades of demands for more a realistic Barbie, Mattel introduced new dolls with darker skin
tones and coily hair. That same year, Angolan model Maria Borges made headlines for walking in
the Victoria’s Secret runway show with her natural hair for the first time—a significant departure
from the flowing extensions she wore in the last two shows and the brand’s signature long, wavy-
haired representation of feminine desirability. In 2017, Miss Jamaica, Davina Bennett, became the
first contestant with natural hair to make it the finals of the Miss Universe pageant and became a
worldwide trending topic on Twitter because of her hair. Major retailer Target created an entirely
new front-facing display in the cosmetics section of its stores dedicated to showcasing products
for naturally curly and kinky hair, many manufactured in small batches by emerging Black women
entrepreneurs. Until recently, items for “ethnic” women had been marginalized to a small section
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at the end of the hair aisle or were omitted entirely from most stores depending on corporate
analyses of neighborhood demographics. By creating a new area for healthy products to care for
curls, major retailers are finally acknowledging that Black women are worthy of provision and that
Black-owned companies are worthwhile investments. The 2018 blockbuster film Black Panther
was a celebration of natural hairstyles. Women in the fictional African nation of Wakanda donned
shaved heads, Bantu knots, dreadlocks, braids, and Afros. One reviewer concluded that the film
“weds a Black Nationalist aesthetic with an ethos of global kinship” (Miles, 2018).

A cultural phenomenon so global in scope that it engages participants across the Black
Atlantic and forces established mainstream companies to reconsider their tactics, the 21
st
-century
natural hair movement begs scholarly analysis. The simultaneous developments of the natural hair
Figure 1.1: Cover of O Magazine’s “Let’s Talk About Hair” Issue (September 2013)
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movement, social media technology, increased concern about the environment and climate change,
and large-scale anti-racist organizing and mobilization prompt questions of critical significance:
• How are women of African descent reproducing, negotiating and challenging beauty ideals
through natural hair? How do Black women experience ‘going natural’? What beauty
ideals are advanced by and through natural hair communities?
• How is race being constituted in the current discourse on Black hairstyles and natural hair
politics? How do gender, race, location, and historical context shape what natural hair
means to individual women and their communities?
• How does the current commercialized neoliberal context constrain, enable and inform
Black women’s beauty practices and their meanings? How does the natural hair movement
reorganize Black women’s relationships to the global market and within the Black beauty
industry?
I explore these questions with a mixed-methods qualitative approach including interviews with
people who participate in natural hair culture and three years of multi-sited participant observation
in natural hair spaces. By focusing on where and how conversations about natural hair are taking
place, as well as who is allowed and encouraged to participate in these conversations, I address the
influence of Black women’s changing beauty practices on their relationships with their bodies in
their entirety, the virtual, global, and entrepreneurial marketplace, and each other.
On the Body and Embodiment
Sociologists of embodiment theorize the human body as a “medium of culture” (Bordo,
1993), or a physical form through social hierarchies, control, and etiquette are inscribed. How
bodies look, how bodies are worked upon, and how bodies are treated by others can all be a starting
place for discussing broader social dynamics. After all, we move through the world within our
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bodies and we increasingly incorporate the body into our digital interactions, as well. Fashion,
cosmetic surgery, comportment, dis/ability and other forms of bodily presentation are ways people
signal to others their race, class, gender, sexual, cultural, religious, and political identities and
social locations. But human bodies are not solely a product of agency; bodies are also socially
constructed. As Synnott (1993) writes, “The body is not only a political symbol, it is itself
political” (p. 121). Historically-situated state policies, economic arrangements, and cultural norms
influence how bodies labor, the physical environments in which bodies live, and how humans
express their individual agency. Connell (2009) calls this reflexive, dynamic process of bodily
agency and objectification social embodiment. Connell further explains that bodies are central to
gender relations because gender is shaped by power arrangements within the reproductive arena
in social life. Other feminist scholars have pointed out that the body is significant for women
because, while cultural messages tell men that their worth is tied up in their work, cultural
messages more often tell women that their worth is tied up in their bodies—particularly in their
proximity to beauty standards and their ability to bear children (Bordo, 1993; Wolf, 1991; Bartky,
1990). Not only do outsiders objectify women’s bodies, but also most women are socialized to
imagine their own bodies as incapable, mysterious, vulnerable, and ornamental (Young, 1980).
Frigga Haug et al. (1987) describe this complicated experience through the phrase the “subjective-
aspects-within-being-as-object.” By analyzing cultural materials like advertisements, film, and art
alongside women’s own stories, Haug et al. (1987) explain that while women live in a state of
constant objectification by others, they also engage in an often-pleasurable experience of
objectification that is made more gratifying by cultural and social rewards, and thus often entails
a sense of agency and subjectivity. Though there is potential and opportunity for agentic, creative,
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and resistant expression over against sexist objectification, embodiment always responds to the
social systems within which people live (Dworkin & Wachs 2009; Haug et al., 1997).
Women’s bodies are valued and treated differently depending on their positions within
racial and economic hierarchies. Race and class intersect with gender to shape Black women’s
embodied experiences of enslavement, violence, citizenship, medicine, love, and more. For
example, white middle-class American women’s status as property of their husbands or fathers
prevented them from making decisions about their own monetary earnings, children’s futures, and
possessions through the late 19
th
century, but Black enslaved women were literally property. Beliefs
about women’s sexually seductive power are also intensified for Black women and have been
deployed by governments to rationalize forced sterilizations and punitive welfare policies (hooks,
2014; Collins, 2005; Hays, 2004; Thomson, 1997). Such treatments and stereotypes about Black
women’s bodies are mutually shaped by white supremacy, patriarchy and class arrangements,
undermining them in ways unique from differently racialized women.
Beauty ideals are not just a product of European colonial histories and race-based slavery;
exclusionary beauty ideals are constantly being reproduced by the fashion and entertainment
industries. Representations of women’s bodies as young, tall, thin, blonde, and light-skinned
within the mainstream media and advertisements continue to perpetuate a white-centered ideal for
feminine beauty, respectability and professionalism, constraining and informing women’s options
for self-presentation (Jha, 2015; Johnson, 2013; Mears, 2011; Craig, 2002; Collins, 2000; Banet-
Weiser, 1999). For example, Mears’ (2011) ethnography describes how representations in the
entertainment and fashion industries, especially of women, are literally racially policed by
advertisers, executives, designers, photographers, editors, and modeling agents. These actors
exclude women of color from conceptualizations of what “high-end” means. As a result, the
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commercial fashion and editorial images that saturate everyday life participate in a white-
supremacist capitalist patriarchal system that naturalizes and reinforces social inequalities. In
addition, white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies foster the co-creation of controlling images
of Black womanhood to justify Black women’s oppression (Collins, 2000). Elite groups, in
exercising power, have represented Black women as sexually animalistic jezebels, wild sapphires,
subservient mammies, and generally “Other” to white humanity to justify the use of Black
women’s bodies as unpaid chattel laborers, as breeders for more slaves, and to shelter white men
from legal penalties for raping Black women (Weitz, 2009; Nagel, 2003; Collins, 2000; Gilkes,
1983).
Much intersectional research finds that economic constraints and racial domination stratify
women’s access to aesthetic forms of human capital, as well (Jha, 2015; Mears, 2011; Craig, 2006;
Banks, 2000; McCaughey, 1998; Rooks, 1996). For women, light skin, European facial features,
and slim body frames are resources, or feminine currencies, that are valuable in the employment
and dating markets (Jha, 2015; Hunter, 2005). However, as women enter collective contexts, they
often discover opportunities to create new meanings, narratives, and experiences of embodiment.
Black feminist scholars have shown how Black salons and hair shows offer rare spaces for Black
women bond with one another, circumvent a racist job market to become economically
independent, express creativity, politically strategize, and escape the stresses of work and family
(Wingfield, 2008; Jacobs-Huey, 2006; Battle-Walters, 2004; Mercer, 1994). As comedian Phoebe
Robinson (2016) aptly explains about the subjective and collective aspects of Black hairstyling,
“There is an element of play, like being a pop star who constantly reinvents her look. There’s also
a bond, a band of sisters, if you will, because when we see each other we know exactly what it
took to get our hair a certain kind of way” (p. 6). Research on beauty pageants documents how
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communities marginalized by race combat the systematic exclusion of non-white women from
Western conceptions of beauty by organizing their own spaces for self-valuation (Balogun, 2012;
Craig, 2002). Participation in beauty pageants might reinforce women’s status as symbolic objects,
but pageants have also progressively rearticulated dominant Eurocentric standards of beauty to
affirm darker skin, curly hair and fuller figures (Balogun, 2012; King-O’Riain, 2006; Craig, 2002;
Banet-Weiser, 1999). The natural hair movement offers several examples: The Naturally Crowned
Carolina Beauty and Scholarship pageant, established in 2014, “uplifts the beauty of natural hair
(and the dreams of women who wear it)” by providing scholarships and start-up capital for the
winners. Similarly, Cuban performance artist Susana Delahante held a natural hair pageant in
Havana in 2015, crowning 72-year-old Felicia Solano’s fluffy white Afro the winner. Events like
these subvert exclusionary norms that measure women by proximity to youth, whiteness, and
wealth.
In sum, embodiment is both the product of capitalist, white supremacist, and sexist systems
and people’s responses to and experiences of these systems. For women of color, body work is
mutually informed by the pressures to avoid racist stigma and violence and the pleasures of
securing social, cultural and aesthetic capital.
Why Study Hair?
Everyone everywhere has a hair story. Because of hair’s versatility, visibility, and uniquely
personal quality, it is the body's ripest material for creative self-expression (Weitz, 2005). Hair is
not simply a biological fact; hair is “on the cusp between self and society, nature and culture”
(Mercer, 1994, p. 103). Hair is social material that is groomed, prepared, and cultivated by human
hands. As the most malleable part of the human body, it almost always expresses social dynamics.
We “read” other people’s hair for clues about their social location and political stance towards the
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world. Hair can signify age through greying or balding, health through hair loss or
overgrowth, race through texture and color, and gender through the presence or absence of
secondary sex-characteristics and hair styling. Hair can be cut, colored, dyed, covered, gelled,
waxed, plucked, lasered, dreadlocked, braided, relaxed and many combinations of the above. The
symbolic value of hair is perhaps most visible in religious practices. In many cultures around the
world, hair is imbued with moral and spiritual significance. Growing hair long is considered a sign
of spiritual strength and commitment for Rastafarians and Sikhs, while hair shaving rituals are
incorporated during Hindu supplications to God. Covering hair signifies piety, obedience, and
modesty for Orthodox Jewish and Muslim women. Hair was the ultimate source of strength for the
Biblical figure Samson.
Hairstyling practices demonstrate that macro-level structures—like political, economic
and ideological frameworks—are not divorced from the agency of human actors, discourses, and
representations. Trends in ways people manipulate their hair are influenced by the social systems
in which they live. For example, dominant gendered systems of representation in the West exclude
aging women, rendering them past womanhood and thus socially, economically, and sexually
obsolete (Calasanti, 2007). The stigmatization of grey hair on women as a physical sign of aging
is one way this ideal is expressed. Once safer hair dyes formulated without peroxide hit the market
in the late 1950s, artificial hair color became an essential feminine routine that capitalized on
women’s insecurities about aging out of desirability (Weitz, 2005). More than half of women over
35 years of age who dye their hair do so to cover greys (Sander, 2000). For men, however,
selectively coloring grey hair can be instrumental in negotiating competitive job markets that tie
innovation, motivation, and competence to youth. For example, Just for Men’s “Touch of Gray”
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hair dye pits elders’ experience against youthful energy in its advertisements. Gender differentiated
hairstyling is perhaps the most widespread cultural norm (Weitz, 2005).
Style politics, like all politics, are historically situated and constantly contested. The natural
hair movement is but one of many resistant subcultures that have taken up hair as symbolic
material. For example, at the peak of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States, young
women flappers wore short haircuts in resistance against Victorian gender binaries that their
generation was coming to see as limiting and outdated (Johnson & Barber, 2019; Zdatny, 2006).
Hair length is tied to femininity the West, so the flapper’s “bob” progressively deemphasized
differences between men and women’s bodies. It is important to note that hair styling is often also
taken up as symbolic material for surveillance and control, and that resistant politics are always at
risk for backlash and corporate cooptation. As progressive women of the “first-wave” feminist
movement began declaring new habits of bodily self-determination, physicians and media outlets
asserted that body hair on women was disgustingly symbolic of their political extremism, laziness,
or deviance (Herzig, 2016; Lesnik-Oberstein, 2013). By the mid 20
th
century, such discourses
firmly retrenched the patriarchal status quo around hairstyling and gave rise to a plethora of new
technologies for removing hair directed mainly at women. Advertisements routinely refer body
hair on women as “unwanted” or “excessive” to sell products, and conservative estimates believe
that 99% of American women have tried hair removal practices and that 85% do so regularly
(Herzig, 2016).
Elite groups do not have a unified gaze that maintains the total oppression of others;
communities can and do redefine beauty, gender, race, and culture through hairstyling to create
spaces for the appreciation of difference. In the 1970s, and later in the 1990s, Black activist
communities celebrated kinky and coily hair textures, ranking women’s political commitment by
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their choice to wear “natural” Afro styles (Craig, 2006). Afros subverted white supremacist beauty
preferences for long, straight hair. Likewise, some LGBTQ communities have their own beauty
norms that disregard or oppose the hegemonic white heterosexual male gaze. Cogan (1999) finds
that lesbian communities encode some unique markers of beauty like short haircuts, denim, and
leather that allow them to identify each other and more comfortably enter lesbian spaces. For
example, in the 1950s and 1960s, the DA (“duck’s ass”) haircut signified lesbian identity for
women, and in the 1980’s the mullet performed a similar function (Weitz, 2005). Within lesbian
communities, the choice to reject a “feminine” hairstyle is often tangled up with understandings
of lesbian authenticity and commitment, which can serve to police and exclude “femme” women
from lesbian spaces (Weitz, 2005; Stein, 1997). Race also stratifies beauty, desirability, and
inclusion in lesbian communities. Lyle, Jones, and Drakes (1999) note that Black lesbians are often
underrepresented in gay media and that most representations of lesbian beauty depict athletic white
women, so Black lesbian communities have developed their own beauty norms. Moore’s (2006)
research on gender display in Black lesbian communities found that “femme aggressive” and
“transgressive” lesbians, or Black lesbians who gender-blend by incorporating some or mostly
masculine presentations, are more likely to wear buzz cuts, dreadlocks, twists, and other natural
hairstyles. In a conversation analyzing their personal experiences with Black lesbian beauty, Lyle,
Jones, and Drakes (1999) contemplated how the rise of 1990s Afrocentrism challenged and
association of natural hair with a Black lesbian identity. Jones wondered:
Right now, in Black culture, we’re going through a whole change of trying to look more
Afrocentric- an interesting change is emerging. What we identify as a Black lesbian is often
a person who wears her hair natural, uses no make-up, and wears ‘dreads.” I wonder how
those images are now regarded; if it’s gonna make straight Black folk think they might be
misidentified as queer (p. 52).

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During the time of their conversation, natural hair was widely considered outside the realm of
heterosexual desirability, and many lesbians choose “dyke” haircuts to protect themselves from
being desired and pursued by men (Weitz, 2001; Lyle, Jones & Drakes, 1999). However,
discrimination, prejudice, and the threat of violent homophobia police binary gender self-
presentations and discourage some women from outwardly signaling a lesbian identity through
hair and dress (Weitz, 2001). As Butler’s (2004) incisive portrait of violence against intersex and
trans communities and Collins’ (2005) analysis of Sakia Gunn’s murder both demonstrate, “doing
difference” on the body is political, risky, and often exclusionary.
Spaces for haircare and beauty work, like beauty supply stores, cosmetology schools, hair
shows, blogs, industry trade shows, salons, and barbershops, can also tell us much about gender
relations, race relations, labor and trade. Beauty shops are “sites of interaction not around simply
the giving and receiving of hair care, but cultural exchanges about life” (Jacobs-Huey, 2006, p.
17). For example, Barber’s (2017) ethnography examines “metrosexual” culture, exploring how
white middle-class men’s increasing participation in beauty culture has given rise to the newly
emergent high-end men’s hair salon. Barber describes how patrons of these salons work to protect
and project their claims to hegemonic masculinity over and against the beauty services they receive
and women workers who service them. Similarly, historian Douglas Bristol, Jr. (2009) explains
how barbering was a rare occupation that enabled enslaved and free Black men to become
entrepreneurial businessmen during the antebellum period. Through their close contact with white
elites, Black barbers learned the limits and possibilities afforded by accommodating white-middle
class masculine social etiquette. After emancipation, Black barbers’ temporary power over white
clients was no longer tolerated, and barbershops became increasingly segregated by race.
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For over a century, racism in the mainstream job market has pushed Black women towards
entrepreneurship in the hair care industry, a racial enclave economy with minimal white oversight
(Gill, 2010; Wingfield, 2008; Blackwelder, 2003). The beauty shop’s segregation by race and
gender has enabled Black feminist activism to flourish within its walls. At the salon, Black women
can critique racism and patriarchy together in a safe space (Gill, 2010; Blackwelder, 2003; Willett,
2000). Most cosmetology schools do not teach their students how to care for kinky hair or perform
services many Black women receive, like braiding, weaving, and relaxers, so Black women apply
their lay and learned knowledge to serve one another (Wingfield, 2008; Jacobs-Huey, 2006).
Jacobs-Huey’s (2006) ethnography finds that Black hair stylists liken themselves as akin to
physicians, as skilled experts on Black hair over and against their clients, kitchen beauticians, and
non-Black cosmetologists. West African immigrant women are particularly drawn to salon
ownership because it allows them to monetize cultural braiding skills, increase their migrant
mobility and become economically visible (Settler, 2017; Wingfield, 2008). In many places around
the world, specializing in hair braiding enables women of African descent to avoid expensive
cosmetology licensing regulations.
How, why and where people discuss and care for their bodies often signifies their racial,
gender, cultural, and professional identities. Hair is an especially expressive bodily material upon
which people “write” their identity politics. In this study, I “read” an empirically new phenomenon
in Black women’s hair culture—the natural hair movement—and discuss how this movement has
reimagined Black beauty, informed Black women’s self-care practices, created novel spaces for
cultural production like natural hair shows, blogs, and vlogs, catalyzing new forms of
entrepreneurship. I theorize what these shifts can tell us about Black women’s lives by building
upon the existing literature on the body and embodiment, racial formation theory, and feminist
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analyses of neoliberal capitalism. In bringing these literatures together, my analysis highlights
Black women’s lived experiences within and strategies of resistance against intersecting of
systems of race, class, and gender.
Black Women, Natural Hair and Gendered Racial Formation
In this section, I provide a brief overview of key terms and concepts in racial formation
theory and explain how I expand critical race sociology to theorize Africana women’s experiences
of race and racialization. Omi and Winant’s (1994) theory of racial formation defines race as “a
concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types
of human bodies” (p. 55). Race is not an essential or biological characteristic, but a socially
constructed category of difference that determines groups’ material, political and social status
(Harris, 1993). Racialization, in turn, is the process by which the ruling group justifies its position
by asserting that the phenotypical features of the oppressed groups, like Black peoples’ coiled hair
textures, express their essential and biological inferiority (Cha-Jua, 2001). Those in power further
legitimate their privileged position through racial formation projects, which are racialized political,
religious, academic and artistic representations and discourses circulating at the macro-level.
These representations perform the ideological work of race and racism by drawing associations
between racialized groups and other phenomena to legitimate social arrangements. Through racial
projects, racial categories are “created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (Omi & Winant,
1994, p. 55). Since the power elite in the United States and in other places with histories of
European colonization is dominated by whites, current racial categories and racial formation
projects must always be understood within such historical contexts of white supremacy (Omi &
Winant, 1994). White elites have generated and institutionalized racism through their
disproportionate control over the military, the economy, religion, the mainstream media and
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through enforcing hegemonic conceptions of normal and abnormal bodies. Therefore, this research
emphasizes the continuing and systemic nature of white-supremacist racism. But racialization,
like all hegemonic practices, is not fixed but responds to competing representations. Those with
less privilege and who lack institutional power also influence and drive the content and results of
racial projects. Racial formation is a “continuing encounter between despotic and democratic
practices, in which individuals and groups confronted by state power and entrenched privilege but
not entirely limited by those obstacles make choices and locate themselves over and over in the
constant racial ‘reconstruction’ of everyday life” (Omi & Winant, 2012, p. 327). In other words,
resistance efforts by marginalized groups, like women of African descent in the natural hair
movement, participate in the process of racial formation by producing alternative discourses and
applying pressure on the state. The state, in turn, responds to movements of resistance by shifting
policies and definitions. New moments of racial formation are constantly unfolding.
Racial formation theory as initially conceived by Omi and Winant (1994) minimally
includes gender in its frame of analysis and did not engage beyond second-wave feminist ideas of
sex-categorical difference (Kandaswamy, 2012). Thus, much of the research on racial formation
tends to center the experiences of men of color by ignoring gender as a simultaneous, co-
constitutive and interacting structure of power (Glenn, 1999). But intersectional theorists have
elaborated racial formation approaches to show how racial projects take on gendered and class
dimensions because systems of racism, capitalism and patriarchy interlock and mutually reinforce
each other (Kandaswamy, 2012; Ferguson, 2012; Kitch, 2009). Intersectional feminist theory
draws attention to how racist, patriarchal and capitalist systems intersect and produce distinct
experiences of oppression for women of color (Collins, 1986; Crenshaw, 1991; hooks, 1984;
Combahee River Collective, 1977). Notwithstanding this insight, empirical analyses of racial
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formation have not broadly taken up the contributions of intersectionality. The absence of gender
in the critical race sociology literature may be reflecting the masculine orientation of the most
highly publicized anti-racist organizing for social change. We know from testimonies like Michelle
Wallace’s Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1990), and more recent hashtag
campaigns like #SayHerName that Black women have historically been and continue to be
silenced within movements even though they are often responsible for much of their organizing
labor. Participation in the natural hair movement is almost exclusively women, highlighting the
need for an intersectional race and gender analysis that illuminates both the pleasures of Black
women’s cultures and the specific violence of what Bailey (2010) calls “misogynoir,” a particular
form of anti-Black sexism directed towards women of African descent in popular culture.
Omi and Winant’s (1994) focus on the state also does not account for multi-level factors
influencing racial formation. Race is not only created and maintained at the structural level through
law and policy; the process of racial formation, as I see it, is also created, invoked, obscured and
reimagined through the self-representative choices people make. For example, Carbado and Harris
(2012) highlight how racial formation can operate at the micro-level in their analysis of
autobiographical narratives in college application statements, describing how state policies
requiring colorblind university admission processes fail because the meanings of writers’
experiences depend upon how they inscribe and express race in their texts. Likewise, Carrington
(2000) uses racial formation theory to analyze media discourses alongside sports governing bodies
and sporting rules as “sporting racial projects” that produce and respond to racial regimes.
However, few sociologists employing racial formation substantially move beyond the field’s
macro-level legal studies origins to focus on the interpersonal and subjective processes of
racialization. Perhaps because racial formation theory emphasizes social constructionism against
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biological understandings of race and racism that have been used to justify policies of genocide
and social Darwinism, empirical applications of racial formation theory have failed to connect
insights about racialized self-representation and racial formation to the embodiment literature.
Necessarily, this research on the natural hair movement connects the fields of embodiment studies
and critical race studies to demonstrate how racial projects also operate at the micro-level of the
body. People can express, emphasize and/or minimize racial signifiers through hairstyle, fashion,
makeup, plastic surgery, and comportment. In addition, racialized and gendered social structures,
for example stratified labor markets that usher many women of color into low-wage service work,
influence how bodies are used, what bodies consume, and what bodies look like. Bodies are
simultaneously objects and agents of racial formation.
The present research will also show that racial politics and racial formation projects at the
state and individual levels draw from internationally circulating discourses across the Black
Atlantic. While racial categories across the African diaspora differ, parallel experiences of
European colonization, racial slavery, and white domination unite people of African descent in
Europe, the Caribbean, the Americas, and West Africa in a common Black consciousness,
understanding, and experience of race and racialization (Gilroy, 1993). The middle passage was
not a one-way or final moment of transfer of African peoples across the Atlantic. Africana people
in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and on the African continent have continued to
communicate, finding inspiration in one another’s art, politics and experiences. For Black women,
fashion and style have been important modes for facilitating and circulating global political
exchange. Historian Tanisha Ford (2016) describes how “soul style,” like Afros, Kinte cloth,
cornrows and hoop earrings, were a central way that Black Americans and Britons forged solidarity
with real and imagined communities of women on the African continent from the 1950s to the
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1990s. Ford argues that soul style was born out of Africana women’s interconnected political
efforts, where dress became both a symbol of race and gender liberation and a substantive weapon
against economic marginalization and police aggression. For example, Black women in the
townships of South Africa used their high heels strike back at the militarized police during anti-
apartheid protests.
Today’s natural hair movement invites a much needed intersectional and multi-level
reconceptualization and application of racial formation theory. The interviews, media analyses,
and observations presented in Each New Curl Howling a War Cry highlight the gendered
dimensions of racial formation and reveal that racial projects draw from women’s interrelated
experiences of private, collective, and transnational violence and pleasure across the Black
Atlantic. Africana women imagine, express and create social change through their stylized
performances, self-representations and the commodification of their own bodies. Since kinky hair
is a racialized phenotype, when women of color collectively celebrate the socially risky and
unpopular choice to not straighten their hair, the body becomes a site of gendered racial resistance
and contested meanings. Having received criticism of their choice to wear natural hair, many of
my interviewees posit natural hair as the centerpiece of a political project—a way of “acting out”
identity politics in contestation of a racial preference baseline that devalues Black femininity. In
this dissertation, I describe how Africana women are using natural hair to write new narratives—
new articulations of their personal and collective visions for racial freedom, upward mobility, and
women’s empowerment.
Contextualizing 21
st
Century Natural Hair Politics
Racial projects are grounded in social structures and ideologies of a moment and place.
Neoliberal culture is central to the forms of surveillance, control, and resistance that manifest
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today. With contemporary shifts towards unrestrained markets, privatization, and the decline in
social welfare in the name of individualism, social subjects, like the market itself, are increasingly
considered privately responsible for the costs of social reproduction and economic success
(Duggan, 2003). Neoliberalism idealizes “self-managing, autonomous and enterprising” subjects
(Gill & Scharff, 2011, p. 7). In this postindustrial order, the body is a signifier of discipline and
good citizenship, requiring that individuals interact with consumer capitalism to demonstrate
moral worth (Dworkin & Wachs, 2009). Many scholars argue that the neoliberal rhetoric of
individual choice, entitlement and pleasure depoliticize social justice issues by grounding
citizenship in consumption (Butler, 2013; McRobbie, 2009; Gill, 2007). Others assert that
neoliberal politics minimally disrupts structural race, class, and gender inequality by empowering
individual women at best, and reproducing social hierarchies at worst (Butler, 2013; Gill &
Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2009; Duggan, 2003). Feminist anti-beauty scholars fall in this camp,
viewing beauty culture’s capitalist engine as driving and depleting women’s subjectivities (Bordo,
1993; Wolf, 1991; Bartky, 1990). In their assessment, beauty is a disciplinary force, a form of
power that systematically subjugates women. Wolf (1991) argues that while the women’s
movement of the 1970s successfully deconstructed most fictions of femininity like domesticity,
motherhood, and chastity, “beauty myths” remained intact. Like Wolf, Faludi (2009) argues that
women paradoxically face increasing pressures to be thin, young, and demure despite gains in
political, sexual, and economic power and self-determination. These scholars believe that
strengthening and all-encompassing beauty ideals are rooted in and maintained by corporations
that rely on women as consumers who seek to embody them. Elias, Gill, and Scharff (2017) that
argue under neoliberalism, all women are expected to engage in “aesthetic entrepreneurship” due
to the rising numbers of images and technologies to alter the way we look.
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Women’s beauty practices can reveal the raced, classed and gendered contexts of their lives
and can serve as tangible marks of social control (Fahs, 2011). White, middle-class representations
of feminine beauty are often deployed by corporations to sell goods and services to “improve”
women’s bodies (Mears, 2011; Dworkin & Wachs, 2009; Glenn, 2008; Bordo, 1993). The global
and billion-dollar industries for skin lightening products, cosmetic surgery, and commoditized
human hair disproportionately target non-white women as consumers who can come closer to
normative beauty ideals through consumption (hooks, 2015a; Fahs, 2011; Glenn, 2008; Byrd &
Solomon, 2005). For example, the market research firm Mintel estimates that the Black hair care
market will reach $761 million by 2017, and as much as half a trillion dollars if e-commerce,
distributors, weaves, and independent beauty supply stores are considered in calculations (Roberts,
2014). Jarrin’s (2016) cultural analysis asserts that racialized beauty hierarchies are a technology
of biopower in Brazil, where non-white women are increasingly pressured to bear the economic
costs of plastic surgery as a form of “self-improvement.” Medical, scientific, and public health
discourses that everyone has the “right to beauty” encourage individual women assume the task of
actualizing the state’s whitening eugenics project by eliminating facial features that look Black or
indigenous.
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These researchers suggest that any time and money women invest in beautification and
aesthetics is wasteful, shallow, regressive and oppressive. However, critiques of consumer-based
politics rarely involve immersion into the actual lives and motivations of those who, they argue,
engage in coercive and depoliticized consumption, and such categorical evaluations of beauty
culture collapse differences between local histories, cultures, and subjective experiences. For
example, Jarrin (2016) briefly notes that the Afro-Brazilian movement is actively pushing to re-
valuate Black beauty, but does not explore what this means, does or feels like for Afro-Brazilian
women. Women often form identities through the process of body objectification and beauty
consumerism, deriving gratification, creating bonds with one another and exercising control over
their selves and environments in the process (Elias, Gill & Scarff, 2017; Jha, 2015; Craig, 2002).
As Connell (2009) explains, “Bodies may participate in disciplinary regimes not because they are
docile, but because they are active” (p. 56). This “subjective-aspect-within-being-as-object” (Haug
et al. 1987) must not be overlooked. Empirically observing women in social life, especially through
an intersectional lens that is attentive to differences in race, class, and culture, might show that
beauty work can be both critical and political for those who have access to its tools. For if there is
little doubt that neoliberal discourses of self-scrutiny and self-making echo across the world in the
interest of global capitalism, the kind of subject being mobilized, the nature of self-making that is
encouraged, the effects being produced, and their economic impacts cannot be assumed to be
consistent.
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Some recent empirical intersectional and transnational beauty studies caution against
reductive discourses that women uncritically internalize and center white beauty ideals when
engaging in aesthetic labor. For example, while many have argued that Asian women who elect to
undergo blepharoplasty (double eye-lid surgery) seek to Westernize their appearance, the
reflections and experiences of those who engage with the procedure reveal more complex story
that must be told in context. Noting that blepharoplasty is often accompanied by a set of other
procedures like two-jaw surgery, cheekbone surgery, and rhinoplasty, Leem (2016) argues that
plastic surgery in Asia endeavors towards a globalizing Korean Gangnam style beauty rather than
an imitation of Western beauty to grow cultural and economic capital for both individual bodies
and the South Korean national body. Similarly, Balogun’s (2012) ethnography of pageantry in
Nigeria finds that for women in the Global South, aesthetic self-making is often part of asserting
a cosmopolitan national identity, and not necessarily a reflection of a European cultural hegemony.
As Elias, Gill, and Sharff (2017) have pointed out, women who engage in beauty work are
“intersectional subjects who come into being in a transnational field” (p. 14). Beauty work is a
technology of self-improvement, and self-improvement can be collective, subjective, contextual,
and relative.
The natural hair movement is certainly a product of the neoliberal context from which it
emerges—individual women turn to the market to remake themselves and to claim Black women’s
“natural” hair as beautiful. Natural hair meet-ups are often held at parks or in exhibition halls at
hotels, museums or conference centers where stylists, beauty bloggers, and everyday women
discuss hair politics, natural hair maintenance techniques and the latest products hitting the market.
Unlike most beauty conventions that are primarily attended by industry professionals, natural hair
shows are geared towards the lay consumer. Fashion shows, fitness classes, forums, and
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demonstrations operate concurrently within the same room, as women leisurely explore
businesses’ booths and listen to pitches from their representatives. Attendees line up hours in
advance, sometimes by the thousands, to receive SWAG (“stuff-we-all-get”) bags filled with
deluxe-sized samples of creams and shampoos for naturally kinky hair that have been donated by
event sponsors. Individual practices and communal activities often rely on the class privilege of
Internet access and disposable income. Natural hair is both a movement and an industry. But since
Black women remain underserved by both the beauty and green consumer industries, might there
be space within neoliberalism for an anti-racist and feminist politics that not only allows for the
pleasures of consumption and beauty but also goes beyond the level of individual empowerment?
What draws millions of Black women to dedicate their bodies, time and money to natural hair
culture as opposed to another activity or political strategy in this historical moment? At present,
the meanings and implications of Black women’s organizing around natural hair remain under-
interrogated.
To answer these questions, I engage feminist debates about the potential for consumer
politics to have positive social and individual effects by empirically investigating how women of
African descent living in the 21
st
-century experience consumer-based natural hair politics in their
everyday lives. I’ll introduce several natural hair entrepreneurs who use embodied knowledge
gained from playing with and caring for kinky hair to create lucrative and rewarding haircare
ventures they view as politically transformative. I’ll also describe how transnational flows of
people, products, practices and politics shape the natural hair movement and advance intersectional
critiques of the state, androcentric activist discourses, and the political economy. By grounding
theoretical arguments in contextual empirical observation, and by taking seriously what everyday
women tell and show us, sociologists can decolonize beauty studies to better understand what
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beauty and hair symbolize for Black women today. Studying the natural hair movement as an
ongoing gendered racial formation project reveals Black women’s role in working and re-working
today’s racial, gender, and economic systems.
Researching Black Hair
I approach this project from a feminist position. Using ethnographic and interview-based
methods, this research focuses on the experiences of women of African descent and their
interactions both in person and online with the natural hair community. Building from Jacobs-
Huey’s (2007) research on how African American women talk about hair on their own terms,
rather than in comparison to Black men or white women, I foreground how and whether Black
women construct race, class, gender, and cultural hierarchies within spaces that celebrate natural
hair vis a vis one another. I am interested what it is like to be a woman of African descent with
natural hair, or the subjective experience of Blackness and womanhood in the context of
contemporary culture. By giving voice to the everyday experiences of women who are
marginalized by race, gender and sometimes by class, this project illuminates the lived effects of
power relations.
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This project takes an intracategorical approach
6
to intersectionality (McCall, 2005),
recognizing that interlocking systems of power and privilege determine social location, and that
people form solidarity by identifying with those who are similarly positioned. Specifically, this
research is interested in understanding the experiences of women of African descent who are
similarly positioned within intersecting race and gender hierarchies and capitalist societies, and
who share a history and/or experience of living in places with histories of white supremacist
colonialism and slavery. Intracategorical approaches are useful for extending and refining theories
based on case studies. For example, this project’s focus on Black women’s similar experiences at
the intersection of race and gender hierarchies in places with histories of slavery and European
settler colonialism extends and builds upon an existing literature of case studies about Black
women’s experiences with beauty, outlined in Chapter 2. The intracategorical approach is also

6
McCall (2005) outlines three main approaches to intersectional research: 1) intercategorical 2)
anticategorical and 3) intercategorical frameworks. The intercategorical approach, typically used
by quantitative sociologists, strategically employs categories to measure and compare inequality
between groups. The anticategorical approach to intersectionality evolves from postmodernist
and poststructuralist critiques that cast suspicion on the validity of modern categories, and
considers heterogeneity at the individual level too vast to grapple with difference within
collectivities. While useful for analyzing individual experiences, anticategorical approaches
often fail to acknowledge the lasting and meaningful affective relationships individuals have
with larger identity-based communities. The intracategorical intersectional method employs
identity categories even while remaining critical of them, focusing on a single intersection
between multiple axes of identity.
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useful for its ability to allow my respondents to help me identify and refine who is welcome to
participate in natural hair movement’s collective identity. I sought to understand the ways in which
my participants constructed boundaries around an identity-based movement in response to
dominant beauty ideals, controlling images of Black womanhood, and an extended history of
economic exclusion from the beauty industry and marketplace. Through interviews and multi-sited
field work, I aim to paint a detailed and nuanced portrait of the meanings of femininity, naturalness,
and racial authenticity as they play out on and through women’s bodies.
Interviews
Between 2013 and 2017, I conducted 80 semi-structured interviews with participants of the
natural hair movement. I recruited interviewees through local organizations for Black women,
during my fieldwork at hair shows and in beauty salons, in online natural hair forums and by
referral. Interviews lasted between one and three hours, and took place in public restaurants and
coffee shops chosen by the interviewee or at their home. While I did not financially compensate
interviewees, I usually offered to purchase their coffee to thank them for sharing their time with
me. I collected identifying information about my interviewees, which allowed me to schedule
follow up conversations when necessary. Follow-up conversations most often occurred over the
phone. For all women interviewees, I gathered personal histories about their hair styling choices,
their experience of “going natural”, and their reflections about natural hair as a movement. I
interviewed laywomen because they are the main participants of natural hair shows, the primary
readers of natural hair blogs, and the intended audience for vlog reviews of products. It was
important for me to speak with people who manage, lead, and create spaces for natural hair
communities because these organizers provided insight on the community aspect of the natural
hair movement and could articulate the objectives of the events they held. During interviews with
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natural hair organizers, I inquired about their political commitments, inter-group relationships,
organizational forms, movement trajectories, and labor demands. I asked business owners about
their entrepreneurship histories, business plans, perspectives on beauty trends, product sourcing,
industry networks, relationships with customers, and retail mediums. These interviews helped me
to understand the changing modes and landscapes of ethnic entrepreneurship and interethnic
conflict within the ethnic beauty aids industry. I noted convergences and divergences in how and
to what extent interviewees deployed movement terminology to construct the meanings around
natural hair for Black women today. Several of my participants kept in contact with me over the
course of my research, forwarding me photocopied articles of interest that they came across or
written reflections of memories that surfaced to their attention after we spoke. Research
participants were eager to talk about this topic, and our ongoing interactions demonstrated that
many other people were actively engaged in contemplating significance of the natural hair
movement, as well. I refer to my interviewees using pseudonyms throughout the text to protect
their identities and confidentiality.
Multi-Sited Participant Observation
Instead of choosing a single field-site, I employed multi-sited participant observation at
natural hair shows, beauty industry conventions, and online spaces across four continents. Multi-
sited field work made sense for this project because the natural hair movement is global and
interconnected by way of social media, transnational trade, and internationally touring natural hair
meet-ups. Multi-sited ethnography acknowledges that people, connections, associations, and
relationships may be substantially continuous even as they are spatially and organizationally non-
continuous (Falzon, 2009). A community of beauty bloggers, natural hair organizers, small
business entrepreneurs, and laywomen attend each other’s events, traveling across town, across
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the country and internationally to share information and vend products. I frequently encountered
natural hair influencers repeatedly at one another’s events and as featured models on online natural
hair forums. As I travelled internationally, I often relied on natural hair influencers in the United
States to introduce me to their collaborators abroad.
Most participant observation occurred at hair shows and beauty industry conventions.
Some natural hair shows are small and intimate, attracting 15-20 attendees gathered in a
neighborhood hair salon or restaurant. Other meet-ups are massive, with many vendors and tens
of thousands of participants. Natural hair events are ideal sites to conduct this research because
they are spaces where organizers, bloggers, stylists, retailers, and lay consumers come together to
interactively discuss and shape body politics in person. The largest natural hair expos are held on
an annual basis. Smaller meet-ups occur more frequently, at least twice a week in major cities and
at about monthly in less populated metropolitan areas. Most of these events are advertised online
by blogs and discussion boards dedicated to natural hair, through Meetup.com list-servs, and on
social media websites. I identified events through my participation in these channels, and through
the connections I made with natural hair organizers. Ethnographic immersion allowed me to
provide detailed descriptions of the cultural, social, and physical contexts within which this study
was conducted. While in the field, I took photos and brief written notes that I expanded into full
field notes after returning home (Emerson, Fretz & Shaw, 2011). Throughout the research process,
I wrote theoretical memos, coding them for key themes using the qualitative research software
Atlas.ti. I noted whether, when and the ways in which Black women reinforce and/or challenge the
dominant logics of existing racial hierarchies and feminine beauty standards.
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The U.S.-based data for this project came primarily from fieldwork in three cities: Atlanta,
New York City, and Los Angeles. Atlanta, colloquially known as the “Black hair capital” hosts
the largest Black beauty industry expos and the oldest natural hair shows, and so draws many
aspiring entrepreneurs. Fieldwork in Atlanta allowed me to contextualize both natural hairstyles
and the emergent natural hair movement’s place within the Black hair care industry at large. I
traveled to Atlanta four times to attend the 2014 and 2015 Taliah Waajid World Natural Hair Show
and the 2015 and 2016 Bronner Bros. International Hair Show. Each trip to Atlanta lasted around
one week. During these visits, I took notes at workshops, expo spaces, and associated expo
gatherings. I also spent 10 months New York where I attended natural hair workshops around the
city and interviewed women of African descent in beauty shops. New York is a global city and
enabled greater ethnic diversity in my sample. Its communities of African and Caribbean
immigrant women allowed me to probe multiple local and diasporic meanings of Blackness and
beauty. I also spent 3 years attending natural hair events around Los Angeles, which was my home
base during my doctoral program at the University of Southern California. Los Angeles’ role as
Figure 1.2: Curlfest in Brooklyn, NY (2016)
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an entertainment hub provided easy access to high profile vloggers and women who navigate what
“looks” sell in the media marketplace, illuminating how tastemakers are currently constructing
who and what is considered beautiful.
I explored the international dimensions of the natural hair movement through interviews
with women in Spain, The Netherlands, France, South Africa and Brazil, which expanded my
understanding of how national racial regimes and histories influence the meanings of natural hair
in any particular place. I attended to “the global” in more detail by spending two months in Cape
Town and Johannesburg in 2016. Given the geographic and economic constraints of conducting
qualitative research on a global phenomenon like the natural hair movement, I chose South Africa
as a strategic site for two reasons: 1) The presence of a mixed-race “Coloured” racial category
provides a useful comparison to the U.S.’s “one drop rule” measure of Blackness, which
illuminated the relationship between racial boundaries and local beauty ideals, and 2) South Africa,
Figure 1.3: The Los Angeles Natural Hair and Beauty Expo (2014)
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like most African countries, has a fraught relationship with a U.S. and Asian-dominated human
hair and cosmetics industry, impacting Black and Coloured women’s access to consumer products
for natural hair. These two features allowed me to probe why and how natural hair has become a
form of beauty (re)organizing for women of African descent in different cultural and economic
contexts at the same historical moment. Having lived in South Africa for six months while I
attended the University of Cape Town in 2010, I benefitted from prior relationships with
sociologists, media studies scholars, feminist collectives, and communities of Black and Coloured
South Africans who facilitated my dissertation research process overseas.
My participant observation also extended to online spaces like Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube and Instagram, because natural hair discourse is widely circulated, constructed and
disseminated on the Internet. Through an ecosystem of social networks, geographically distant
groups of women connect, converse, collaborate, purchase and plan. As Hallett and Barber (2014)
aptly observe, online spaces have become another “level” where participants live their everyday
lives. My findings demonstrate that online interactions do more than overlap with face-to-face
interactions, but are integral to business structures and the construction of community among
geographically distant groups of women of African descent. I immersed myself within many sites
where natural hair is regularly discussed, including accounts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube,
and Tumblr. My interviewees frequently referenced social media destinations where they learn
hair care techniques, identify local natural hair events and watch product reviews, and broadly
engage with body politics. I noted their references, and recorded observations in and of online
places that they suggested. I also recruited some interviewees from within online natural hair
forums.
Integrating My Own Experiences
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Feminist research does not purport to be neutral. It has become standard practice in feminist
ethnography for the author to provide a biographical account of the experiences that drive her or
his interest in the research, and how her or his positionality vis a vis research participants and sites
affected data collection and theorizing. Importantly, I share many experiences with my
interviewees, including transitioning out of chemical relaxers, resistance towards natural hairstyles
by family and romantic partners, and dealing with comments about my hair in my professional
environment. I have been a consumer of imported human hair, worked to revalue the physical traits
that signify my Blackness, and resisted the ways I have been presumed incompetent in my
predominantly white professional environment because of my hair styling choices. I have had my
hair searched by officials at the airport for contraband, by strangers to satisfy curiosity, and by
both bullies and intimate partners for proof that it is “real.” I have also sat at the feet of other Black
women in college dorm rooms, swap meets, expos, salons and kitchens, bonding with these sisters
over beauty work. Thus, I began this project with an intimate awareness of common Black
American hair care practices and am familiar with colloquial terminology used to refer to common
African American hair textures, technologies, and techniques.
Because I relate personally to this topic, I chose to employ the reflexive dyadic
interviewing method (Berg, 2001), which encourages researchers to disclose their personal
experiences, reflections, and feelings with participants to facilitate conversation and minimize
power imbalances. As with much feminist ethnography, my participants and I often discussed the
ways in which our life experiences aligned or diverged. Interviewees were curious about the
themes that were emerging during my research process, and I often spoke with them about my
findings and whether they held true to their own observations. The public excitement around
natural hair was so great that I was asked to write several articles for publication in popular media
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outlets as I was researching for this project. Natural hair culture is lively on the Internet and
propelled through content creation, so these articles were disseminated widely across social media
networks. Because of the nature of social media, interviewees and online commenters became
active participants in my theorizing process. This meant that I was ever accountable to the “field,”
as interviewees and audiences spoke back to me about what I was finding, seeing, and saying. I
constantly felt the pressure Jacobs-Huey (2007) describes to “get it right.”
Even though I shared axes of identity and experiences with some interviewees, my status
as a researcher always separated me from others. My main motivations for entering conversations
and attending events were unusual, and sometimes people noticed that I moved around spaces
differently. My graduate student status seemed to facilitate my recruitment of and sustained
relationships with interviewees because many women expressed pride in my academic pursuits as
a minority student and considered their speaking with me as a contribution to my education and to
racial uplift more broadly. I always needed to establish trust with interviewees since it is often
difficult to reflect on something so intimate as the body and beauty work. There were interviews
where I could not establish the rapport necessary to overcome the awkwardness of a tape recorder
sitting visibly between my interviewee and me. I sensed that speaking to me felt especially risky
for interviewees who had read my public sociology about hair online. Publishing within natural
hair spaces increased my legitimacy in a context where everyday women become mini-celebrities
as online “influencers.” At the same time, however, engaging in public sociology made some
women suspicious of and intimidated by me in our one-on-one interactions. I intentionally
negotiated power relations in these situations—and I often failed. I reiterated to participants that I
would not disclose any of their identifying information and that I was held to strict IRB regulations,
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but this simply emphasized my disproportionate power as a researcher. In these instances, we
unfortunately remained trapped in an unfair and unproductive power dynamic.
At first I sought to fade into the background during fieldwork; however, I was repeatedly
compelled into more interactive participation through questions about my own appearance and
presentations-of-self both in person and online. This is a common experience amongst beauty
researchers. For example, Mears (2011), Kang (2010), Jacobs (2006), Banks (2000), and Weitz
(2005) each describe how they and their research assistants were explicitly and implicitly “read”
by other women in the field. I moved through the field with a distinct feminine gender
identification, age, racial and ethnic identity, class background and nationality that times hindered
and at other times facilitated fieldwork. Realizing that I cannot step out of my own body, I actively
embraced the ways in which engaged participation enhanced my data collection. I got into the
habit of recording descriptions of my appearance and attire each time I entered the field and before
interviews to help contextualize my conversations with participants. I became more of an
“observing participant” (Mears, 2011) who was actively engaged in the field, rather than a
participant-observer who distances herself from action in the field.
Depending on my styling choices, I often ended up on the interviewee side of conversations
in the field by being mistaken for a natural hair influencer—an elite social actor in the natural hair
scene whose career involves providing beauty advice and product reviews. The more work I put
into my appearance by washing my hair ahead of time (a two-day task), putting on makeup, and
dressing fashionably, the more eagerly fellow attendees interacted with me. In other words, my
styling choices affected my positionality. My hair texture, hairstyle, skin tone, eye color, makeup,
and outfits were often called into dialogues, usually to acknowledge my mixed-race background.
This pattern inspired chapter 6, which discusses intra-racial color and texture hierarchies within
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the natural hair movement. For example, at one natural hair expo, I got into a conversation with
Debra, a brown-skinned fitness blogger who looked to be in her mid-forties, as we waited for a
hair fashion show to begin. In complimenting me on my hair texture, Debra asked, “are you
mixed?” I told her no, and that although there are multiple ethnicities on both my mother and
father’s side of the family, we all consider ourselves Black. I showed her pictures of my mom and
dad on my iPhone. Debra said I look just like my dad except for my eyes. I decided to push the
envelope a little bit and told her that mixed-looking features were the result of rape by slave
masters and not of love, because this is true. Debra replied, “well at least you got something out
of slavery!” While Debra said this jokingly, our interaction still highlights the continuing
significance of colorism and texturism, or proximity to phenotypical whiteness, even within a
movement to re-valuate Black beauty. In chapter 6, I include more of these auto-ethnographic
anecdotes to describe how color and texture hierarchies and boundaries operate within today’s
natural hair culture and complicate notions of solidarity. While these interactions were often
uncomfortable for me, they were also analytically helpful by illuminating how women interpret
beauty ideals and police racial authenticity amongst and relative to one another.
My positionality during fieldwork and interviews outside of the United States was
complex, but facilitated my research in some interesting ways. For example, in the South African
context, I was most often read as a member of the Coloured as opposed to the Black South African
racial group because my hazel eyes and medium-brown complexion suggested a multiracial
background. Being read as Coloured by Coloured South Africans often created a sense of openness
to critique the Black-led political process in post-apartheid South Africa and the resulting policies
and cultural commentary that saturate mainstream media outlets. At the same time, Black South
Africans expressed a level of cultural and experiential solidarity with me as a Black American with
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a lived understanding of anti-Black oppression. Phenotypically and culturally straddling the
Coloured and Black racial categories in South Africa seemed to facilitate meaningful
conversations with people who identified with either group.
My American privilege challenged some interactions and data collection outside of the
United States. One situation is worth highlighting here for its theoretical and methodological
significance to this study. Several South African participants asked me for American product
samples as compensation for interviews, probably because there happened to be a Black American
filmmaker in Cape Town at the same time as me who was interviewing women for a documentary
about Pan-Africanism and hair and recruiting interview participants with product samples from
the American company SheaMoisture. This created a moral dilemma for me, because my
conversations with South African business owners had made me hyperaware of how uneven power
relations in the global beauty market privilege American corporations and Black American culture.
I feared participating in and perpetuating in this situation to the detriment of these local business
owners by helping to advertise American products. I decided that the best thing to do was talk
about it. I met with the American filmmaker, and we had a tense but fruitful conversation about
the global, economic, and cultural implications of our recruitment tactics. We mutually decided
not to disseminate American products to benefit our own work and discussed the situation with a
South African natural hair blogger on a radio show, and with Cape Town natural hair entrepreneurs
who generously allowed us to sit in on their group meeting while they strategized the creation of
an online hub to connect local bloggers with local businesses. In sum, the results of academic
research go beyond the final product of a dissertation or a book. Theory-making always has an
impact, and that impact is more than theoretical. Our activities, our bodies, our decisions, and our
indulgences and divulgences are active variables in the field have real and material consequences
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for the communities we study. As a Black feminist researcher, I aimed for my impact through this
project to be as intentional, responsible, accessible, and equitable as possible.
Chapter Overview
This dissertation tells a story about how women’s embodied experiences and beauty
practices are tied up with processes of politicization and social change. The following chapter
provides a historical overview of Black women’s hair styling, beauty cultures, and politics through
the theoretical lens of racial formation to situate today’s natural hair movement within a long
legacy of Black feminist resistance. Previous research has examined how a politics of
respectability in the first half of the 20
th
century and a politics of soul during the height of the
Black Power and Black Consciousness Movements manifested in different expectations for Black
women’s hair styling (Ford, 2016; Gill, 2010; Tate, 2007; Blackwelder, 2003; Craig, 2002; Willett,
2000; Mercer, 1994). For centuries, politicizing beauty has enabled Africana women to imagine
their lives and their bodies differently despite patriarchal, economic, and racial domination. As
dominant social justice strategies, theories for change, and understandings of racial uplift have
shifted, so too have Black women’s politics of style. In chapter 3, I contextualize and introduce
the contemporary natural hair movement by discussing how colorblind forms of racism continue
to create barriers for Black women as they endeavor for economic and spatial mobility. I illustrate
how women experience this cultural and political moment personally, through their rationales for
and experiences of transitioning to natural hair. Their reflections highlight an emerging Black
beauty politics of authenticity, in resistance to a 20
th
century politics of respectability, but distinct
from a politics of Afrocentricity. Unlike many people across the Black movement community in
the 1960s and 1970s, most women I interviewed did not initially transition to natural hair to express
a feminist or anti-racist stance. Instead, women I spoke with and encountered in the field more
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often foregrounded the ongoing processes of transitioning to natural hair, caring for their natural
bodies, and facing every day forms of gendered racial stigma as catalyzing and necessitating new
levels of self-acceptance. However, many of these women ultimately became more conscious of
race, culture, and gender hierarchies in response to increased discipline and surveillance by
employers, romantic partners, family members and the state. The natural hair movement’s
collective focus on Black women’s subjectivity has become a new and productive intersectional
praxis that Black women come to deploy to intervene in two main areas: 1) public health advocacy
and wellness and 2) the anti-racist social movement sector.
I discuss this first focus of intervention in Chapter 4, where I describe how an emphasis on
health distinguishes the ways in which naturalness is deployed by Black women in today’s
neoliberal context from what “natural” meant for Black communities in the 20
th
century. Unlike in
the 1960s and 1970s, this contemporary sociological research finds that today’s organizing around
natural hair accommodates biomedicalized frameworks from the green movement to politicize
natural wellness as Black feminist praxis. While feminist analyses of neoliberal capitalism suggest
that biomedical and consumer-based strategies for empowerment cannot produce meaningful
feminist or antiracist change, little empirical research has tested these hypotheses or their race-
neutral assumptions. I argue that the natural hair movement’s celebration of naturalness
rearticulates pejorative associations between Black women and the earth by projecting natural hair
as both politically Black and a healthy, ethical and responsible choice. Given that the
environmental health risks that Black women face are under-recognized by activists, academics,
and government regulatory bodies alike, I posit in this chapter that the natural hair movement’s
biomedical framework fosters important intersectional environmental justice work.
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In chapter 5, I discuss how Black women deploy hair as political symbol in their local
social movement sectors through two case studies: 1) the Fees Must Fall movement for
decolonizing educational spaces in South Africa and 2) Black Lives Matter Movement against
police brutality in the United States. I describe how women use natural hair in both social
movements as an embodied intersectional critique of broader movement discourses that erase or
marginalize Black women’s experiences while centering Black men’s entitlement to bodily
integrity or right to take up space. A comparison between the United States and South Africa
highlights how state level policies determine the direction of political critique on the ground. In
the United States, Black women often talk about natural hair to make their embodied experiences
of violence legible, while in South Africa, Black and Coloured women center natural hair to
emphasize the gendered experience of racial oppression in formerly-white educational settings.
Chapter 6 begins with an analysis of the Rachel Dolezal media spectacle to describe
African ancestry legitimizes the experience of transitioning to natural hair, one’s ability to
participate in natural hair culture, and the ability to speak about racial politics in today’s political
climate. I expand on this theme with support from additional media analyses, interview data, and
my own ethnographic observations at natural hair events. Black women draw discursive racial
boundaries around the natural hair community and work to create a Black-centered collective
identity. I find that race and skin tone shape one’s access to and privilege within natural hair spaces
via the language of authenticity and appropriation. I argue that this boundary-making serves as a
racial formation project that illuminates what “Blackness” is coming to mean today. In the United
States, internal color hierarchies and “one drop” understandings of hypodescent for inclusion are
met with ambivalence, and serve as challenges to crafting a stable embodied identity politics. I
compare how women in the United States talk about naturalness with South African, Senegalese,
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and Caribbean women’s boundary-making to demonstrate how different racial regimes, histories
and social locations shape whether women consider the natural hair movement’s emergent
aesthetic ideal to be reproductive or resistant of racial hierarchies. The conclusion to this study
addresses the theoretical significance, implications and limitations of this work.

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Chapter 2
An Historical Overview of Black Hair Politics
Beauty is often thought of as apolitical, or even counter-political; however, the ways that
Black people’s bodies have been represented, talked about, treated, and styled have never been a
minor or inconsequential matter. Across the Black Atlantic, Black people’s hairstyles are both
shaped by and productive of racial histories. Racializing Sub-Saharan African people’s coily hair
as inferior has been a key ideological tactic for denying them social, economic, and political power
since the start of the transatlantic slave trade. Today, transgressing Eurocentric beauty standards
continues to pose severe economic and social risks for Black people in post-colonial societies,
particularly women, who are more likely than men to be measured by their appearance. In
response, Black women have often politicized beauty in their various fights for liberation, self-
definition, and social change.
As racial formation theory emphasizes, racialized groups are in continuous political
struggle over racial meanings and resources (Omi & Winant, 1994). These struggles can be “read”
through Black people’s hair styling practices, through discourses about Black bodies, and through
Black peoples’ consumer options in the cosmetics industry. Hair is simultaneously gendered,
racialized and malleable, so Black women’s struggles for power, influence, adequate
representation, and social mobility, at any point in time, can often be observed through the ways
in which they style their hair. As Jacobs (2007) points out, “Black women’s hairstyle choices are
seldom just about aesthetics or personal choice, but are instead ever complicated by such issues as
mate desire, mainstream standards of beauty, workplace standards of presentation, and
ethnic/cultural pride” (p. 3). Hair straightening, adornment, and “going natural” are all strategies
that Africana women have used to reimagine Black femininity and critique inequality through their
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bodies. In what follows, I describe key moments in Black hair styling politics from the 16
th
century
to the present, analyzing each episode as a gendered racial formation project. This chapter’s
overview is crucial to historicizing contemporary style politics because the ways in which Black
women use and discuss natural hair today responds to previous forms of gendered racism and
evolves from prior logics and strategies of embodied resistance.
Racializing Hair Texture
European explorers arrived in the Americas in 1492, when Christopher Columbus first
encountered the island now known as The Bahamas. By the mid-16
th
century, Dutch, French,
Spanish, British and Portuguese pilgrims were claiming land in the Americas and Caribbean for
themselves in a race for wealth and territory. As these colonizers settled in the “New World,” they
displaced, killed and forced Native Americans into indentured servitude alongside other
Europeans, most of whom were English, Scottish, or Irish. After stopping in port cities like Cape
Town and Durban, South Africa, English and Dutch colonizers also transported thousands of Sub-
Saharan Africans, East Indians and Indonesians as indentured servants to Caribbean territories like
Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Jamaica. Slaves were also taken throughout the
continental Americas, where planters set up large estates for farming cash crops like fruits,
vegetables, cotton, tobacco, and sugar (Marques, 2016; Rawley & Behrendt, 2005).
Europeans increased their slave trading operations in West Africa as the demand for labor
grew (Green, 2012). The transatlantic slave trade sourced much of its human cargo from native
West Africans, who captured people from neighboring tribes in raids and as prisoners of war
(Shumway, 2011). Each ship destined for the Americas contained one to three hundred bodies on
average (Rawley & Behrendt, 2005). Once slave ships reached their destinations across the
Atlantic, enslaved Africans were bought and sold for handsome profits. Most lived and labored in
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51
captivity for the rest of their lives. By the 17
th
century, indentured servitude in the Americas had
been largely replaced by a peculiar race-based system of slavery that constructed white supremacy
against Black servitude. By the 19th century, an estimated 20 million Africans had been
transported across the Atlantic in bondage (Rawley & Behrendt, 2005).
The interrelated systems of European colonization on the African continent and chattel
slavery in the Americas and Caribbean first racialized Sub-Saharan African people as Black. Since
intricate hair braiding styles and head adornments are symbols of pride, spirituality and clan status
in most African cultures, denigrating enslaved Africans’ hair was central to denying them their
identity. One of the first acts of suppression slave traders did was shave the heads of their captives,
which symbolically revoked the enslaved people’s sense of belonging to their tribe of origin and
ownership over their own body (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). Slave traders also refused enslaved people
their given birth names, treating their human captives like anonymous chattel cargo. Slaves were
no longer Ashanti, Igbo, Mende, Yoruba or Mandingo—they were Negro, Black, enslaved,
inferior.
Styling Hair during Slavery
Enslaved people often lacked the tools, the time, and the conditions to care for their hair
with the herbal ointments, combs, and oils they used in their African homelands. Scalp diseases
and lice were common (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). Enslaved men and women who worked in the fields
usually wore rags on their heads to protect their skin from the sun, sweat, grime, and parasites
(Bell, 1997). Many enslaved people shaved their heads or breaded their hair in small sections to
keep it from matting (Weitz, 2005). Those who worked in closer proximity to whites as cooks,
washerwomen, housekeepers and nursemaids were more likely to imitate European hairstyles like
powdered wigs or wear neat, tight plaits to avoid the ire of their masters, who judged one another
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based on the health and condition of their slaves (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). If slaves had a day off it
was usually Sunday to observe the Sabbath, so Sundays became days for spiritual renewal and
self-care. Blacks often exchanged improvised tips for caring for their hair at church. Former slave
Amos Lincoln recalled in an interview with the Federal Writer’s Project years after emancipation,
“All week they wear they hair all in a roll with cotton that they unfold from the cotton boll. Sunday
come they come [comb] they hair fine. No grease on it. They want it nice and naturally curly”
(WPA, 1936, p. 18).
As early as the 1700s, hair styling and barbering for white clientele were rare trades that
allowed some Black people to escape slavery and become financially independent entrepreneurs
(Gill, 2010; Bristol, 2009). For example, in 1787 a 21-year-old enslaved Black man named Pierre
was brought by his owners from Saint-Domingue to New York City to style wealthy French men’s
hair. The earnings Pierre’s owners allowed him to keep were substantial enough for him to
purchase his own freedom, his sister’s freedom, and that of several other young boys in his
community (Walker, 2009). Pierre adopted the surname Toussaint to honor Toussaint Louverture,
the leader of the Haitian Revolution, and established himself as the leading Black social justice
philanthropist in Harlem (Bristol, 2009). Many other Black men owned lucrative businesses as
barbers for white men and hairdressers for white women, who visited stylists daily during the
antebellum period. Black barbers’ economic advancement was made possible by whites’
prejudiced eschewal of service work
7
(Willett, 2000). Through Black barbers’ intimate contact with

7
In the late 19
th
and 20
th
century, Black leaders like W. E. B. DuBois also critiqued barbering for
its association with servility and domestic work, advising Black men to only enter the field as a
last resort (Willett, 2000).
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53
white elites, they learned the limits and possibilities afforded by accommodating white middle-
class understandings of respectability and social etiquette (Bristol, 2009).
Colorism, Texturism, and Interracial Relations
Racial mixing was common among Africans, Europeans, East Indians, and Indigenous
people in diversifying African port cities as well as in colonies across the Americas and the
Caribbean. British law in the 16
th
and early 17
th
centuries decreed that children inherited the status
of their fathers, so any mixed-race child with a white father was free at birth. However, by the mid-
1600s, most of those laws were reversed in the United States. Because most racial mixing resulted
from relations between white men and enslaved Black women, interracial relations were
considered “Blackening” and increased a master’s slaveholdings (Russell-Cole, Wilson & Hall
1993). These laws formed the basis of the “one drop” rule of Black hypo-descent in the United
States. Anyone with proven African ancestry was considered Black and at risk of enslavement.
These miscegenation laws encouraged people to scrutinize others for any African-looking
phenotypical features. A commonsense understanding developed that Blackness, the inverse of
white purity, contained a wide range of skin tones ranging from very dark to indistinguishable
from white and hair textures ranging from very coily to straight (Davis, 1991). Kobena Mercer
(1994) explains, “The pejorative precision of the salient expression, nigger hair, neatly spells out
how, within racism’s bipolar codification of human worth, black people’s hair has been historically
devalued as the most visible stigmata of blackness, second only to skin” (p. 101).
Distinctions between Blacks, mulattos, quadroons, and octaroons attempted to affirm and
maintain the white-supremacist plantation economy and the racial caste system in the antebellum
South. Similar distinctions for interracial people developed in other parts of the world, like
coloured in South Africa, red in Trinidad, and parda, mulata, and morena in Brazil. Colorism,
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54
which is the belief that those with visible proximity to whiteness are superior to those with darker
skin of the same racial group, is a product of these hierarchical racial categorizations (Jha, 2015;
Norwood, 2013; Russell-Cole, Wilson & Cole, 2013; Glenn, 2008; Tate, 2007; Hunter, 2005). In
other words, colorism refers to a system of stratification and differential treatment that privileges
those with lighter complexions. Colorism and patriarchy work in tandem with what I’ll call
texturism, the idea that straight, long hair is more feminine and beautiful.
Having both light skin and straight hair was advantageous for people of African descent
during slavery (Morrow, 1973). Familial, spatial and phenotypical proximity to whiteness shaped
life for Black people in many ways. On plantations across the Caribbean, North America, and
South America, slaves with lighter skin tended to enjoy an elevated status as domestic servants,
observing and imitating white genteel etiquette (Davis, 1991). Darker skinned slaves were often
relegated to more strenuous physical labor in the fields. Some white slave-owners freed and
sponsored the education of their mixed-race children, who formed much of the free Negro
population in the American South and became the earliest Black professionals in the North. In
some parts of Louisiana and South Carolina, free mixed-race communities served as a tertiary
buffer class between more powerful whites and enslaved Blacks (Russell-Cole, Wilson & Hall,
1993; Davis, 1991). Since light skin and straight hair implied free status, some light-complexioned
slaves passed as free or white to escape bondage. Many Black people internalized beliefs that
straight hair was “good” and tightly coiled hair was “bad” and “nappy” because hair texture
corresponded with privilege both on and off plantations (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). White slave
owners reinforced texturism by referring to Black people’s hair as wooly, which further
legitimized slavery by likening Black people to animals and excluding them from humanity.
Discourses that curly hair textures are unruly, uncivilized and closer to the earth implied that Black
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55
people were meant to toil the land and to be excluded from citizenship, thus reinforcing white
supremacy and chattel slavery at the same time.
Disciplining Black Women’s Hair
Racism, colorism, and texturism intersected with a patriarchal gender order to produce
unique forms of oppression for Black women. While both women and men were exploited laborers
under chattel slavery, enslaved Black women’s sexual availability and reproductive capacity made
them more susceptible to additional forms of objectification and commodification (Collins, 2004).
Many white men slave owners and overseers forced sexual relationships with enslaved African
women who they viewed as their property. By the late 18
th
century it was commonplace for wealthy
white men to openly keep Black mistresses (Davis, 1991). Some mulatto, octoroon, and quadroon
women were intentionally bred and sexually fetishized for their “exotic” beauty and generated
high bids at auction (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Russell-Cole, Wilson & Hall, 1993; Davis, 1991).
Mixed-race women’s phenotypical and spatial proximity to whiteness made them particularly
vulnerable to rape by white men and the wrath of their jealous wives (Russell-Cole, Wilson &
Hall, 1993).
Many mistresses of plantation households would shave off domestic servants’ hair as a
form of punishment, which operated as a gendered racial project to maintain white women’s racial
superiority over Black women in a patriarchal system that put them in competition for men’s sexual
attention (but of course, Black and white women’s “attention” from men took different forms and
was experienced differently since each group’s social and political position vis a vis white men
was dissimilar). Weitz (2005) reports that:
In virtually every incident in which a slave was punished by having his or her head shaved,
the punished slave was a woman with straight hair and the person who ordered the
punishment was a white woman. By doing so, white women could reduce the threat these
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56
slaves posed to their marriages while punishing both the slaves and the white men who
found them attractive (p. 39).

This disciplinary tactic demonstrates that both white women and Black women understood the
significance, favor, risk, and access to power that long, loosely textured hair and proximity to white
beauty standards afforded (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Weitz, 2005).
Black women’s hair was taken up in a variety of other disciplinary gendered racial projects
during slavery. In 1785 Spanish colonial governor of Louisiana Esteban Rodriguez Miró passed a
sumptuary law mandating that women of color wear tignons, or handkerchief head wraps to visibly
mark themselves as different and inferior to whites and as belonging to the slave class, regardless
of skin tone or free status (Bell, 1997). An additional rationale for the Tignon Laws was that white
men needed defense against the lure of mixed-race women’s erotically “exotic” hair. The Tignon
Laws concurrently reinforced a patriarchal gender order and white supremacy by affirming a
growing preoccupation with controlling women’s sexuality, by asserting that women must
compete with one another for men’s attention, and by advancing a universal white beauty ideal.
Sumptuary laws mandating that women of African descent identify and discipline themselves by
wearing cloth coverings over their hair also governed those living in French, Dutch, and British
colonies in the Caribbean through the late 1800s (Lemire, 2018).
Racial formation theory acknowledges that hegemonic ideologies about race and gender
are not totally coercive, but are also shaped through the consent and/or resistance of subordinated
groups. Black women’s reaction to the Tignon Laws exemplifies this dynamic process of racial
articulation and re-articulation. Many Afro-Creole women in Louisiana with economic means
protested the spirit of the Tignon Laws by decorating their headscarves with jewels, ribbons, and
feathers. Elaborately adorned tignons ultimately became a defiant fashion statement for free
women of color in 18
th
century Louisiana and challenged the white supremacist patriarchal order.
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57
The ways in which Afro-Creole deployed style demonstrates how racial meanings are also formed
and reformed at the micro-level of the body, and through the style choices that individual women
make.
While slaveholders in the United States bred slaves in captivity after the slave trade was
abolished in 1808, slaveholders in the Caribbean and South America notoriously worked their
slaves to death and imported replacement laborers from Africa for decades longer (Marques,
2016). Perhaps because of this brutal replacement system, African communities in the Caribbean
and South America passed along more traditions from their homelands, which enabled them to
navigate the racist systems in which they found themselves in unique ways. For example, enslaved
women in the West Indies resisted sumptuary laws by communicating secret messages to one
another through the architectural folds and position of knots they manipulated into the material of
their headscarves. These tignon codes were material links between Black Caribbean women and
the traditions of their West African ancestors across the Atlantic, who used intricate cloth folding
traditions to signify wealth, ethnicity, marital status, and mourning, and reverence. Their head
wraps were notoriously dramatic. Lemire (2018) writes that Black women’s “apparent lack of
deference to the disciplinary intent of the law irked settlers and some visitors who identified
African Caribbean women as a source of social corruption” (p. 112). Minority cultures of
resistance, like these, routinely become sites where political contradictions are resolved, history is
remembered, and alternatives are imagined (Lowe, 1996).
After the United States abolished slavery in 1865, some Black women in the United States
continued to wear head wraps creatively, but the style ultimately became associated with servitude
and homeliness. Wearing headscarves in public fell out of favor in early 20
th
century Black
American communities with the mass production of mammy images like Aunt Jemima wearing a
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58
checkered hair tie. In contrast, Afro-Surinamese women elders have carried on head wrap
traditions through time to the present day, and through space, as they migrated in large numbers
to form vibrant Africana communities in The Netherlands. During the annual Keti Koti (“Breaking
the Chains”) festival in Amsterdam that commemorates the abolition of slavery in former Dutch
colonies, Surinamese and Antillean women march through the city proudly donning bright and
towering head wraps as symbols of their resilient heritage.

Styling Segregation
By the end of the Reconstruction period in the late 1800s, the rise of Jim Crow segregation
enforced a two-tier racial system in the United States that subordinated all non-whites to whites.
Black folks were subject to de facto and de jure racial discrimination in the job market, the electoral
process, school system, public spaces and more.
Figure 2.1: Afro-Surinamese women at the “Keti Koti” (Breaking the Chains) Festival in
Amsterdam, Holland (2014)
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59
White-owned companies dominated the Black hair care industry in the late 1800s, and their
marketing messages commonly reinforced white supremacy and Black inferiority. A typical
advertisement read, “Race men and women may easily have straight, soft, long hair by simply
applying Plough’s Hair Dressing and in a short time all your kinky, snarly, ugly hair becomes soft,
silky, smooth…” (quoted in Byrd & Tharps 2014, p. 74). White legislators and physicians
contributed this white supremacist racial project by depicting Blacks as disease carriers and their
barbershops as disease-ridden (Willett, 2000). At the turn of the century, mainstream newspapers
increasingly represented Black masculinity as violent through myths that white women were at
high risk for sexual assault by Black men. Black male hairdressers’ close bodily contact with
whites increasingly became viewed as suspect and dangerous (Bristol, 2009). Stereotypes of Black
men as criminally hypersexual maintained white supremacy and Black powerlessness by inciting
extralegal lynch mobs across the American South, and by narrowing a long-established pathway
for Black men into the middle-class. Barbering and salon service work progressively segregated
by race, ultimately becoming what Adia Harvey Wingfield (2008) terms a “racial enclave
economy.”
On the other hand, segregated society allowed beauty culture to become a critical avenue
for Black women’s upward mobility. Black beauty educators (or “culturists” as they called
themselves) established cosmetology training institutes that offered Black women a rare
opportunity to escape field labor, factory work, and domestic service. Beauty culturists Marjorie
Stewart Joyner and J.H. Jemison famously taught thousands of Black women valuable business
and trade skills, ushering many Black families into middle-class stability (Blackwelder, 2003).
Joyner trained Madam C.J. Walker, who eventually became the first self-made woman millionaire
in the United States. Walker lifted tens of thousands more Black American women out of poverty
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60
by training them to become independent door-to-door sales agents for her beauty products and
through her various philanthropic endeavors (Bundles, 2001). Eventually, 95% of working Black
women who owned property were either hairdressers, washerwomen, or seamstresses in the
postbellum/pre-Civil Rights era (Walker, 2009). White elites responded to Black women’s new
opportunities in the beauty industry with repression. Lawmakers in Georgia imposed targeted taxes
on Black hairdressing establishments, blaming the shortage of Black field labor on Black women’s
newfound opportunities in beauty culture (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). To protect themselves, Walker,
Joyner, Jemison, and others formed the National Beauty Culturists League (NABL), which aimed
to raise training standards and earnings within the cosmetology industry and to collectively lobby
for their interests. The NABL endeavored to cast Black women as civically responsible, self-
sufficient and enterprising without abandoning individual workers to racist and sexist legal and
corporate systems (Gill, 2001). Beauty shops became a near “depression-proof” enterprise for
Black American women during the Great Depression, attracting thousands of entrepreneurs and
practitioners (Gill, 2010).
Becoming a beauty shop owner or hairstylist was the most autonomous occupation open to
Black women during the Jim Crow era. Black beauty shops are also the most lucrative industry in
which all aspects—from education and service to ambiance and consumption—are run by Black
women (Blackwelder, 2003). Black beauticians challenged ideas that the business world and
public sector should be male-only spaces. In addition, Black beauticians re-claimed the
womanhood denied them during slavery by working in a feminized industry (Gill, 2010). During
the Civil Rights Movement, Black beauty salons were one of few establishments that escaped
white oversight, and unlike churches, salons were gendered spaces where Black women could
foreground intersecting race and gender issues (Gill, 2010; Blackwelder, 2003; Gill, 2001; Willett,
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2000). Many beauty shop owners used their salons to politicize clients and to fight deprecating
depictions of Black women in white media (Gill, 2010). Black beauticians also widely participated
in the Black women’s club movement and in racial justice organizations like the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Marcus Garvey’s Universal
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) (Blackwelder, 2003). Gill (2001) explains, “the hair-care
industry in general and the black beauty parlor in particular should be examined as an important,
albeit unique, institution in the black community, a space that was once public and private, where
the matrix of beauty, business, and politics allowed black women to actively confront issues of
their day” (p. 190).
Hair Straightening and Respectability Politics Across the Black Atlantic
When Black women entered professional positions in increasing numbers in the post-war
period, many chose to straighten their hair for work because head wraps and curly hair had long
been taken up by the media and the state as symbolic of Black women’s inferiority. Like Black
clubwomen of the same period, beauty culturists promoted respectability as a pathway to
acceptance by more powerful whites by inventing technologies to “press” or thermally straighten
coiled hair (Craig, 2002; Bundles, 2001; Gill, 2001; Walker, 2001; Rooks, 1996). Respectability
politics refers to the position that oppressed groups should emphasize a cultural and moral
sameness with the dominant group to gain their respect and acceptance (Higginbotham, 1993).
Straightened hair successfully facilitated some white employers’ tolerance of Black women’s
presence in the workplace by deemphasizing physical differences between Blacks and whites, and
accentuating Black women’s adherence to mainstream feminine beauty and professional norms
instead. As many Black feminists have pointed out, in a global society where Black women fit at
the bottom of race, gender and often class hierarchies, adherence to white ideologies about beauty
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often increases Black women’s opportunities for upward mobility via access to employment, social
networks, and romantic relationships (Collins, 2006; Craig, 2002; Banks, 2000; Higginbotham,
1993). Historian Julia Kirk Blackwelder (2003) explains, “In the segregation era carefully
groomed hair and immaculate dress armed women against the arrows of racial insults. Beauticians
thus played a role in undermining Jim Crow and styling its defeat” (p. 6). But even though
straightened hair enabled many Black American women to reclaim the self-respect and dignity
that whites systematically denied them in an era where racial segregation was the state-sanctioned
status-quo, respectability politics also enforced restrictive notions of femininity on Black women
who were burdened with the responsibility to represent the race (Johnson, 2013; Craig, 2006;
Mitchell, 2004; Higginbotham, 1993).
During Jim Crow, Black men experienced their own conflicts around respectability and
assimilation. The slicked back conk look—achieved through heavy pomades and chemical
relaxers—came into style among young African American and Latino zoot-suiters in the 1930s
and 1940s. In the 1950s, James Brown’s and Little Richard’s slick, glistening hairdos epitomized
cool. When the political climate changed in the latter half of the decade, the conk became viewed
as a shameful act of whitening for those in the Black movement community. Perhaps the most
iconic account and analysis of the conk appears in Malcolm X’s (1964) autobiography. In the text,
Malcolm X remembers admiring his reflection in the mirror after his friend Shorty assisted him in
his first painfully traumatic application of lye relaxer to his scalp. He admits that his increased
proximity to whiteness made him fall in love with his new image. In retrospect, Malcolm X
describes this moment as his “first really big step toward degradation” (p. 64). He goes on to
lament, “I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed
into believing that the Black people are ‘inferior’—and the white people ‘superior’—that they will
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even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards” (p.
64). Malcolm X came to eschew assimilationist rationales for hair straightening, asserting that
wealthy Negroes “ought to know better” and praising celebrities like Sidney Portier for fighting
through and against white standards of desirability to achieve success and wide acclaim in
Hollywood (p. 65). Relaxers were never as widely adopted among Black men as they were among
Black women, and they went out of fashion almost entirely for Black men by the 1960s.
Hair texture was also taken up in segregationist institutional policies and, in turn, a politics
of respectability across the Atlantic. During apartheid in South Africa, which lasted from 1948 to
1991. Under apartheid rule, “Bodies [were] signifiers of status, power, and worth in a hierarchy
that privileged whiteness (as both a biological and social condition) at its apex” (Posel, 2001, p.
72). The government classified its population into four categories: white, Coloured, Indian and
Black. The white minority controlled the government, land, and in turn the business sector. One
way that people strived for political, social and economic power was by petitioning the government
to reclassify their legal racial category as white. The appeal boards for reclassification scrutinized
petitioners’ phenotypical racial markers, like hair texture, cheekbones and even the color of one’s
genitalia (Posel, 2001). The most notorious method that the apartheid state used to determine “non-
white” from “white” was the pencil test: if the petitioner’s hair texture was straight enough for a
pencil to fall out, he or she was more likely to be granted the political, economic, spatial and social
privileges afforded only to white South African citizens. If the pencil remained there instead of
slipping out, the person’s hair was considered too curly to be that of a white person. Thus, the
texture of one’s hair could determine whether someone could marry their lover, attend university,
or access adequate health care. In some cases, the board called upon barbers to testify about true
hair texture, as people used hot combs and chemical relaxers to undermine the test. No one was
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ever classified from white to Black or vice versa during apartheid, so hair texture was a critical
factor for assimilating into elite society for Coloured and Indian South Africans rather than Black
South Africans. Apartheid rule left a lasting impression on cultural standards for corporate
professionalism in South Africa that influence workers and students of all backgrounds, especially
since whites still own a disproportionate amount of the country’s land and capital. Hair
straightening remains essential to many people of color in their quests for social and economic
mobility. For Black women, especially, relaxers remain a popular service in Black salons and in
Black beauty culture as a sign of and reward for economic security.
Good Hair/Bad Hair Debates
Segregation resulted in both intra-racial solidarity and disparity in Black America. Hair
straightening was not just a strategy for navigating white spaces; colorism and respectability
politics contributed to the overrepresentation of Blacks with lighter skin and straighter hair in the
Black American elite and press through the 20
th
century (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Russell-Cole,
Wilson & Hall, 2013; Craig, 2002; Gill, 2001). Many light complexioned African Americans like
W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells used their privileges to advocate for Black issues, while others
internalized their proximity to white supremacy. Elite Black clubs, fraternities, churches and
schools institutionalized colorism through paper bag and comb tests that excluded Black people
with skin too dark or hair too “kinky” (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Obiagele, 2003; Russell- Cole,
Wilson & Hall, 1993). Actresses Dorothy Dandridge and Lena Horne were the suitable faces of
Black beauty. Until the 1960s, beauty pageants at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
almost exclusively recruited and crowned light skinned women with long hair (Craig, 2002). The
interaction between class privilege and white-centered beauty ideals manifested in Black idioms
like nappy hair and hair grades that hierarchize intra-racial phenotypical differences among Black
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people, particularly Black women (Jacobs-Huey, 2006; Battle-Walters, 2004; Banks, 2000; Rooks,
1996). Similarly, Caldwell (2007) finds that good hair vs. bad hair distinctions in Brazil express a
culture of white desirability and a fear of Black contamination despite the country’s public image
as a racial democracy after slavery was abolished in 1888.
Black activists, academics, families, ministers, and reporters consistently contested
dominant ideas insisting that curly hair was “good” and that straight hair was most beautiful (Byrd
& Tharps, 2014; Craig, 2006; Craig, 2002). For instance, Booker T. Washington banned beauty
culturists from teaching at Tuskegee Institute, a Black College he founded to provide Black people
with practical skills training. Washington also banned beauty culturists from speaking at his
National Negro Business League convention (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). Scholar W. E .B. Du Bois
and activist Marcus Garvey were likewise critical of relaxers and skin bleaching practices. Hair
straightening to assimilate into the predominantly white professional workforce exemplified what
W. E. B Du Bois (1903) termed the double-consciousness that African Americans develop to
survive white supremacy. In his observations, Black Americans are “a sort of seventh son, born
with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world” because they are intimately
familiar with the American ideal even as they are excluded from it on the basis of their race (p. 9).
Against critiques of hair straightening, beauty culturists then, like many beauty theorists
since, pointed to the simultaneous roles of class, culture, and subjectivity on Black women’s beauty
practices during Jim Crow. Black beauty entrepreneurs deployed discourses about good grooming,
health and economic mobility in advertisements to avoid implying that curly hair textures are
essentially inferior to sell their straightening products (Stille, 2006; Bundles, 2001; Rooks, 1996).
Craig (2002) argues that for many Black women in the early and mid-20
th
century, straight hair was
more about “looking like a lady” rather than “looking white.” Byrd and Tharps (2014) similarly
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point out that hair straightening was also a matter of appearing less country and more fashionably
urban during the Great Migration of Black Americans from the rural South to cities like Chicago,
Detroit, St. Louis, Philadelphia and New York. In addition, beauty consumerism was on the rise
for women of all races during the mid-20
th
century. It was common for both Black and white women
with excess income to take weekly trips to the hair salon and process their hair (Willett, 2000).
Black is Beautiful, Soul Style, and the Aesthetics of Rebellion
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new aesthetics of rebellion took hold. In the United States,
the Black Power Movement loudly and proudly challenged the internalization and
institutionalization of colorism and texturism in society. Activists condemned the dominant
assimilationist rationales of the early 20
th
century and instead emphasized, “for Black people to
adopt their methods of relieving our oppression is ludicrous” (Hamilton & Ture, 1992). Craig
(2002) explains, “for members of the Black movement community, one of the consequences of
personal transformation was the politicization of their bodies and behavior that was formerly
considered private” (p. 18). Not straightening one’s hair, favoring dark skin, and choosing lovers
of color were all part of this line of thought. “Black is beautiful,” the slogan went. James Brown’s
anthem “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” filled the airways, and magazines Essence,
Ebony, and Jet portrayed Black women with Afros as hip, glamorous, and fashion-forward.
Wearing round, picked-out Afros, also referred to as “naturals,” became symbolic of resistant
Black beauty. Corliss (62), a retired economist and college administrator, reflected on the shift
from assimilationist to Afrocentric racial uplift strategies during our interview:
Well, there was a Black Power movement going on then…You know, people started
seeing themselves differently. You know, with the hair straight down like white people
it’s like copying white people… “I’m Black and I’m proud” got to be a popular saying,
then people didn’t want to copy white people’s hair so much anymore. So, there was a
wholesale shift from chemically processed hair to Afro.

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This shift often put Black baby boomers in conflict with their parents of the “traditionalist”
generation. Corliss told me:
Our parents were not into the Afros. They thought it was rebellious and kind of wild-like.
And they were more conformist to the predominant culture. But still very proud of their
Blackness but they didn’t want to risk offending white people with outward appearance
and being judged before people get to know us inwardly.

The Afro was definitely not an understated style. Its size and shape required that it be worn proudly
like a crown, with one’s head high and back upright. This requisite dignified posture was itself
defiant against hegemonic racist associations that tie Blackness to inferiority and shame (Mercer,
1994).
Black-owned companies did not shy away from politicizing the Afro to sell products and
services (Walker, 2000). For example, the AHBAI (American Health and Beauty Aids Institute)
affixed the Proud Lady Symbol on product packaging so that Black customers could easily identify
Black-owned companies and advance the nationalist goal of an economically self-sufficient
community. Black business owners considered making a profit and supporting images of Black
Power to be complementary goals that concurrently redistributed Black aesthetic and material
power (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Walker, 2000). As Ford (2014) explains, this “re-aestheticization of
Blackness…created new value and political power for the Black body” (p. 7). In the United States,
“Black is beautiful” was a racial project where “hair was shaped by a broader Black re-
conceptualization of American Black identity as an ethnic identity with cultural connections to
Africa” (Craig, 2006, p. 172).
Global Soul Style
Afros were also adopted by Black Power movement community in Great Britain, who were
similarly coming to identify as Afro-Caribbean (Ford 2014; Mercer, 1994). Around this same time,
Rastafarianism increased in visibility and militancy in Jamaica. Rastafarian Dreadlock hairstyles
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are based in biblical spiritual doctrines that restrict the cutting of hair. By embracing the natural
material qualities of coily African hair, Dreadlocks are an embodied portrayal of the Rastafarian
belief that the “Promised Land” of Zion is in Ethiopia. Like the Afro, Dreadlocks invoked nature
to portray an Afrocentric political, aesthetic and ethnic affiliation with a mythical African
homeland (Craig, 2006; Banks, 2000; Mercer, 1994). For movement communities across the Black
Atlantic, “natural” hairstyles were part of a counter-hegemonic nation-building project to redefine
people of the diaspora as ethnically African rather than Negro (Craig, 2006; Morrison, 2006;
Mercer, 1994).
This African homeland is more imagined than real since neither the Afro nor Dreadlocks
refer to any existing West African cultural hairstyling practices. As Morrison (2006) writes, “The
signified of the ‘afro’ is the Africa of the imagination, a homeland that is on the bodies and in the
hearts and minds of diaspora people” (p. 106). Mercer (1994) further points out that in African
cultures, hair is more likely to be braided, plaited or wrapped than to be left to grow “naturally,”
though Afros and Dreadlocks became fashionable among West African women as media
representations of celebrities like Bob Marley, Nina Simone, and Miriam Makeba circulated
throughout the Black Atlantic (Ford, 2014). In increasingly cosmopolitan cities like Accra and
Lagos, Afros referenced these metropolitan images of Blackness rather than traditional cultural
practices or a resistant political identity (Mercer, 1994). However, it is important to note that Black
Power and Pan-Africanist movements across the Black Atlantic did, in fact, identify and
communicate with activists in de-colonial movements on the African continent, with whom they
shared an anti-imperialist worldview. Tanisha Ford (2014) argues that Afros were part of a global
“soul style” that connected the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa to Black Power
Movements Great Britain and the United States.
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The Afro from an Intersectional Perspective
Activists Angela Davis, Kathleen Cleaver, Huey Newton, and Jesse Jackson became global
cultural figures not just because of their antiracist politics, but also because of their hair. Both men
and women in the Black movement community considered wearing an Afro a symbol of Black
pride and liberation, which simultaneously undermined binary oppositional gender norms and
white-supremacist aesthetic norms. Afros meant more for Black women, however, because short
coily hair did not conform to norms for “doing” heterosexual womanhood appropriately. As Kelley
(1997) explains of the 1970s Afro, “For Black women, more so than Black men, going ‘natural’
was not just a valorization of Blackness or Africanness, but a direct rejection of a conception of
female beauty that many Black men themselves had upheld” (p. 348). This resulted in conflicting
intra-racial hierarchies and dilemmas for Black women. Some heterosexual Black men considered
women with Afros as outside the bounds of feminine desirability, while others judged Black
women’s political commitment based on their ability to achieve a culturally relative but still
exclusionary beauty ideal. An intersectional analysis of the 1970’s Afro reveals its limited
potential as a radical racial formation project (Craig, 2006).
The media and political representations of Angela Davis’ Afro were especially influential
to how natural hairstyles are interpreted when worn by Black women. When the United States
Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) pursued and later tried the scholar-activist in 1970—
alleging kidnapping, murder, and conspiracy—the government and press circulated among the
public photographs taken by activists, reporters and undercover police that highlighted her
“rebellious” Afro. During and after the two months that she was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list
and in hiding, Davis (1994) estimates that “hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of Afro-wearing
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Black women were accosted, harassed, and arrested” (p. 42). The Afro-wearing Black woman’s
association with Davis’ alleged criminality, political extremism and deviance persist to this day.

Persistent racism, including the Afro’s association with deviant behavior, meant that
embodying “Black is beautiful” was always a risky choice. Most Black women continued to
straighten their hair through the 1960s and 1970s despite powerful attempts by activists, Black
media and artists to redefine “natural” hair as fashionable and political (Byrd & Tharps, 2014;
Ford, 2016; Banks, 2000). For women who came of age during the 1970s, political identity, family
pressures, workplace demands, and personal preference mutually shaped individual style. For
example, Corliss (62, retired) had grown up having her hair lovingly straightened in her neighbor’s
kitchen with a hot comb heated by the stove, and relishing in the positive attention her Shirley
Figure 2.2: Wanted by the FBI poster of Angela Davis (1970)
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Temple curls attracted at school. A lifetime of socialization meant that an understanding of straight
hair as “good hair” was hard to break. As college students, Corliss and her friends’ hairstyling
choices were also strongly shaped by their class aspirations, which often demanded that they
adhere to a politics of respectability. Corliss further explained:
Of my friends, the ones who were more studious and everything, they tended to have the
chemically processed hair or they got their hair straightened with a hot comb. They kept
with the straight hair and a little bit of Afrocentric jewelry instead of Afrocentric attire to
kind of straddle both worlds, you know? I think the more studious friends were thinking,
‘I’m going the route that’s going to get me as far as I can go in life, so, that means I gotta
walk a fine line and not offend the white people but still get along with the Black people.’
So yeah. My friends were ambitious.

Corliss’ friends’ decisions to straighten their hair were acts of “double-consciousness”—they
anticipated that white gatekeepers would react negatively to Afrocentric style in the workplace.
Ironically, artifice enabled some Black women to adopt “natural” hairstyles during this time.
Corliss opted for a curly Afro wig so that she could easily transition between “soul style,” which
was popular at her Historically Black College, and white aesthetic standards for professionalism
at her internships. Black women have always been resilient, finding creative ways to negotiate
competing pressures and ideological systems to attain what they desire. Her everyday style
practices subverted the logic of binary oppositionality between the “cultured” West and a
traditionally “natural” Africa, which Mercer (1994) points out, the Black Power movement’s
liberation ideology also relied upon.
Depoliticizing the ‘Fro
The backlash against the Afro was swift. Physicians argued that Afros fostered unhealthy
grooming habits, and Black beauticians pushed relaxers to encourage clients to purchase more
frequent services (Willett, 2000). The mainstream media also downplayed the Afro’s political
dimensions and marketed the style as a fashionable trend (hooks, 2001; Walker, 2001; Davis,
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1993). This ultimately served to reduce the style’s revolutionary Black nationalist symbolism
(Walker, 2007; Walker, 2000). Angela Davis (1993) reflects on the lasting effects of her own
Afro’s commodification decades later, writing, “It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of
liberation to a politics of fashion; it is humbling because such encounters with the younger
generation demonstrate the fragility and mutability of historical images, particularly those
associated with African American history” (p. 37). Afro wigs ultimately became kitschy nostalgia.
And ironically, after centuries of denigrating curly hair textures and West African hairstyles, braids
gained widespread popularity among white women when Bo Derek wore her hair in beaded
cornrows during her appearance in the movie 10 in 1980. Derek received credit for the style,
angering many Black women who considered hair braiding a cultural art form (Byrd & Tharps,
2014; Willett, 2000). While men and women of the Black movement community had worn
cornrows and Afros to express a diasporic collective identity in the previous decade, white women
were donning the styles to express their individuality and eccentricity.
During the 1970s, Black American beauty culturists circulated an alternative Black
aesthetics throughout the Black Atlantic (Gill, 2010; McAndrew, 2010). African American fashion
designers, models, and hairstylists traveled to France, Italy, and England, capitalizing on a greater
acceptance of African Americans abroad to grow their businesses and gain legitimacy. Bethann
Hardison, Beverly Johnson, Pat Cleveland and Naomi Sims became international supermodels. As
they traveled, they established themselves as the leading experts on Black beauty and hair care.
Rather than advancing Black Nationalist or separatist ideologies, beauty culturists, models, and
designers sought to widen understandings of Western citizenship. Becoming “global ambassadors
for American consumer capitalism,” they themselves as uplifting the race by disseminating images
of Black people as respectable, upwardly mobile, fashionable and characteristically American
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during the Cold War Era” (McAndrew, 2010, p. 798). As they traveled across the Black Atlantic,
beauty culturists expanded the image of American beauty in the global public consciousness to
include people of African descent to resist sexist and racist tropes about Black women (Gill, 2010).
Black Hair in the 80s, 90s, and 00s
In the 1980’s, white-owned companies re-acknowledged Black women as profitable
potential consumers and entered the “ethnic” haircare market in force. Eventually, they bought out
most major Black-owned beauty product manufacturers in the United States. Walker (2009) points
out the role of racial discrimination in Black Americans’ economic struggles: “If Black financial
achievements seem inconsequential, it is not that Blacks have failed to save, but that capital
available has been unconscionably circumscribed by race” (p. xvi). For much of the history of the
United States, government policies exclusively subsidized and established contract agreements
with white-owned companies, deliberately, systematically, and institutionally hindering Black
business growth (Feagin & Elias, 2013; Walker, 2009; Lipsitz, 2006). The usurpation of Black
beauty businesses was largely facilitated by these sorts of racially discriminatory regulatory and
financial lending practices. For example, in 1975, the Federal Trade Commission ordered Johnson
Products, the first Black-owned company to be listed on the American Stock Exchange, to add a
health risk warning label to their Ultra Sheen relaxer. The FTC did not enforce the same policy
against Johnson Product’s largest competitor, white-owned Revlon, which used the same
ingredients but advertised themselves as “better and safer” (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). Johnson
Products sued the FTC and won twenty-two months later, but they never recovered from the
incident and lost their market share to Revlon. In an infamous news article, Revlon executive
Irving Bottner predicted that Black-owned cosmetics companies would eventually disappear
altogether, stating that “they’ll all be sold to White companies” (Doherty, 1987). Since the hair
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care industry is at the center of many important Black economic milestones, losing racial
ownership within it was fraught with emotional, moral and material stakes. Bottner’s remark
incited Jesse Jackson and his Operation PUSH foundation to arrange a boycott of Revlon, organize
its symbolic funeral, and publicly criticize the company’s presence in apartheid South Africa.
Despite efforts to re-politicize racial ownership, the numbers of Black-owned beauty businesses
continued to dwindle through the 2000s.

The shift in power over the Black beauty product manufacturing industry away from Blacks
retrenched the hegemony of Eurocentric feminine beauty ideals. As Mears (2011) well articulates
in her study on determining factors of beauty in the fashion industry, “the relations of cultural
production,” taking into consideration modern markets, labor organization, decision-making
processes, and race and gender hierarchies, “determine the possibilities of cultural consumption”
Figure 2.3: Reverend Jesse Jackson at the Operation PUSH funeral for Revlon (November
1986)
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(p. 5). This may explain the shift in Black women’s hairstyling trends from Afros and cornrows to
towards straight, long looks since the 1980s. Reading hair as text, Johnson (2013) catalogued
hairstyles shown in advertisements for Ebony and Essence magazines by the product
manufacturer’s race for 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, and 2010 and discovered that models’
hairstyles in advertisements reflected the racial ownership of the manufacturer--models for white-
owned companies tended be styled with straight hair while Black-owned companies were more
likely to show models with natural hairstyles. Johnson (2013) argues that white-owned
manufacturers’ cultural assumptions about beauty in the ethnic hair-care market idealize white
femininity and decrease Black women’s options for alternative presentations of self. The wet,
silky Jheri Curl, chemical relaxers and weaves were most popular among African Americans
during the 1980s and 1990s (Byrd & Tharps, 2014).

The Entrance of Korean Entrepreneurs and Racial Triangulation in the Black Beauty
Industry

Systemic gendered racism—evidenced by and perpetuated through racist and sexist
representations of Black people, discriminatory financial institutions and a dearth in resources
catering to styling curly and coily hair textures—channeled Blacks into salon servicing while
favorably positioning whites and Asians as suppliers in the more lucrative manufacturing, retail
and distribution sectors of the Black beauty industry (Wingfield, 2008; Yoon, 2007; Silverman,
2000; Light & Bonacich, 1988). The style shift to straight hair facilitated Asian entrepreneurship
in the Black beauty supply market as Black women’s demands for weaves made with Indian,
Chinese and South Korean human hair rose. South Korean manufacturers gained a near monopoly
on processing human hair due to Korean government-aid loans to the wig industry (Yoon, 2007).
In the United States, Korean immigrants formed middleman minority businesses, using
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connections to human hair suppliers overseas to stock their beauty supply stores (Yoon, 2007;
Portes & Jenson, 1989; Bonacich, 1973). In the United States, Koreans came to enjoy 60% of the
manufacturing, distribution, and retail market share of the Black beauty supply industry by the
2000s (Byrd & Tharps, 2014). In places like The Netherlands, France, and Spain, Indian and
Pakistani entrepreneurs established similar shops. To secure funding and circumvent bank loan
processes that systematically excluded non-whites, immigrant social networks formed their own
credit associations (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Yoon, 2007).
Relationships between Blacks and Asians in the beauty supply industry demonstrate how
white supremacy expresses itself through market dynamics, even in interactions between two non-
white groups. Lipsitz (2006) notes that conflict and cooperation “among racialized minorities
[stems] from the recognition of the rewards of whiteness and the concomitant penalties imposed
upon ‘nonwhite’ populations” (p. 4). Korean-American owned beauty supply stores provide for
and depend on Black consumers by stocking wide selections of hard to find products that Black
American women want. And, some Black entrepreneurs collaborate with Asian manufacturers to
create products for Black women. One Black American celebrity hairstylist I interviewed partnered
with a Chinese manufacturer to design a special comb for coiled hair, and an entrepreneur I met at
Brooklyn’s International Natural Hair Meet Up Day partnered with an Indian distributor of human
hair to create weaves that mimic Black women’s curl patterns.
On the other hand, Korean immigrant success in the Black beauty market is often used to
advance “model minority” myths that point to the economic mobility of some Asian Americans as
proof of Black cultural deficiency, while deflecting attention away from distinct political and
social realities—in this case, differential global trade networks and proximity to hegemonic
feminine ideals for long, straight hair. Racial triangulation theory asserts that twin processes of 1)
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relative valorization of Asian work ethic and 2) Asian civic ostracism serve to maintain social and
political white supremacy over people of both African and Asian descent in the United States
(Kim, 1999). Triangulating Blacks and Asians as mutually inferior to whites but different from
one another puts them in competition for resources. Krystal (23) worked for a Korean-owned
beauty supply store in high school and recalled a conversation with a Black woman entrepreneur
who was in completion with her employer in our interview: “She would explain to me how hard it
was because certain companies won’t sell to her when they realized she was African American.
She was just like there are laws in place and groups in place to prevent non-Korean store owners
from getting products.” A presenter at the 2015 Bronner Brother’s Hair Show made a similar
accusation in a session about how to start a business importing human hair from China and India.
The session was attended entirely by women of African descent, and the lead workshop facilitator
was a middle-aged African American man who had worked in the beauty industry for 20 years.
He asserted, “Koreans come for one purpose. To sell hair to [Black people] from China. Chinese
people get $17 million a month from the Koreans and are obligated to sell to the Koreans and not
to Blacks. We [Black people] can’t compete with $17 million.” The presenter also warned the
group about buying hair from Alibaba, a Chinese multinational e-commerce website worth
billions, casting suspicion on Asian hair suppliers and feeding into xenophobic yellow peril
metaphors that East Asians will conquer the West—triangulating Blacks and Asians by pitting
Black American nativism against Asian perpetual foreignness. He then advised the group to try
importing Indian hair instead, because he saw the market as less regulated and therefore more open
to Black entrepreneurship. Black manufacturers, distributors, and retailers have collectively
responded to real and perceived racial discrimination by Asian business owners through
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organizations like the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association (BOBSA), which aims to “connect
the Black dots” within the beauty industry.
Hip-Hop Hair
Hip-hop culture popularized new forms of fashion, dance, and music in the 1980s and
1990s. Hip-hop originated among Black and Puerto Rican working-class youth in The Bronx, New
York, who used music to express the problems of urban life (Rose, 1994). Rappers and emcees
gave voice to the experience of social and economic exclusion while creating alternative avenues
for fame, wealth, and acclaim. Hip-hop culture quickly spread throughout the world to become a
powerfully influential form of post-colonial resistance across the Black Atlantic (Lipsitz, 1994).
Hip-hop style rejected white, middle-class styling norms. Masculine style included baggy
clothes, stocking caps, tattoos, and large jewelry. Brown (2005) explains the gendered effects of
hip-hop style for Black men: “The stylin and profiling associated with a hip-hop black masculinity
is perpetuated in videos, films, entertainment, and athletics as a way to demonstrate an oppositional
identity that is reified as a sign of a strong black man” (p. 78). The Philly fade was a popular
hairstyle among rappers, emcees, deejays and break dancers, featuring short hair on the sides of
the head and a high flat top. Some people embellished their haircuts by etching elaborate designs
and logos into their scalps. Women and girls of the hip-hop generation often donned long extension
braids, platinum blonde weaves, elaborate cornrows, and ornate up-dos crafted with wire, synthetic
hair, and gel. Hip-hop style was imaginative, distinctly Black, and proudly working-class. Many
hip-hop hairstyles made use of the material qualities and sculptural potential in coily hair, as well
as new technologies of artifice (Mercer, 1994). Black beauticians found ways to make hairpieces
defy gravity, spin, and light up. The best beauticians gained notoriety for their work by competing
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in runway competitions at Black beauty industry expositions. Black hair shows remain a rare space
for Black stylists to showcase the craft and creativity of working-class style.

In the late 1990s and 2000s, artists Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Jill Scott and India Arie
popularized towering head wraps, Dreadlocks and natural hair for a new generation. Arie’s hit
single “I Am Not My Hair” (2006) celebrated Black people’s diverse and sometimes paradoxical
hair styling practices, as influenced by respectability politics, state surveillance, hip-hop culture,
Afrocentricity, illness, and individual creativity alike. Just as the neo-soul genre repackaged Black
music traditions like jazz, hip-hop, and R&B, these artists’ hairstyles paid tribute to a rich history
of Black hair culture and Black feminist politics of resistance. Head wraps were new and
unfamiliar to many outside the African diasporic community, but they quickly became a symbol
for 1990s multiculturalism—a political philosophy encouraging diverse ethnic groups to
Figure 2.4: Model and stylist at the Bronner Brothers International Beauty Show competition in
Atlanta, GA (2015)
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collaborate with one another while retaining their distinctive identities. On an iconic episode of
Sesame Street, Erykah Badu used her colorful, plaid head wrap to teach children about tolerance
and cross-cultural friendship. On the hit show Moesha (1996-2001) and the made-for-TV movie
Cinderella (1997), singer-actress Brandy made braids the “girl next door” style of choice for Black
teenagers around the world.
Though a distinctively Black style flourished in the arts, debates about Black sports stars’
style reminded the public that hip hop hair was still exotic, risky, and marginal. When African
American tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams entered the elite tennis scene with bold patterned
outfits and technicolor hair, they were hit with scandal after scandal ignited by media, fan, and pro
tennis officials’ responses to their “urban” fashion and hairstyling choices. Most memorably,
Venus Williams was warned and penalized at the 1999 Australian Open because beads fell off her
braids and onto the court. The referee argued the beads caused a “disturbance” to her opponent,
and Williams ultimately lost the game to Lindsay Davenport. Until then, the rule had only been
applied when larger garments like hats fell onto the court. Many saw the referee’s call as a way of
policing the predominantly white, wealthy professional tennis culture. Black men celebrities also
negotiated stereotypes that hip-hop style signified toxic Black masculinity and criminality. In the
late ‘90s and early ‘00s, Allen Iverson, with his cornrow braids, tattoos, baggy clothes, and use of
African American Vernacular English, became the most notorious player in the NBA for his
refusal to adopt white middle-class cultural norms after becoming wealthy. Brown (2005)
summarizes, “For African American males such as Iverson who attempt to construct identities
outside of the acceptable boundaries of dominant culture, their struggle for self-definition reflects
the larger cultural clash between white society’s middle-class values and Black masculinity from
a hip-hop perspective” (p. 81).
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Colorblind Racism and Negotiating Workplace Policies
It is inaccurate and incomplete to suggest that Black women passively internalized
Eurocentric representations of beauty they saw in cosmetics advertisements. Many Black women
decided to straighten their hair because straight hairstyles were considered more professional, so
they needed to relax their hair to keep their jobs (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Willett, 2000; Rooks,
1996). Lorde (1984) points out that “in order to survive, those of us for whom oppression is as
American as apple pie have always had to be watchers, to become familiar with the language of
the oppressor, even sometimes adopting them for some illusion of protection” (p. 288). Even
though civil rights gains from the previous decades made overt racial discrimination more taboo
and illegal, white supremacy evolved into new forms. Employers and state institutions in South
Africa, the Americas, and Western Europe adopted “colorblind” approaches to social problems
that saw race-conscious policies as inherently racist, but continued to systematically perpetuate
cultural forms of prejudice (Carbado & Harris, 2012; Ansell, 2006; Bonilla-Silva, 2006).
Colorblind language tends to shelter institutions from accusations of racial discrimination because
race is often not mentioned even if it is implicitly inscribed. For example, discriminatory and
white-centered grooming policies at schools, the military, and the workplace have institutionalized
gendered racism, discouraging or explicitly preventing individuals from wearing culturally Black
hairstyles like Afros, braids, and dreadlocks. Without mentioning race, such rules are still based
in white, middle-class standards and disproportionately affect Black women because they are more
likely than men to be judged by their appearance and to wear their hair long. They become
roadblocks that constrain Black women’s upward mobility via access to employment, social
networks and educational institutions (Thompson, 2009; Carbado & Harris, 2012; Collins, 2005;
Craig, 2002; Banks, 2000; Caldwell, 1991). As Patricia Hill Collins (1998) explains, “where
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segregation used to keep Black women out of the classroom and boardroom, surveillance now
becomes an important mechanism of control” (p. 38).
In legal cases where Black women plaintiffs argued they were racially discriminated
against by employers for wearing natural or braided hairstyles, an unarticulated baseline of
feminine whiteness and of masculine Blackness made Black women’s claims unintelligible
(Carbado, 2013; Caldwell, 2008; Crenshaw, 1989). These cases took center stage in the 1980s and
1990s. Consider the most famous of these incidents: Rogers v. American Airlines. In 1981, Renee
Rogers sued her employer, American Airlines, for racial discrimination after she was fired for
wearing cornrows to her job as a desk ticket agent. Rogers lost her appeal at the Federal District
Court of New York because the judge argued that Rogers’ hairstyle referred to Bo Derek’s
cornrows in the film 10 rather than her identification with an African cultural heritage (Byrd &
Tharps, 2014). What is considered a respectable appearance often has racial implications despite
policies that read as colorblind. The decision implicitly asserted that white women’s perception of
cornrows as fashion determines how all others derive meaning from the style. The decision ignored
the ways in which hair is simultaneously gendered, racially constitutive and culturally expressive.
Such cases exemplify the importance of analyzing social life from an intersectional lens that is
attentive to how race, class, and gender (among other relevant social locations) intersect to shape
identity and stratify experience (Crenshaw, 1991).
Black Hair Today
Discrimination against Black workers and athletes continues to occur into the second
decade of the 21
st
century. If stigmas against Black bodies remain similar and consistent, the ability
for Black communities to respond has broadened, thanks to the advent of social media and the rise
of vocal natural hair and other political and identity-based communities on-and-offline. For an
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example, when Alan Maloney, a white referee, forced New Jersey high school wrestler Andrew
Johnson to cut his dreadlocks or forfeit his match in December 2018, a video of the incident filmed
by Sports New Jersey reporter Mike Frankel went viral and amassed over 15 million views
(MikeFrankelSNJ, 2018). The footage depicts an athletic trainer aggressively hacking off
Johnson’s dreadlocks, as well as the sorrow on his face and across his hunched shoulders as he
accepts the obligatory victory fist-raise from the referee, walks off the mat, and is embraced by his
teammates after a bittersweet win. This moment, which ten years ago would have occurred in
relative obscurity, was filmed, archived, circulated, discussed by journalists, celebrities,
politicians, and regular folk alike. Some defended the referee, arguing that the New Jersey State
Interscholastic Association rulebook is about hair length and makes no reference to race
whatsoever. Others pointed out the referee’s ultimatum occurred in an inappropriate manner and
time, and that the application of the rule unfairly forced Johnson to choose between his identity
and his ambition. Several social media influencers reposted the video, like Shaun King, who
encouraged his 812k Instagram followers to Google research Maloney’s history of racism
(shaunking, 2018). The grassroots social media firestorm around the incident forced established
institutions like the American Civil Liberties Union and the New Jersey Division of Civil Rights
to respond.
The New Jersey State Interscholastic Association’s rulebook and referee Maloney’s
insensitive ultimatum mutually suggest that colorblind racism is alive and well; but, the reaction
to the Frankel’s video proves that resistance is also thriving and at a level and of a quality that has
never been possible in the past. The following chapter discusses the continuing significance of
race and hair in the 21
st
century, and how social media and the natural hair movement give new
voice and form to dilemmas that Black peoples have faced for generations.
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Chapter 3
The Continuing Significance of Race and Hair in the 21
st
Century
In a post-civil rights and post-apartheid era, those with privilege frequently assert that
people of all racial backgrounds now have equal access to opportunity, and accordingly, that
policies which consider race are inherently discriminatory; but, race mobilizes vast cultural
resources, discursive devices, and meanings that persist after societies recognize their histories of
slavery, imperialism, and/or exploitation and after states grant protections from discrimination.
Ideological and material holdovers from centuries of explicit racial marginalization continue to
privilege whites despite (and sometimes because of) non-racial policies. Carr (1997) calls this
phenomenon “colorblind racism.” Bonilla-Silva (2006) finds that in an era of colorblind racism,
whites increasingly employ alternative frames and stories that avoid explicitly invoking race while
still making decisions that have racial and racist implications. Bonilla-Silva interviewed dozens of
white Americans and noted patterns of abstract statements, like emphasizing meritocracy to
explain opposition affirmative action and defend decisions to live in segregated neighborhoods,
which ignore the persistence of racial inequality and how their personal actions negatively affect
minorities. Colorblind racism does not escape the aesthetic. Black women’s exclusion from
dominant understandings of professionalism and beauty continues to politicize Black women’s
bodies into the new millennium. Even as Tate (2017) notes the longevity of anti-racist Black beauty
politics among Black and multiracial women in the United States, Latin America, and the United
Kingdom, she and other scholars remind us that Eurocentric standards for professionalism and
feminine beauty remain hegemonic within and beyond Black communities (Byrd & Tharps, 2014;
Johnson, 2013; Caldwell, 2007; Craig, 2006; Banks, 2000; Rooks, 1996; Figueiredo, 1994).
Discourses about and representations of Black hair in the media to reinforce systemic
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gendered racism in the 21
st
century. For example, when radio talk show host Don Imus famously
described the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos” in 2007, his
remark dismissed the team’s accomplishments as college students and award-winning athletes by
using kinky hair to evoke racist stereotypes that Black women are hypersexual and unrespectable
(Cooky, Wachs, Messner, & Dworkin, 2010). Similarly, at the 2015 Academy Awards, E! TV’s
Fashion Police co-host Giuliana Rancic commented that multiracial entertainer Zendaya’s faux
dreadlocks smell like patchouli oil and weed, drawing race and class boundaries around the formal
event that excluded Zendaya as inferior and potentially criminal through her hair. In 2017,
conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly rejected and minimized a critical speech African American
congresswoman Maxine Waters delivered about President Donald Trump, stating, “I didn’t hear a
word she said, I was looking at the James Brown wig.” O’Reilly’s comments about Water’s hair
relied upon racist and sexist stereotypes that Black women are too powerful and should be ignored
if they cannot be silenced. Public figures like Imus, Rancic and O’Reilly regularly reduce Black
women’s contributions to society through racist and sexist comments about their hair. By doing so
on the public stage, the media and representatives of the state discipline and restrict Black women’s
presentations-of-self, maintain white middle-class feminine beauty standards, and reinforce white
supremacy.
In addition, despite decades of critiques against employment grooming policies banning
popular Black hairstyles like cornrows, braids, and Afros, many colorblind but discriminatory rules
continue to be newly instituted and upheld by laws. For example, in the spring of 2014, the United
States Army updated its grooming policy to prohibit dreadlocks, twists, and large cornrows-- all
popular styles for managing Black hair during physical exercise. That the military policy described
these styles as “unkempt” ignores the fact that cultural meanings of hair are racially constitutive,
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and that professionalism and normative notions of attractiveness are racialized (Carbado, 2013;
Caldwell, 1991). Upon widespread criticism by Black women in the military and by anti-racist
advocates, the military regulations were abandoned in February 2017. However, similar policies
are regularly upheld by the law. In September 2016, a U.S. federal appeals court decision
maintained employer bans against dreadlocks arguing that the style is cultural and not racial in a
biological sense, and thus not subject to protection by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. U.S. Circuit
Judge Alberto Jordan argued that while hair texture is racialized and immutable, hairstyle is a
“mutable characteristic of race” (Finley, 2016). Given that all hair textures are malleable, the court
decision sent the message that racialized phenotypes should be minimized—when a person is not
white. Employers attempts to control Black bodies at work produces “a particular effect—Black
women remain visible yet silenced; their bodies become written by other texts” and they too often
remain powerless to speak for themselves (Collins, 1998, p. 38).

Likewise, the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA) regularly and
disproportionately conducts pat downs of Black female travelers, including searches of their
Figure 3.4: United States Army Grooming Guidelines Visual Aid (2014)
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natural hair. Per a U.S. Government Accountability Office (2000) press release, Black women who
are U.S. citizens “were 9 times more likely than White women who were U.S. citizens to be x-
rayed after being frisked or patted town.” Simone Browne (2015) theorizes the experience of state-
sanctioned discrimination against Black and Brown people in airports as racial baggage, “where
certain acts and certain looks at the airport weigh down some travelers, while others travel lightly”
(p. 132). Black women’s bodies, especially those with natural hair, “come to represent, and also
resist, security theater at the airport” (Browne, 2015, p. 29). The presumed criminality of Black
women in transit, or their racial baggage, partially reflects punitive U.S. War on Terror policies
against non-whites, widespread Islamophobia, white nativist xenophobia across the West in the
early 21
st
century. As Black women go natural, they become seen as incompatible with the (white)
image of a naturalized American citizen. Or in other words, agents of the state make assumptions
a Black woman with natural hair must be a naturalized citizen elsewhere, within a body politic
they more “naturally” belong. This response reflects an essentialist and ahistorical logic, and is
also likely a backlash to contradictory Black Power movement ideology in the 1970s, which
politicized “natural” hair as symbolic of Black people of the diaspora’s identification with an
imagined African homeland, but relied on binary oppositional logic that had for centuries depicted
the “cultured” West as superior to and different from the “naturally” primitive “rest” (Mercer,
1994). Forty years later, this backlash increases Black women’s racial baggage, while hair
straightening enables them to better navigate systemic gendered racism for easier spatial mobility.
In March 2015, after the second of two complaints by Black women represented by the
American Civil Liberties Union, TSA agreed to begin training employees on the discriminatory
impact of hair searches on Black women (ACLU, 2015). ACLU Staff Attorney Novella Coleman
explained in the press release announcing the agreement, “The humiliating experience of countless
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Black women who are routinely targeted for hair pat-downs because their hair is ‘different’ is not
only wrong, but also a great misuse of time and resources.” However, explaining discriminatory
impact to TSA agents does nothing to prevent or discourage discriminatory practices. This practice
continues to be sheltered by laws that allow exceptions to unreasonable searches and
discriminatory law enforcement based on race.
TSA searches are indiscriminate of class status and celebrity. In 2012, entertainer Solange
Knowledge described her experience of “Discrim-FRO-nation” at the airport on Twitter alongside
a link to an article about TSA’s public search of a woman named Isis Brantley’s Afro, apparently
for explosive material. I regularly have my natural hair searched, and have been asked to remove
a headscarf worn to maintain my hairstyle. Usually, this entails a woman agent squeezing my hair
into my head or her running fingers from my forehead through my scalp. In the digital age, Black
women have access to and are creating new platforms to publicly share their accounts of their
experiences of hair discrimination, and what it feels like for others to casually treat their bodies as
public property. For example, designer Momo Pixel’s interactive computer game “Hair Nah” went
viral across the Internet in 2017. In the game, the player first assembles a character from a range
of brown skin tones and natural hairstyles. After choosing a destination, the player defends the
character’s natural hair using the arrow keys to swat a barrage of light-complexioned grabbing
hands away. The game’s outro reads, “The game is over, but this experience isn’t. This is an issue
that Black women face daily. So, note to those that do it: STOP THAT SHIT.”
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Even when Black women’s bodies are not explicitly regulated, they remain pressured
through conversations with friends, family, and coworkers to conform to a politics of respectability
to find or keep jobs. For instance, at a 2017 panel discussion about curls in the workplace held at
a co-working space in downtown Los Angeles, a featured panelist with natural hair explained to
the audience how racialized professional norms affected her job hunt: “I was in the middle of a job
search and I got a call for a job interview. I was at my friend’s house and she gave me a straight
bob wig to wear. This is sad that we have to do this. I don’t know how it’s going to be received or
if it’s going to be professional. I mean, by whose standard is it professional?” Her rhetorical
question was met with grunts and nods of understanding from the audience. Friends and mothers
of Black women often pass along their strategies for survival, socializing one another into a
collective double-consciousness to anticipate how Black hair is or might be seen by others. Zaire
(23, Los Angeles) and Shauna (24, Los Angeles) both described conversations with their mothers
about how to wear their hair during job interviews. Zaire recalled, “My mom has made comments
on ‘oh you haven’t found a job yet because you haven’t combed your hair…She thinks that I
Figure 3.5: Hair Nah Video Game (Pixel, 2017)
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shouldn’t wear it out in an Afro. She thinks it will save my chances in the workplace.” Shauna
explained her mom’s similar view of hair straightening as a proven strategy for upward mobility
and economic advancement:
For [my mom], growing up, hair was definitely straight because she wanted to move into
a better life and going corporate and all that. For her, [it was] a no-brainer that her hair
would have to be straight. When I started not to wear my hair that way it kind of threw her
off because she didn’t think it would be socially acceptable. She thought about how people
think you are crazy and wild. She thought these things because that was something
ingrained in her for her to get where she wanted to be.

Shauna’s mother’s reaction to her natural hair referenced white supremacist views that coily hair
is a sign of Black women’s inherent wildness, and she saw straight hair as one way to protect
daughter’s right to employment, dignity, and civil life. LaToya (23, Houston), a computer analyst
and Jane (42, Los Angeles), a media executive, took cues from more senior Black women in their
fields when deciding to how to wear their hair at work. Jane recalled a subtle conversation with
her boss about how she should wear her hair for an upcoming presentation to executives in our
interview when she told me, “I remember one day I was wearing [my hair] natural and big and my
boss at the time was Black, she’s mixed, she’s from New York and I was like ‘should I not do this
tomorrow?’ She would have never said no but she was like ‘ehh I think I’m going to press mine’
and I was like alright.” Similarly, LaToya explained her worry that wearing natural hair would
make her seem incompetent and jeopardize her career mobility in her predominantly white
company:
I kind of conformed to the way Tiffany, the other Black lady who seems to be doing well
at work on my team was. Her hair is usually straight and it’s very standardized. You know,
American standardized hair—straight. She’s natural as well, but she wears straight styles.
Nice sleek buns, and so I thought for this current setting maybe my natural poofs and my
natural hairstyles that I usually wear may not be as well received as they were at my HBCU
[Historically Black College] because this is no longer an HBCU. This is a professional
workplace and so I do find the weave…I mean I do have professional natural styles, but
I’ve noticed that people have been more responsive to the responsible, to the weave or to
the straight hair.
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Both Jane and LaToya learned and accepted that straight hairstyles are key to upward mobility at
their jobs. As these women’s reflections demonstrate, racist stereotypes that Black hair is wild and
unprofessional and respectability politics from the mid-20
th
century continue to inform Black
women’s hair politics into this century. Such insecurities are especially acute for Black women in
a deregulating neoliberal era, as individuals are increasingly held privately responsible making
themselves marketable and, in turn, socially successful, despite stratifying social systems of
capitalism, racism, and patriarchy and increasing labor precarity. As Evans and Riley (2013)
explain, “the management of risk within the discourses of neoliberal femininity presents women
as always culpable for their own individualized failure, often in highly racialized and classed
ways” (p. 271).
Many women’s concerns that their natural hairstyles will hinder their careers are reinforced
by their interactions at work. When Michelle (49, Los Angeles) stopped straightening her hair for
health reasons her coworkers ostracized her. She told me, “When I first started wearing [my hair
in] puffs and trying to come up with my own flavor I would walk in a room at work and I could
see all eyes on me and it wasn’t like, ‘aww that’s great!’ it was like ‘what is she doing?’ and I had
to like, push through all of that.” Brie, a 35-year-old university administrator based in Cape Town
told me that co-workers’ comments about her hair silenced her from participating in meetings
despite her desire to contribute:
I was in Joburg two weeks ago for a conference and there are so many things I could have
spoken about but I also keep quiet about insecurity and not feeling like I was fully part of
the team. But it was also a case that they dismissed what I have to say and, ‘oh you didn’t
go with your hair like that to the meeting’ or whatever. It feeds into it. Like, it trips you up!
It is hard being a woman of color at the moment for me.

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In the post-apartheid context where corporate workplaces are slowly, but increasingly diversifying,
macro-level shifts are felt through interpersonal interactions which discipline women’s
presentations-of-self. Marley, a 26-year-old teacher living and working in Cape Town, illustrated
this in our interview:
Where I am working now it is a private school very strict. I have to be precise with what I
want to do. The other night we went to a very fancy restaurant and they come around and
then there African dancers that come while you are eating and you taste traditional dishes
and it is made very well. At the end of the night they throw dust on the people and they are
like ‘experience the gold of Africa.’ My co-worker told me, maybe the dust will be magical
and your hair will be straight tomorrow. I didn’t say much because I’m new to the company
and I didn’t want them to hate me but I felt very insulted by that. Why do you want my
hair straight? Why do you think it should be straight? It could be a race thing because she
was white and I am Coloured. The company that I work for is majority white people and
they feel like the Coloured people are taking over and I’m in a management position. I still
rocked it at work like girl please I’m not going to change for you. Who are you? No! But I
thought about wearing braids for a month and I wondered whether I shouldn’t now. I don’t
want to think about what I must do next I just want to be. Why can’t I be? Let me just be.

The comment by Marley’s coworker was a classic example of colorblind racism. Because Marley’s
coworker never explicitly mentioned race, Marley was made to guess her coworker’s intention.
So, Marley left the interaction without a clear sense of whether she has the right demand an apology
or file a grievance against her coworker even though she felt deeply insulted and disrespected.
Instead, Marley unfairly took on an insecurity about her hair and a fear of being disliked—of being
seen as angry and hostile. The interaction taught her to self-police her style at work moving
forward. The interaction was all the more powerful given where it took place—the colleague was
happy to be entertained with African culture at a restaurant but implied that Marley’s hair was
unwelcome in the predominantly white corporate setting they shared. These sorts of interactions
produce a particular effect, telling women of color where they should be and where they do not
belong. In places with histories of European settler-colonialism and displacement like South
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Africa, such comments are interpersonal forms of colonialism, where white elites take space,
dignity, and the right to expression away from people of color, reinforcing white supremacy.
Paula (26, Los Angeles) confronted controlling image of the mammy and when she wore
her hair in a head wrap to work. Her experience demonstrates that that centuries old racist
representations of Black womanhood continue to shape their interactions into the 21
st
century:
One time I wore a wrap for the first time and when I did wear a turban, I remember the
security guy at the front desk…the first thing he said was do you have any syrup? I’m like
huh? It’s early morning and I’m confused. I’m not as sharp as I am around 2pm. I’m like,
huh? And he’s like Aunt Jemima! I was like literally… I wanted to go off. I just said no
and walked to my desk. Come on! That was one thing that really, really annoyed me.

This interaction was a microaggression, a term that refers to the everyday subtle statements,
behaviors, and environments—whether intentional or intentional—that communicate derogatory
or hostile beliefs based on the identity of a target group. While microaggressions may seem minor
or trivial, they maintain the white-supremacist and patriarchal status quo by silencing, excluding,
and marginalizing their target. Given the overt and implicit ways women of color are
systematically held accountable to a hegemonic femininity that devalues their Blackness, it is
evident that hair and beauty remain social justice concerns (hooks, 2015a; Kang, 2003; Banks,
2000; Banet-Weiser, 1999; Rooks, 1996; Wolf, 1991; Chapkis, 1986).
The Contemporary Natural Hair Movement: A New Era of Resistance
Black women in the 21
st
century carry on a long tradition of embodied resistance to white
supremacy and patriarchal control—systems of stratification that continue to marginalize Black
women in the workplace, in the media, in transit, and in relationships—through the natural hair
movement. Like during the 1960s and 1970s, many Black women today are politicizing their
natural hair as more culturally authentic, and as resistant to Eurocentric standards for feminine
beauty. However, the stories of the women I encountered in my fieldwork are not fully represented
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by the existing literature on Black beauty politics and culture. This is unsurprising—the context of
Black women’s lives has transformed and is transforming. A confluence of shifts in the political
economy, technology, and popular culture in the late 2000s has enabled natural hair to become
full-blown lifestyle movement among women of African descent.
In 2008, Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair revived a conversation about the politics
of Black hair on an international level. The film explored the physical, emotional and financial toll
that straightening hair to appeal to white beauty ideals takes on Black women’s lives. While the
Good Hair documentary harshly critiqued wearing weaves and using chemical relaxers, it left
viewers unsettled, without clear pathways for change. The rise of visually rich social media
platforms filled the gap that Good Hair left behind. YouTube (released 2005), Tumblr (2009) and
Instagram (2010), enabled formerly isolated Black women to form online communities and
exchange information about styling natural hair, concocting products at home, and fostering self-
acceptance. Women online offered natural hair as a healthier, cheaper, and more culturally
affirming solution to the good hair/bad hair debate.
How to become natural is a central conversation in natural hair communities since many
Black women receive their first chemical relaxers as children and have not seen or cared for their
natural hair texture for years or even decades (Byrd & Tharps 2014; Banks, 2000). Natural hair
spaces refer to the practice of purging permanently straightened hair to reveal one’s natural hair
texture as transitioning. Women transition to natural hair in one of two main ways. The first way
is by growing out chemically relaxed or heat damaged hair over an extended period, and then
gradually cutting off the straight ends of their hair to retain a desired hair length. Women might
braid, weave, twist, or heat style their hair during this time to camouflage the difference in texture
between their curly new hair growth and their straighter processed ends. For example, Michelle
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(49) wore straight weaves for the first six months of her transition while her natural hair grew
underneath. Later, she switched to box braids to avoid heat damage caused by thermally pressing
her edges to match the texture of the weave. In between installations, she’d cut off her relaxed hair
bit by bit. Hair growth is a slow process, so it can take several months for women with tightly
coiled hair to discover their natural hair texture. The point where virgin hair meets processed hair
is called the “line of demarcation,” and the process of transitioning is complete when one’s hair
has been trimmed to this point.

The second way women transition to natural hair is by “big chopping,” a term in today’s
natural hair culture that refers to the practice of shaving off all one’s hair at once for an immediate
fresh start. In the opening poem to this study “Wild Crown,” I.S. Jones conjures this practice in
the beginning line “chop me from the neck up,” and when she later refers to her newly barren
scalp. While a general search for “transitioning natural hair” shows about 580k results on
YouTube, a search for “big chop” garners over 4.6 million hits, highlighting the importance of this
practice to natural hair culture, and the spectacle it has become. Big chopping is dramatic in its
Figure 3.6: Transitioning Hair

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abruptness, and seen as brave for going against cultural norms. Weitz (2005) calls baldness “the
ultimate hair statement” for women in Western heteronormative and patriarchal societies because
it eschews feminine beauty norms for long hair and deemphasizes differences between women’s
and men’s bodies. She finds that generally, rebellious, politically radical or artistic women choose
the style, or women want to signal a lesbian identity. An intersectional analysis that is mindful of
how racism shapes women’s lives must also note the cultural impact of head shaving a form of
punishment and shame during slavery, as well as the centrality of hair style, texture, and length to
Black women’s cultural, social and personal identities (Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Jacobs-Huey, 2006;
Weitz, 2005; Banks, 2000; Rooks, 1996). Within this context, transitioning to natural hair by big
chopping can be shocking for both the person who does it and those around her. Maria, a panelist
at an intimate natural hair forum discussion about the experience of transitioning to natural hair,
told the group about severe pushback from her family when she big chopped because she rejected
conventional hetero-feminine beauty and respectability ideals. She recalled:
My family looked at me different. They thought I was this wild child, you know, being
from the South where you can’t talk back to your parents. My uncle told me that this style
was for men. That’s dyke. Dyke women wear that! And it kind of stabbed me in my chest.
I was getting all these energies from my family and now all the sudden I’m different. So, I
wore this shirt to be a superwoman that said “I heart my hair.”

Patriarchal homophobia makes “going natural” a risky choice, potentially putting women in danger
of emotional and physical harm. But Maria’s testimony also reveals that the practice of big
chopping can be liberating and self-affirming. Against much hurt and disappointment from her
family, Maria asserted the “superwoman” within herself.
Regardless of how she becomes natural, most women I interviewed describe transitioning
to natural hair as both an external and internal process of self-discovery. As Tate (2016) explains,
“the process of transitioning is important to evaluate because it is the first step in many Black
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women’s natural hair journey. Transitioning begins an entirely new process of handling and caring
for Black hair, and more importantly, it is a critical stage where Black women began fostering a
new relationship with hair” (p. 38). For these reasons, Black women often describe the experience
of letting their hair grow out naturally as revelatory. Corliss (62, Charlotte) was currently
transitioning when we spoke. She had pressed it since she was a child, then relaxed it from seventh
grade until three months prior to our interview. She exclaimed, “The new phase I’m in, I haven’t
seen my hair like this since I was a little girl. Or ever! I haven’t seen my hair like this ever!” This
emphasis on transitioning—going from one way of looking, doing, and being seen to another way
of looking, doing, and being seen—is distinct of contemporary natural hair politics. The idea of
transitioning to natural hair is curiously absent from discussions about the Afro in the 1960s and
1970s, even though an Afro cannot be achieved overnight without hair artifice. While activists and
scholars more often describe the Afro part of the Black Power “uniform of rebellion”— a signal
that portrayed someone’s Afrocentric political orientation to others, women today describe
becoming natural as an intimate, personal journey to learn and be who they are from the outside
in. Fannie (45, Los Angeles) explained:
I will say that in the 70’s it was probably more of an ‘I’m Black and I’m proud,’ you know?
It was like a revolution. It was like, I have to fight to take a stance for my rights. This time
it’s ‘I like me.’ I just love my hair this way and I don’t care what anybody thinks.

Typical of new social movements, the natural hair movement emphasizes individual autonomy
and self-transformation compared with traditional social movements, which tend to operate
through formal organizations that target state-level redistributive change.
A Politics of Authenticity and Self-Love
For me, loving my natural hair came with confidence. I’m so out. This is who I am. This
is me. I want to wear the bright purple lipstick and the earrings and look at me. This is who
I am. This is me and I’m proud to be it. I remember not wanting attention but then I got
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confidence with myself. It was more so an acceptance thing. Fully becoming comfortable
in my own skin to want to. (Paula, 27, Los Angeles)

It took a lot of perseverance--I still have a few straight bits here and there and I’m supposed
to go for a trim later on—but I just feel more confident. It’s weird. When I walk, I like the
stares now. I used to hide away. Now I can’t wait because I’m owning this and whoever
doesn’t like it it’s their problem and for a long time I shied away from it but up until last
week my aunt was here and she was like, ‘Your hair, when are you going to do it? When
are you going to do your hair? It’s not attractive.’ I feel like this is my hair and whoever
doesn’t accept it to hell with them. (Brie, 35, Cape Town)

As these emphases on self-love and confidence above highlight, going natural is not just a
physical experience. For many women, the emotional aspect of transitioning is just as significant,
if not more. Becoming natural forces many women to notice of their distance from and
internalization of mainstream beauty ideals, which continue to underrepresent dark-skinned
women and women with kinky hair. It took months for Krystal (25, Tallahassee) to view her natural
hair texture as beautiful and worthy. Krystal had worn her hair chemically relaxed since elementary
school and in long, wavy weaves once she could afford them. She recalled:
It was hard! I remember it being very, very hard. I didn’t know how it would turn out. I
didn’t know if my hair texture would be something I would like—my natural hair texture.
I didn’t know how to really manage my natural hair coming in with my relaxed hair. I
didn’t know a lot of stuff about my hair and I didn’t want to deal with it.

When Krystal realized she could not change her hair texture without chemicals or heat, she
“learned to get with the program.” Getting with the program catalyzed the beginning of a new way
of thinking about her body, and made her critical of what her beauty practices insinuated about her
self-esteem:
It’s like, the more I think about it… I got into a relationship with my natural hair and the
closer I got in the relationship with my natural hair the more deviated I was from my
connection to the weave even though the connection was near and dear to my heart. The
thought of putting someone else’s hair in my head because oh, it’s convenient? It’s like,
am I that desperate to have a look that I would wear the actual follicles off of someone
else’s hair? You have to use somebody else’s actual hair to put in your hair because it’s
convenient or it makes you feel better.

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Krystal’s reflection made it clear to me that transitioning is not simply a physical embrace of one’s
natural hair texture; transitioning also begins a critical inquiry about of societal beauty standards
and about one’s own emotional state.
Krystal personified her hairstyles, coming to see her weave as a being of its own that
separated her from a healthy, authentic relationship with her inner self. When I asked her when
she felt the most beautiful, Krystal replied:
I feel the most beautiful, like (pause) at any point at this point. I say that because since I
know me wearing my Afro I’ve grown into a relationship with my Afro and this is just me.
I’m unapologetically me when I have my Afro. When I came out of my mother’s womb,
this is how my hair began to grow. This is how it is. This is me at my core being. I can
appreciate and love myself as who I am, how I wake up in the morning and my hair is just
goofy. I can love and appreciate my hair when it’s straight because I know who I am and I
appreciate who I am at my core now. It’s a relationship that I didn’t have when I first was
natural but eventually I grew into it. I fell in love with my natural hair at some point and
tells me to love me with a weave, me with a press out, me with a twist-out, me on my bad
hair days.

Interestingly, Krystal does not describe natural hair as a uniform of rebellion or an outward
political symbol. Transitioning transcended her physical appearance and extended to her “core
being.” Likewise, Fannie talks about the power of accepting one’s natural hair texture this way:
Basically natural is being comfortable in your own skin, in your own body, with your own
hair, your own look, you know? Its just being comfortable with your texture of hair. So,
you can rock a natural hairstyle and it no be your… it can not look like your texture and be
altered and still be a natural hairstyle look but a lot of people find that their confidence is
actually coming from them actually rocking their own hair. And then after you get the hang
of your own hair you love that and you feel confident and secure in that then you can play.
You can play with different things. Natural is basically you loving and liking your own-
ness. Having your own hair. Just being in love with that. Your Blackness, your beauty,
your curves, your hair, your skin. That to me is natural. (Fanny, 45)

Transitioning, according to these women, is an inner journey from insecurity to confidence where
the final destination is a level of self-confidence that persists through any form of creative hair
play. This emphasis on self-love suggests that authenticity rather than Afrocentrism is a priority in
today’s natural hair culture.
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Lindi (41, Cape Town) also told a transition story that focused on confidence and self-
esteem. She decided to transition to natural hair because she saw her daughter’s self-worth crumble
due to ruthless teasing of her “bossiekop” (kinky hair) by her cousins with straighter hair. Lindi
came to believe she was reinforcing her daughter’s insecurities by relaxing her and her daughter’s
hair. She told me:
When I started off my natural hair, or return to natural as I call it, it wasn’t for any political
reason. It was because of my daughter. I started relaxing her hair at the age of 5, which is
bad. Now I can see that it was wrong but back then it was normal. Back when I was little
it was normal. I was scared because in my community, in the Coloured community, this
was unheard of…This is what they call Bossiekop. This is the term that is used. Derogatory
terms. I was at the point where I could no longer lie to myself and it needed to be done. We
transitioned for a year. We did it together, and then we eventually cut it off. I cut my hair
first and allowed her to make up her mind about it.

Hair was a gateway for Lindi to a critique of power relations within her community that
marginalized those with curly hair textures. Realizing how deeply texturism influenced her
daughter’s self-esteem, Lindi gave her daughter daily affirmations. She recalled, “I would boost
her confidence…I would say things like gosh you are so stuffing and so intelligent and I love your
hair…eventually she became this powerhouse of a child where she was fighting her own battles.”
Lindi’s neighbors’ and family members’ disdainful comments about her hair texture brought her
attention to aspects of Coloured culture that she wanted to change. She continued, “As far as the
political thing, it came in a bit later because as you wear your hair natural, as you go you kind of
realize what it all stands for. You realize that it is about your culture. That it’s not a fashion
statement…There’s so much more to the point where sometimes I can be quite militant about it.”
As Lindi’s experience reveals, an embodied transition can be politicizing. Being a woman of
African descent is not necessarily a fixed identity standpoint, but a self-conscious location from
which to see. As women’s embodiments shift so too do their standpoints, or their ways of looking
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at themselves and the world. Such shifts in standpoint are not necessarily inevitable or always
immediate, but as Lindi’s reflection shows, they can produce new, critical, and political insight.
For Lola (26, Bahía), transitioning to natural hair entailed a transition into an understanding
of herself as part of a Black collective political identity for the first time. The meaning of her
transition to natural hair stems from the history of race and construction of Blackness in Brazil.
She explained:
Belonging to the Black race is built under negative stereotypes, so we are taught from an
early age that our hair is bad, ugly, and that we must modify it to be socially valued in the
labor market. In this way, a good part of Brazilian Black women, including me, straighten
their hair early in childhood, but the traces of belonging cannot be changed, such as skin
color. So, I spent 15 years of my life smoothing my hair, did not know what the natural
root was, and because of this that I did not recognize myself as a Black woman, but from
the moment I became aware of the meaning of racism, and how he acted in my body, I
decided to stop smoothing my hair. I began to recognize myself within an ethnic and
political identity, to be a Black woman. From then on, I experienced a new identity, when
I cut my hair straight and saw the natural grow, I saw myself Black for the first time, and
unlike what I was taught, I found myself beautiful.

Brazil projects itself as a “racial democracy,” a country where citizens do not see themselves or
each other through the lens of race (Twine, 1998). In this context, Lola’s description of coming to
a Black identity through the process of transitioning to natural hair is quite striking. For her,
transitioning was a de-colonial act, a way of undoing her embodied internalization of racism that
considers Black phenotypical identifiers ugly and bad. Not only did her feelings about her natural
appearance change, but she also came to see herself as part of a collective political and racial
identity. Lola asked about my own experience with natural hair, and I mentioned to her the
difficulty of navigating work and relationships. This inspired her to clarify a difference between
the effect of natural hair in Brazil and in the United States:
The women here in Brazil leave their hair natural, for reasons very similar to those that
you point out in the reality of the United States, but I believe that the identity factor is
what prevails, or political declaration, that refers to the perception of belonging to a
common origin, to an ethnic group, where, from the moment they realize that they are
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exposed to a particular type of oppression, they have been empowered to get out of this
situation.

Lola’s insights are substantiated by Elizabeth Hordge-Freeman’s (2015) study on racial features,
socialization, and affective experiences in Brazilian families. Hordge-Freeman finds that hair
texture is more decisive for racial identification than skin color or body shape, and that
transitioning to natural hair functions as a rite of passage for those who choose to “assumir-se”
(assume their Blackness).
Some women describe feeling immediately liberated from social norms dictating who they
are and what they should look like upon big chopping. Lauren (26, Brooklyn) told me:
The first day that I wore my hair after getting it cut, the first day that I actually went out of
the house and everything I just felt so amazing. I was just so okay in my own skin. Nothing
special really happened that day but that was one of the best days of my life. Is that weird?
It was so long that I went without being okay in my own skin feeling like I should be
different, a little thicker, all these little tweaks and when you are finally like you know
what, I like me, that feels damn good.

She showed me the first photo she took of herself after her big chop, laying in her bed and smiling.
She posted the photo to her Instagram account few months before our interview, and smiled as she
pulled it up on her iPhone to show me. Women’s declarations of joy and self-love within and
against a racist and sexist society are political in and of themselves, and they also crucial to Black
women’s potential for community-wide change. After all, “[Black women] cannot create effective
movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized
or working towards that end” (hooks, 2015b, p. xi).
Virtual natural hair communities are often women’s first layer of practical and emotional
support during the process of transition. Many women shared with me how Facebook groups,
Instagram accounts, YouTuber influencers, and Pinterest boards help them to find pride in their
hair, learn new styling practices, and fellowship with like-minded others. Brie (35) explained the
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impact of a Cape Town-based Facebook group for women with natural hair, in which hundreds of
new messages are posted daily: “Being part of that group that I’m in on Facebook where [natural
hair] is acceptable, you don’t feel alone because of the transition. Transitioning was hard. It’s
painful actually because you’re very tempted to go back.” Marley (26) participates in two natural
hair online forums, and concurred of their usefulness:
I get lot of support from the natural ladies on Facebook. Confidence to look the way I
want to and be free because there were so many times where I felt ugly and I can’t walk
out like this and I can’t be seen like this and then these ladies just motivated me because
they took raw pictures in the bathroom and I saw that okay, I’m not that bad. It is nice to
have people to share an experience with you.

Likewise, Lauren told me, “I follow @TheCutLife on Instagram and some natural pages that just
have random pictures of people with natural hair. Just seeing oh, I can do that style, or to keep you
motivated because being natural isn’t always…when you see things that are working for other
people it helps you to stay strong.” Having tagged her own big chop photo with the hashtags
#naturalhair, #blackgirlmagic and #bigchop, Lauren’s selfie became searchable to the rest of the
digital blogosphere, paying forward encouragement to other women of color who might likewise
be searching for role models absent from their surrounding physical communities. Online natural
hair communities, hashtags, and accounts serve as grassroots archives that disseminate resistant
Black aesthetics, and everyday women often unintentionally become contributors to this cache.
Much of feminist scholarship on beauty argues that patriarchy and its capitalist mode of
production relies on unachievable beauty ideals, using the gap between images of women in
advertisements and women’s actual bodies to sell products (Bordo, 1993; Wolf, 1991). However,
these kinds of feminist analyses sidestep women’s agency as cultural producers and consumers.
What happens when corporations compete with everyday people for control over image
production? In today’s digital world, women increasingly produce their own content and use social
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media platforms to disseminate it widely. Social media influencers Nikki Walton of
CurlyNikki.com, Patrice Yursik of Afrobella.com, and Whitney White or Naptural85 on YouTube
have huge, international followings. Online natural hair communities are sizeable. The Facebook
group South African Naturals boasts 75,700 members as of August 2017. The Brazilian Facebook
group Poder Crespo/ Dicas E Transição has attracted almost 13,000 members and is steadily
growing after a successful street protest in Salvador, Bahia. The U.S. based website and forum
NaturallyCurly.com has received over 611,000 Facebook likes. In November 2017, the site’s
founder reported reaching 16 million readers monthly. A simple search for “natural hair” on
YouTube garners over 8.7 million results. Digital platforms like these have become archives of
today’s natural hair culture. These online communities disseminate the natural hair practices,
norms, and a set of terms that reimagine the old Black hair lexicon (see glossary). Gill (2015)
suggests that natural hair communities on social media may come to supplement, or even supplant
the role that beauty shops played in fostering Black women’s activism in the 20
th
century. The
natural hair movement is Black beauty politics 2.0, and Black women increasingly make use of
digital media technology to facilitate discussion, sisterhood, and collective action. As one natural
hair blogger on a panel at “Afrolicious Hair Affair” natural hair expo in Los Angeles declared, “"If
it's on the media it doesn't validate us it doesn't mean that's validation for how we should be. We
are just as powerful as the women on Vogue or the women on Scandal.”
The “Good Hair” study (Johnson et al., 2017) suggests that online natural hair communities
significantly influence how Black women see themselves. The study found that Black women who
participate in online natural hair communities are more likely than Black or white who do not
participate in natural hair communities to prefer or have positive attitudes towards Black women
wearing textured hairstyles. They suggest that natural hair blogs, vlogs, message boards and
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forums transform Black women’s views about hair texture: “engagement with the [natural hair]
community, beyond just personal ideas about natural hair, may be a method of reducing implicit
biases and warrants further study” (Woolford et al., 2016, p. 14). Johnson (2013) likewise finds
that blogs aid some Black women in imagining solidarity with other women based on hair texture.
Ellington (2014) has documented how African American women use social media networking to
form support groups when the lack resources for advice elsewhere, sharing strategies for
navigating schools, the workplace, and resistance from romantic partners.
Just as social media entrenched itself in women’s everyday lives, green movement
conversations piqued concerns about climate change, sustainability, and chemical toxicity in
consumer products. However, environmentalists generally ignored how race and gender shape risk
for disease and contamination. As I will discuss in the next chapter, natural hair advocates fill this
gap by disseminating an intersectional “green” politics. Unlike during the 20
th
century, “natural”
now describes both hair texture and the integrity of ingredients in products and self-care practices.
This focus on health and wellness is a distinguishing feature of contemporary natural hair and
Black beauty politics. Scores of natural hair entrepreneurs have created profitable careers brewing
organic hair potions to sell to health-conscious women in their communities. In what follows, I
theorize the effects of contemporary natural hair politics on Black women and their communities.
First, I describe how emerging natural hair entrepreneurs and cultural influencers extend a politics
of authenticity to consumer product to market natural hair as a wellness practice. Then, I describe
the natural hair movement’s role in Black women’s efforts to challenge gendered racism in the
social movement sector and the beauty industry.
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Chapter 4
Green is the New Black
I sat sipping a cup of coffee at an outdoor café in the trendy hipster Maboneng
neighborhood of Johannesburg, South Africa while I waited for my interview with Sheila (45), the
owner of a line of hair and skincare products marketed towards women with natural hair. Sheila
was a petite brown-skinned woman with a halo of tightly coiled curls that glistened in the sun. Her
glow seemed to reach me before the rest of her body did. I waived over the waiter so she could
place her order as she slid down into the seat across from me at our sidewalk table. Sheila declined
my invitation to purchase her a drink, explaining, “Caffeine is a drug. I’ve always been conscious
about what I put in my body.” She went on to describe her history of unsuccessful yo-yo dieting,
the detox brew of bentonite clay and kale she was exclusively drinking and makes at home, and
how her overall embrace of a plant-based approach to eating and cosmetics has changed her life.
She boasted further that her daughter “is thinner than the thinnest girl, but she’s very assertive so
it doesn’t really bother her because she says [the girls at school] want to look like [her].” As our
interview progressed, Sheila expounded that she uses her company’s sales pitch to extend the
conscious veganism she practices with her family to the broader Black community.
During the week that I interviewed Sheila in August 2016, the news cycle in South Africa
alternated between protests at nearby high school against policies that prohibited students from
wearing natural hair and debates around a proposed 20% tax on sugar-sweetened drinks as a
strategy to combat obesity, which affects 40% of women and 11% of men in South Africa (Hofman
& Tugendhaft, 2016). While the media did not tie these two issues together, Sheila explicitly
discussed natural hair as a healthcare practice. While Sheila had one of the more extreme
alternative lifestyle regimens among my interviewees, her story of increased concern about diet,
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fitness and exposure to harmful chemicals was common among women I interviewed in South
Africa and elsewhere. Some women’s worries about chemical toxicity preceded transitions away
from hair relaxers because health challenges like weight gain, diabetes, cancer or high blood
pressure necessitated alterations in their diet, exercise and beauty regimens. Other women
described learning about a wide range of wellness practices—from breastfeeding to nutritional
literacy—through their participation in natural hair communities.
This emphasis on health and wellness is a defining feature of Black women’s beauty
politics today. Sociologists and historians have described how Black women’s 20
th
century beauty
politics operated as gendered forms of anti-racist cultural activism. For example, in the early 20
th

century, Black beauty culturists linked self-presentation to racial uplift, like Black clubwomen of
the same period who promoted respectability as a pathway to acceptance by more powerful whites
(Craig, 2002; Gill, 2001; Walker, 2007; Gaines, 1996; Higginbotham, 1993). Broadly,
respectability politics emphasizes cultural sameness and assimilation as strategies to shift whites’
concentration away from essential racial inferiority as an explanation for socioeconomic
differences. Hair straightening was one way to accomplish this. Later, the Black Power and Black
Consciousness Movements with their “Black is beautiful” slogans challenged white-centered
beauty ideals alongside the goal of economic redistribution in the 1960s and 1970s (Walker, 2007;
Banks, 2000). Black Power advanced political and economic self-determination, the celebration
of African cultural heritages, anti-colonialism, and the rejection of racism (Ture & Hamilton,
1992). The Black Consciousness Movement originated in resistance to apartheid and European
colonialism in South Africa. Like Black Power, Black Consciousness inspired Black peoples to
articulate an Afro-centric worldview, honor Black history, and nurture Black pride against
pressures to see Blackness through the lens of white supremacy, or what W. E. B. Du Bois calls
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double-consciousness
8
(Biko, 1978). For Black movement communities across the diaspora
grappling with the aftermath of European settler colonialism and slavery, Afros outwardly
signified a commitment to an Afrocentric worldview during this time (Ford, 2016; Craig, 2002;
Banks, 2000). In contrast, many women transitioning to natural hair today say the catalyst for their
choice was maintaining or improving their health rather than a performance of their race or gender
politics. With the help of thriving online natural hair cultures and marketplaces, wellness Black
beauty discourses cut across national boundaries. Sheryl (42, Los Angeles), another natural hair
entrepreneur clarifies, “Certainly that is a movement. It is a movement for change and acceptance
of hair in all kinds of styles. I think it’s a movement to women getting away from extra chemicals
that you don’t need when there are manageable ways to wear your hair and it’s beautiful.” A central
concern for wellness and environmentalism separates how Black women today discuss
“naturalness” from narrower, texture-based definitions of the 20
th
century, when “natural” simply
denoted a short, cropped Afro hairstyle. Now, women use the term “natural” not only to describe

8
Sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois introduced the term “double-consciousness” in his
autoethnographic work The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to describe the American Negro’s
psychological experience of knowing oneself as American and human, and thus entitled to dream
and strive for opportunity, and seeing one’s Blackness through the contemptuous eyes of white
society. Du Bois speaks of the difficulty in reconciling one’s “two-ness” without sacrificing the
beauty and potential of either contribution or worldview. Many scholars have since extended Du
Bois’ work to theorize experiences of oppression across different postcolonial contexts of the
African Diaspora and beyond.
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a wide range of hairstyles that leave kinky hair un-straightened, but also to describe the quality
and character of goods used to care for one’s hair.
In this chapter, I describe how participants in today’s natural hair movement use
biomedical logics to frame natural hair as a healthy consumer choice to be chemical-free, use
products with fewer preservatives and wear hairstyles that permit more physically active lifestyles.
Entrepreneurs like Sheila and Sheryl have created entire careers importing raw Shea butter from
West Africa and crafting organic concoctions to sell to women in their local communities. Through
a broader conceptualization of “naturalness,” Black women today are marketing a hair politics that
goes beyond a cultural aesthetic to incorporate wellness. Against most feminist scholars who see
neoliberal biomedical frameworks as inherently stratifying, I argue that the natural hair movement
performs important intersectional environmental justice work given that the environmental health
risks facing Black women remain under recognized by activists, academics and state regulatory
bodies alike. I conclude this chapter by describing how the natural hair movement’s celebration of
naturalness operates as a gendered racial project that rearticulates derogatory associations between
Black women and the earth, instead projecting Black women with natural hair as progressive,
ethical and responsible citizens.
Black Women, Hair Politics and Environmental Risk
Environmental justice advocates and ecofeminists have extensively critiqued the
environmental movement for centering white, middle-class men’s concerns (Gibson-Wood &
Wakefield, 2013; Mann, 2011). Unfortunately, both ecofeminist and environmental justice
frameworks tend to highlight one axis of identity at a time—either race or gender—obscuring or
misrepresenting the experiences of people at the intersection of multiple categories of oppression.
For example, the environmental justice movement’s central critique is that poor communities and
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people of color have a long history of being ignored by environmental activists, academics and
policymakers despite that people of color and the poor bear an unequal burden of environmental
hazards like pollution and toxic waste (Gibson-Wood & Wakefield, 2013; Mann, 2011; Taylor,
1997). As Bryant and Mohai articulate, “To champion old growth forests or the protection of the
snail darter or the habitat of spotted owls without championing clean safe urban environments or
improved habitats for the homeless, does not bode well for future relations between
environmentalists and people of color, and with the poor” (quoted in Melosi 2006, p. 125).
However, environmental justice activism has largely left out gender-specific concerns altogether
(Gaard, 2010).
On the other hand, ecofeminists, though a form of cultural feminism, have argued that
women’s spiritual and morally superior relationship with nature diverges from patriarchal
capitalist imperatives to dominate and control the earth’s resources. Ecofeminists importantly note
that women suffer disproportionately from environmental risks, and that women are expected to
serve as gatekeepers for their families’ bodies against environmental toxins through the gendered
social organization of responsibility during pregnancy, and for feeding, caring, and shopping for
their families (Mackendrick, 2014; Cairns, Johnston & Mackendrick, 2013). However, by
highlighting women’s mystic connection to nature to support movements against militarism,
corporatism, and sustainable energy production, ecofeminism often falls into essentializing and
othering women of color, particularly Native American and Black women, by upholding them as
exemplars through imperialist stereotypes that they are pre-civilized, and mystically and naturally
closer to the Earth (Sturgeon, 1997). In environmental activist discourses, as with many other
social justice movements, all the minorities are men, all the modern women consumers are white,
and women of color’s unique environmental risk factors and experiences are too often ignored.
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Studying environmental risk cannot be divorced from the postcolonial, Eurocentric,
capitalist and patriarchal cultural context in which women of color across the Black Atlantic live.
While environmental feminists have recently piqued concerns about chemical toxicity in cosmetics
and GMOs, scholars, activists and public health officials frequently fail to consider the racial
differences in women’s beauty practices, and the social hierarchies that produce these differences.
Beauty myths pressure women of all races to approximate idealized and unattainable physical
standards, but white-centered feminine beauty ideals more intensely compel Black women to
discipline their bodies. In a global society where Black women fall at the bottom of race, gender
and often class hierarchies, adherence to white-centric beauty ideals has often meant the chance of
upward mobility via access to employment, social networks, and romantic relationships (Collins,
2005; Craig, 2002; Banks, 2000; Higginbotham, 1993). As Carbado (2013) explains, “precisely
because Black women have historically been masculinized, they have had to expend more energy
and resources quite literally making themselves up as women” (p. 822). Overall, Black women
apply cosmetic products that, when tested, contain higher levels of carcinogenic chemicals like
formaldehyde and synthetic hormones (Stiel et al. 2016; BWW, 2016; Donovan et al., 2007).
Straightening systems like chemical relaxers, Brazilian blow-outs, and keratin treatments are main
culprits, responding to the dominant feminine standard of beauty that valorizes long, straight hair.
While hair relaxer use among white women is rare, one study found that 95% of African American
women surveyed under age 45 and 85% of women above 45-years-old used them (Rosenberg et
al., 2007). Many African American women combine chemical relaxers with heat straightening,
and heat is hypothesized to further facilitate penetration and absorption of carcinogenic chemicals
into the body (Donovan et al., 2007).
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Most consumers assume that if a product is on the shelf at a store that it is safe, but unlike
pharmaceutical drugs and food, cosmetic products often are not subject to pre-market approval by
regulatory bodies like the Food and Drug Administration. In the United States, cosmetics
companies are not required to list fragrance or trade secret ingredients in their order of
predominance as with other products (FDA, 2015). As a result, issues tend to be handled after
products are already on shelves and have reached consumers, and after a critical mass of consumers
have experienced and reported physical harm. This is dangerous, because many chemicals and
micro-toxins in beauty products are more harmful when topically applied than if they were eaten
because the skin lacks a detoxifying mediator like the liver (Epstein & Fitzgerald, 2009). Even
still, research suggests that chemicals in haircare products may affect the fetus in utero through
their pregnant mothers (Donovan et al., 2007).
As a child, I never questioned if there was an alternative to the weeping sores I’d develop
after my monthly relaxers. These sores would leave a sticky residue on my scalp that I simply
endured until I washed and styled my hair the next week. Hair relaxers frequently cause scalp
lesions like those I experienced, which users learn to accept as an unfortunate and temporary side-
effect. Both sodium hydroxide and calcium hydroxide, the two most commonly used active
ingredients in chemical relaxers, are also the active ingredients in many industrial solvents like
brick and cement cleaners. Lisa (35, Los Angeles) reflected on her traumatic first relaxer during
our conversation: “I was like, ‘it’s burning!’ and my stylist she was like, ‘I haven’t even gotten to
the other side [of your head].’ She put her hands on my head and came out with a whole chunk of
my hair in her hand.” Brie (35, Cape Town) recalled the pain and the pressure of hair straightening
in out interview:
I remember my first relaxer. I was like 8 or 9 already and since then it has been straight
hair. It should be straight because it’s nice it’s more accepting, everyone else is doing it.
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Never mind the burns that you got and the hair loss and the breakage. And just having to
sit through it.

Raven (26, Cape Town) shrugged “beauty is pain,” reflecting on her mother’s common
justification for her monthly chemical burns.
But beauty is also much more than that. The lesions caused by chemical burns facilitate the
entry of micro-toxins into the body that are linked to a wide range of reproductive issues (BWW,
2016; Wise et al., 2012). The endocrine disrupting chemicals in hair care products interfere with
endocrine system, which is responsible for regulating human growth, development, and
reproduction (Stiel et al., 2016). A study of more than 23,000 premenopausal African American
women determined that the estrogen-mimicking phthalates used as fragrance in hair relaxers are
linked to uterine fibroids, which affect Black women at 2-3 times higher rates than white women
and are the leading cause of hysterectomy in the United States (Wise et al., 2012). The stakes are
life itself. During Corliss’ (62, Charlotte) first pregnancy, a fibroid tumor grew alongside and
eventually overtook her unborn baby, forcing her to need cesarean sections for all three of her
future pregnancies. She had relaxed her hair from middle school up until her early 60s. The Wise
et al. (2012) study found that ever using hair relaxers, duration of use, frequency of use, and total
number of burns incurred by hair relaxers were all positively associated with the risk of developing
fibroid tumors. Given that some women relax their children’s hair at young ages with the help of
“kiddie perms” marketed to toddlers and sold cheaply at most convenience stores, some girls have
been exposed to toxins in chemical relaxers for a decade by the time they reach adolescence. Black
beauty culture has inadvertently exacerbated Black women and girls’ environmental risk. Relaxing
kinky hair is often treated as a rite of passage into Black womanhood and into the Black beauty
shop—an historically and uniquely important site for fostering sisterhood among Black women
(Gill, 2015; Gill, 2010; Wingfield, 2008; Jacobs- Huey, 2006).
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Several other studies have also hypothesized that chemicals commonly found Black hair
care products are linked to asthma, low birth weights, miscarriages, breast cancer, and early onset
puberty, all of which Black women experience in higher than average numbers (BWW, 2016;
Donovan et al., 2007; Tiwary, 1998). Estrogen and xenoestrogen hormones in parabens, which are
used as preservatives in many personal care products, are also linked to the higher rates and
lethality of breast cancer among African American women (Donovan et al., 2007). These risks
are exacerbated for Black hair stylists who encounter these chemicals daily (BWW, 2016). In
addition, products packaged for salons are not required to list ingredients and chemicals because
the Fair Packaging Act does not apply to products used at professional establishments (FDA,
2015). Fannie (45, Los Angeles), a hairstylist and traveling natural hair expert, expressed this
concern in our interview saying, “I would rather do natural hair. I know natural hair is in its natural
state and you can do natural styles on it you don’t have to breathe in carcinogens.” Even non-
chemical alternatives like weaves and extensions can lead to serious scalp diseases like traction
alopecia (Wise et al., 2012), so natural styles seem to be the healthiest option.
In addition, a study of 300 women in New York found that African American women who
use hair products before age 13 reached menarche earlier, and that relaxers were particularly linked
to early menarche (James-Todd et al., 2011). Some Black girls show signs of puberty as young as
age two, and Tiwary (1998) observed that African American girls’ premature sexual development
regressed when they discontinued use of hair care products containing hormonally active
ingredients. At the 2016 Nappywood Festival in Los Angeles, Black Women for Wellness program
manager Nourbese Flint urged attendees as at meeting about Black hair and health to consider,
“What does it mean when little Black girls look older than they are and we are already
hypersexualized?” Flint’s comment proposes that relaxers are technologies of biopower that
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reinforce controlling images of Black women as hot mommas and jezebels, which are “designed
to make racism, sexism, and poverty appear to be natural, normal, and an inevitable part of
everyday life” (Collins, 2000, p. 67).
Hair straightening is perhaps further to blame for racial health disparities by discouraging
physical activity. Straight hair precludes many women’s ability to be physically active, since sweat
and water revert chemically and thermally straightened hair back to its naturally texture. A recent
study by public health researcher found that Black adolescent girls (ages 14-17) may avoid exercise
because they feared their hair becoming “nappy” due to sweat (Woolford et al., 2016). Janine
(36), a television executive living in California told me, the “only reason why I’m not going to
train for a triathlon was my hair.” Janine’s feeling is common. In 2011, former U.S. Surgeon
General Regina Benjamin suggested hair maintenance as a main deterrent from exercising for
Black women, as the slightest moisture from perspiration can ruin a style that took time, money,
and effort to attain (New York Times, 2011). Correspondingly, African Americans’ rates of
obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are higher than any other racial group in the United
States (US Department of Health & Human Services, 2017). After controlling for age, African
American women are almost twice more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than non-Hispanic
whites (CDC, 2014). Even though regulatory neglect, white-centered beauty norms, and Black
beauty culture put Black women’s health at such severe risk, popular discourse regarding the
relationship between Black women’s beauty practices and their health outcomes has been almost
non-existent--until recently.
(Bio)medicalizing Black Hair
In 2009, comedian Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair (Stilson, 2009) sparked a global
conversation about the politics of Black hair by exploring the toll that hair straightening takes on
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Black women’s emotional, physical and financial health as they endeavor to fulfill white-centric
standards for beauty and appearance. Opponents of hair relaxers have long critiqued Black
women’s styling choices using cultural arguments. Most prominently, the Black Power movement
in the United States and the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa portrayed natural hair
as one way for individuals to aesthetically embrace their African cultural heritage. Good Hair’s
construction of chemical relaxing as a medical health issue through scientific demonstration was
a new and powerful strategy for confronting the relaxer’s social power. In one scene, Rock meets
with a chemist to learn about sodium hydroxide, often referred to as “lye,” which is the main active
ingredient in most hair relaxers. Donning white lab coats and thick protective goggles against a
massive backdrop of the periodic table of elements, the “chemical genius” explains that relaxers
work to straighten hair by breaking down the protein bonds that create hair’s curl pattern. Viewers
then watch sodium hydroxide eat through the flesh of a chicken cutlet. Like a cooking show, the
cameras then pan to three beakers with aluminum soda cans soaking in sodium hydroxide to
represent the chemical’s impact over time. At one hour, the metal can has become transparent, at
two hours it is liquefying, and by four hours the can has completely disintegrated. The time lapse
demonstration grotesquely mirrors the way Black women commonly extend the relaxer’s
application time, sometimes fighting through chemical burns, to get their hair as straight as
possible. This medical framing proved a powerful pedagogical tool, and the film’s popularity
seemed to raise the environmental consciousness of many women of African descent around the
world. Dozens of interviewees referenced the film in our conversations about their understanding
of natural hair today. The impact was so vast that even those who did not actually watch it felt its
impact. For example, Krystal (24, Tallahassee) reflected:
I don’t remember seeing Afros or twist-outs until I was in my junior or senior year of
college [2009-2011]. I remember the movie Good Hair by Chris Rock coming out and that
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steered me to not go back to my relaxer. And I didn’t even see the movie. I’ve never seen
the movie to this day. I just remember seeing previews of it. The talk around it really got
people to say hey, we don’t need that.

While Good Hair never explicitly presents natural hair or naturalness as a solution, it is probably
no coincidence that the film’s debut coincided with the rebirth a new and qualitatively unique way
of thinking about Black haircare in the 21
st
century.

Warnings that chemical relaxers are both physically and psychologically dangerous
proliferated in Black women’s online blogs and vlogs in the 2010s, such that many Black women
began to understand physical ailments as direct results from years of chemical straightening (Gill,
2015). “Creamy crack,” a colloquial euphemism referring to some women’s obsessive drug-like
dependence on chemical relaxers, took on new significance when viewed through a public health
lens. In an article about online natural hair communities, Gill (2015) asserts that “allusions to the
Figure 4.1: Screen shot of Chris Rock and Professor Berry, a “Chemical Genius” from Good Hair
(Stilson, 2009)
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highly addictive crack cocaine and the destruction it has wrought in Black communities is
intentional and highlights what many Black women feel is at stake in twenty-first century
conversations about Black hair” (p. 76). Transitioning to natural hair and natural haircare was a
way for some Black women to avoid what they now saw as a pathological reliance on dangerous
consumer products.
As Black women began to see chemicals as the source of danger and harm, natural hair
movement spaces projected nature as a wholesome and healing alternative. The idea that chemicals
are just as at fault for Black women’s pain as the cultural idealization of straight hair necessitates
a solution that incorporates both transitions to natural hair textures and changes in the quality of
products used to care for Black hair. Natural hair influencers widely construct natural hair as a
healthful choice by taking about their natural hair journeys as transitions from illness to wellness.
Bloggers’ first-person testimonials ground the information they distribute in their embodied, lived
experience of transformation. Whitney White (Naptural85) is perhaps the most popular natural
hair blogger with over 800k YouTube subscribers and 500k Instagram followers. As a social media
influencer whose presence dates back to 2009, Whitney’s example of framing Black hair struggles
in health terms has undoubtedly shaped the trajectory of the natural hair movement. Not only do
Whitney White’s vlog tutorials instruct viewers how to evaluate the toxicity of ingredients
consumer products, but they also suggest DIY organic alternatives to commercial products like
her signature flaxseed gel-- this video has attracted 1.4 million views alone. She uses phrases like
“protein sensitive,” and attributes her ability to grow long hair to having overcome struggles with
fungal overgrowth, post-partum shedding and anxiety. In her video “Why Your Hair Texture is
Changing + Falling Out: My Detailed Story,” Whitney sits in what looks to be her bedroom,
looking directly into the camera confessional-style, creating a feeling of intimacy with the viewer.
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She tells a 16-minute story about managing her vitamin deficiency, celiac disease, alopecia,
candida overgrowth and adrenal fatigue, and how each health concern manifested outwardly in her
appearance. Her videos advance the notion that Black women’s bodies are worthy environments
of care in their entirety, and that hair and health are intimately intertwined. Whitney’s long, thick,
kinky hair and extensive vlog archive grounds the advice she gives in her visible transformation.
At in-person events like Taliah Waajid World Natural Hair Show, Nappywood, and
International Natural Hair Meet-Up Day, organizers link haircare and healthcare against the
backdrop of the relaxer’s known effects on the body. For example, during the 2014 International
Natural Hair Meet-Up Day local event in Los Angeles, a group of 50 women gathered in a private
room at the back of a Mexican restaurant in South LA. Attendees snacked on chips and dip at long
banquet tables while the organizer, lovingly nicknamed “Madame President” by this close-knit
group of women, stood at the front of the room with an easel and a chart about hair porosity, pH
Figure 4.2: Screen shot of YouTube video Whitney White aka @Naptural85 (April 2016)

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balance, and chemicals to avoid. Madame President demonstrated how to create a two-strand twist
hairstyle from start to finish using a model chosen from the audience. With dripping hands, she
held up a jar of soupy, translucent virgin coconut oil. “Put this on your hair before you shampoo,
maybe even leave it overnight to make detangling easier. Especially if you have high porosity hair,
you’re going to want to use this when you’re styling because it penetrates the hair shaft.” She
continued, “and when you’re done, you know you can also use this with your partner during sex!”
Madame President informed attendees that coconut oil’s antifungal properties can serve as an
alternative to commercial intimate lubricants, and then passed out purple sheets with multiple
choice quizzes to assess our comprehension. Homemade natural vaginal soaps made by a Black
woman entrepreneur who also makes products for natural hair were raffled off at the end of the
event. This organization later began selling multi-colored T-shirts with the tagline “Curls Detox:
Not Required.” The product description for the shirt elaborated that curls “don’t need detoxing
because they aren’t toxic. We have cared for our curls with loving care and we are proclaiming
they are fine the way they are.” In these ways, natural hair enthusiast and influencer Madame
President explicitly projects natural hair as a project for self-love, self-care, and wellness.

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Natural hair movement spaces like this have become hubs for collaborative partnerships
with wellness advocates and non-profits. At Curly Girl Collective’s 2016 2
nd
annual CurlFest event
in Brooklyn, NY, yoga instructors led attendees in an outdoor class, encouraging physical fitness,
movement and mindfulness. Health advocacy group Black Women for Wellness distributed
informational pamphlets about hair relaxer toxicity at a natural hair meet-up in Los Angeles. Their
volunteers sat perched at booths alongside stands selling Africa-shaped earrings and T-Shirts
reading “All Natural No Lye.” As Zina Saro-Wiwa (2012) likewise observes in an article for The
New York Times, “[the natural hair] movement is characterized by self-discovery and health.”

Figure 4.3: Sexual health quiz at a natural hair meet-up (2014)
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Toxic Hair, Natural Remedies: Redefining “Good Hair” as “Healthy Hair”
In alignment with proliferating arguments that link hair care to overall health, my interview
data suggests that many Black women who go natural today do so as a wellness practice rather
than or in addition to as an outward political or fashion statement. Women I interviewed repeatedly
told health recovery narratives in our discussions about their motivations for transitioning to
natural hair. Many believed that their illnesses and those of other Black women they knew were
the direct ramifications of their chemical relaxer use. My conversation with Olivia, a 32-year-old
magazine editor and entrepreneur living in Brooklyn, NY is one such example. Olivia’s
Figure 4.4: Photo of yoga session at 2016 Curlfest in Brooklyn, NY
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relationship with her mother was central to her understanding of beauty because of the contrast
between how her mother’s cottony hair texture was regarded in her family and the jealous gazes
her smooth silky curls attracted. Olivia’s mother hated her own natural hair because her sisters
made fun of it since she was a child, calling nappy and ugly. She considered Olivia’s “good”
biracial hair texture fit to avoid relaxers, but her relatively tight curl pattern to be socially
unacceptable. “Good hair” and “bad hair” distinctions were hurtful for both women. The turning
point in her family was her mother’s failing health: “[my mom] permed [her hair] until she was
diagnosed with breast cancer and she got a double mastectomy. Luckily she didn’t have to do
chemo but I think for obvious reasons there was a shift in her life…Why do we have to put all
these chemicals in my scalp this is not healthy?” Olivia’s mother did not choose natural hair in
political resistance against white beauty norms like many African American women in her age
cohort had done in the 1960s and 1970s Black is Beautiful era. Rather, she chose natural hair
against a lifetime of emotional trauma and a broad societal devaluation of kinky hair upon thinking
critically about the relaxer’s impact on her health. Olivia’s family redefined “good hair” as healthy
hair. Olivia’s mother’s motivation to transition to natural hair is a powerful illustration of the power
of medical and environmental health frames to resist colorism, racism, and overcome deeply
internalized social stigma.
Like Olivia’s mom, Michelle (49, Los Angeles) went natural in response to a developing
illness. Michelle stopped chemically relaxing her hair a few months before we met in the parking
lot of the Los Angeles Convention Center, both lost on our way to the 2015 Afrolicious Natural
Hair Show. Michelle had worn her hair relaxed since she was 11-years-old and continued to do so
for the next three decades, accepting the monthly chemical burns as part of what it took to look
presentable for her white-collar job. She transitioned to natural hair after finding out that she had
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dangerously high blood pressure. Her hypertension forced her to become more discerning about
what she put in and on her body: “I just had to change my lifestyle and maybe about three or four
years ago I started juicing a lot. Every day I do a green drink and a red drink. I try to stay away
from anything that’s really salty or sugary, just trying to maintain my health. Then I found out
through maintaining my health that some of the things that I was juicing was also good for my
hair.” The dietary changes Michelle made increased her knowledge about the potential benefits
of a natural lifestyle to her appearance. She worked her way from blending shakes to concocting
do-it-yourself creams made with coconut oil, avocado oil, and honey for her hair and noticed that
avoiding parabens and sulfates caused the whites of her eyes brighten, her skin to clear, and her
hair to grow faster. Michelle began reading natural hair blogs online for more recipes and now
actively participates in natural hair meet-ups as a volunteer organizer.
Several other women I interviewed situated transitioning to natural hair and joining natural
hair communities as part of a broad lifestyle shift to prioritize holistic wellness and self-care.
Krystal (23, Tallahasee) explained:
Even my products are organic and that actually dew me into [natural hair]. I don’t think
one causes the other but I think it’s connected. It’s bringing awareness of the other. The
natural is bringing awareness to the green movement. When someone is a natural it’s kind
of like okay, you’re a natural, so why not be all the way natural? Why not be green?

Likewise, Evelyn (42), an entrepreneur living in Johannesburg told me:
Healthy eating was important before, but more so after I went natural because I was
researching all of these ingredients about keeping your body healthy and how to grow long
hair and then that you learn you are supposed to keep your balance of water to hydrate and
to exercise. All of that kind of stuff. Eat healthy food and take a multivitamin if you need
to. It mattered more when I started growing my hair natural and my first goal was to have
healthy hair that actually grows.

Brie (35, Cape Town) held a similar view, elucidating, “Literally the most profound ‘aha’ moment
is the fact that I started transitioning with my hair but it’s been a transition overall. My skin, oh
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my god. It started with my hair but now it’s how I feed my body and changing the way I eat.
Embracing more natural things in my body. I’ve also joined a gym.” Lauren (26, Brooklyn) also
witnessed a transformation from illness to wellness after adopting an ethos of naturalness. When
Lauren became a caretaker for her former partner’s ill mother, she observed how much the woman
benefitted from ensuring her food was chemically safe by juicing at home: “She was on a strict
diet, so we had to juice for her and I just started learning about it and watching documentaries. I
just became obsessed with it and I saw the benefits because she glowed.” This inspired Lauren to
do a total body detox as a preventative measure, which encompassed changes to her diet, hair care
regimen and contraceptive preferences. She continued juicing, got off the Depo birth control shot,
and shaved her head. Lauren told me, “I cut my hair. I wanted the chemicals out of my hair. I had
to get the chemicals out of me and I have to start caring more about everything that I’m putting
into my body.” Lauren noticed that her migraines and depression have both receded, and she now
aspires transition from waitressing to entrepreneurship and establish her own juice truck so that
she can share her experience with others.
Xena (25, Minneapolis) stumbled upon natural hair websites around 2012 and discovered
that the styling products she used to care for her curly hair contained carcinogenic chemicals, and
that flat ironing her hair straight daily with temperatures up to 400 degrees Fahrenheit was
detrimental to its health. Xena began mixing recipes from YouTube in her kitchen made with
coconut oil, castor oil and natural essential oils like tea tree and rosehip seed and saw her curls
thrive. She began a journey into holistic wellness and eventually trained to become a reiki master.
A self-described bruja, her apartment, which doubles as her reiki clinic, is filled with crystals, lit
by Himalayan salt lamps and filled with the scent of burning Palo Santo wood. Transitioning to
natural hair care prompted a qualitative change that reorganized Xena’s sense of self as well as her
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understanding of what it meant to care for the body. Several other women I interviewed have
pursued occupations around natural care upon transitioning to natural hair. Anita (47, Los Angeles)
became a professional advocate for breastfeeding in Black communities, and Zaire (24,
Inglewood) went back to school to study nutrition upon joining natural hair communities online.
Just as styling curly hair straight requires that one align her lifestyle accordingly, like avoiding
rain and sweating for example, adopting an ethos of naturalness seems to affect how Black women
think about a wide range of lifestyle practices.
That many Black women today transition to natural hair with the purpose of mitigating the
threat of illness or to actively pursue wellness demands that they get to know their bodies’ needs
in new and intimate ways. Each of these women monitored how their bodies looked, performed,
healed and felt as they engaged in conscious care for themselves and others. Their stories of
commitment to natural remedies are grounded in an embodied experience of transformation from
illness to wellness. While the central emphasis on health in these hair testimonies may not sound
overtly political or activist, I argue that the way these women deploy natural hair remains a strong
expression of Black feminist thought. As Collins (1986) posits, Black feminism is grounded in
Black women’s standpoints, or situated experienced-based understandings, and is reflected in
ordinary Black women’s expressions of self-determination. By overcoming externally-defined
white-centric standards for feminine beauty that compel Black women to enact violence upon their
own bodies, these women’s transitions to natural hair are radical practices of self-valuation. Like
Saro-Wiwa (2012) explained in her piece for The New York Times, “whether transitioners believe
it or not, demonstrating this level of self-acceptance represents a powerful evolution in political
expression.” Viewing the Black female body as an environment worthy of protection and care is
arguably just as radical as the Black Nationalist goal of economic redistribution. After all, groups
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are unable to take advantage of redistributed material resources if they are not alive, are ill or are
unable to reproduce. As Audre Lorde (1988) so powerfully declared, “caring for myself is not self-
indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
Sociology’s Take on Biomedicalization
Sociologists theorize the phenomenon of redefining social problems as medical conditions
as medicalization (Zola, 1972). Bolstered with the power and authority of medicine, scientists and
doctors increasingly offer and promote new types of surgeries, pills, enhancements and chemical
processes to patient-consumers as solutions for human experiences like desire or humiliation by
constructing bodies as defective sources. Scholars have widely documented the medicalization of
beauty, observing that women are expected to turn to medical procedures cosmetic surgery to
satisfy and alleviate low self-esteem and body image concerns (Merianos, Vidurek & King, 2013;
Bordo, 2003; Haiken, 2000; Kaw, 1993). The domain of medicine increasingly extends to healthy,
“normal” bodies, as well. Biomedicalization explains the rising preoccupation with wellness in our
post-modern, neoliberal era, where health has become a commodity and a signifier of one’s
responsible self-management. With contemporary shifts towards unrestrained markets,
privatization, and the decline in social welfare in the name of individualism, social subjects, like
the market itself, are increasingly considered privately responsible for the costs of social
reproduction and economic success (Duggan, 2003). The neoliberal idea of the self-as-project
constructs women as both subjects and consumers who must take on “appropriate” consumption
practices, creating a culture of self-scrutiny in which women engage in self-surveillance, self-
monitoring, and self-disciplining (Evans & Riley, 2013; Wolf, 1991). For example, Berkowitz
(2016) theorizes the popularization of Botox as the biomedicalization of aging, and predicts that a
lack of wrinkles will come to signify wealth and class status much like dental health already does.
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These and other scholars widely argue that medical and biomedical frames depoliticize
social issues by locating the source of a problem in an individual’s private body and the solution
to a problem in the consumer market instead of focusing on structural and cultural dynamics. For
example, Kaw’s (1993) study of trends in Asian American women’s experiences with cosmetic
surgery finds that the medical industry subtly perpetuates white-centric beauty standards by
encouraging Asian American women to select procedures that obscure their phenotypical racial
markers. Likewise, Kauer (2016) describes how the neoliberal wellness model that idealizes slim,
white “fit” bodies in popular Western representations of yoga operates to serve the weight loss,
fitness and pharmaceutical industries. Kauer (2016) points to popular sexualized and commodified
media images of white women that saturate women’s magazines and the yoga industry more
broadly as obfuscating a necessary discussion about the barriers to adequate health care, safe
spaces for meditation, and affordable training that many people of color, LGBT communities, and
poor folks face despite that they endure higher rates of stress. She argues that these exclusionary
images pathologize queer and fat bodies, emptying yoga of its potential for spiritual and feminist
transformation.
Medicalization and biomedicalization discourses within the natural hair movement depart
from this trend by starting with a critique of gendered racial inequality and deploying the authority
of scientists to suggest naturalness rather than intervention as a more ethical and socially just
alternative. For instance, cosmetic chemist-turned-entrepreneur Erica Douglas, who also goes by
the moniker Sister Scientist, tours natural hair festivals and the natural hair blogosphere in her
white lab coat discussing the importance of avoiding the phthalates and carcinogens that
disproportionately appear in products for Black women. Likewise, health scientist Audrey Davis-
Sivasothy is widely sought after to speak on her books The Science of Black Hair (2011), Hair
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Care Rehab (2012) and The Science of Transitioning (2015) that subtly offer a return to nature as
a “cure” for damaged, processed hair.

This is not to say that the natural hair movement escapes an engagement with neoliberal
consumer culture, or even that natural hair is hair that is left alone. A burgeoning flock of men and
women have become natural hair entrepreneurs, concocting and selling products with organic
ingredients to care for natural hair, with product descriptions like “sulfate-free” and “paraben-
free.” Today’s advocates of natural hair view specialized hair care products as the key to unlocking
more style choices for women of color, making commodification and consumerism central to
contemporary organizing around natural hair. For example, new services like Mayavana, owned
by Black beauty and technology company Techturized, analyze clients’ hair strands under a
microscope to scientifically recommend the “perfect” customized products by hair porosity,
Figure 4.5: Sister Scientist Featured on Flyer for the 2015 International “Luv and learn Your
Beauty” Tour
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diameter and elasticity.

Furthermore, the newly emergent natural hair show caters towards the lay consumer unlike
traditional hair shows and beauty conventions that are primarily attended by industry professionals.
At a typical natural hair show, business owners pitch their products to women who come and go
from their booths, while panels of “experts” including beauty bloggers, hair stylists, and specialists
like Sister Scientist host discussions on healthy hair maintenance regimens and perform styling
demonstrations on guests. Byrd and Tharps (2014) call these actors “naturalpreneurs” (p. 212).
Broadly, these actors argue natural hair is healthy and beautiful by promoting products that claim
to define curls, lessen frizz, detangle, and increase manageability without using harmful chemicals
both in person at hair events and online through product reviews on blogs.
Tatiana, the founder of an international natural hair event, told me that her main tasks were
Figure 4.6: Woman looking at an image of her hair under a microscope at a natural hair event in
Atlanta (2015)
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securing and distributing samples of healthy hair products to local hosts around the world.
Advertisements of giveaway SWAG “stuff we all get” bags filled with packets of shampoos and
creams serve as incentives for event-goers to show up in person as opposed to exclusively
participating in natural hair forum discussions and advocacy online. At the 2016 CurlFest event in
Brooklyn, NY, thousands of women formed a snaking line around Prospect Park, waiting for hours
to receive a first-come first-served VIP product gift set. These women had no idea what would be
included in the bags, and were content to wait patiently as stations for food, music and dancing
buzzed just beyond.
Selling Intersectional Wellness
Many naturalpreneurs see themselves as not only as business owners, but also as
intersectional environmental justice advocates intervening in a racist, sexist and toxic consumer
market that ignores Black women’s specific needs. Mackendrick (2014) calls the practice of
evaluating the toxicity of ingredients in food, cleaning and cosmetic purchases “precautionary
consumption”—a priority she observes in her sample of mostly white, middle-class mothers in the
West. In response to increasing consciousness about the health risks of relaxers, natural hair
communities likewise advocate for cautious consumption of natural products as responsible,
ethical, healthful and necessary. However, unlike their white, middle-class counterparts, Black
women routinely find themselves ignored by an organic personal care market that assumes a white
subject. On one hand, the ethnic hair care aisle is disproportionately toxic; on the other hand,
organic options are often naively colorblind. Natural hair shows and individual naturalpreneurs
work to fill that gap.
Stacey (29, Cape Town), a cosmetics entrepreneur, brought up this issue during our
conversation. I met Stacey at her shop in market under a train station in Observatory, a
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predominantly Black and coloured neighborhood. Here, she sells her line of natural hair and body
salves next to woman vending vintage clothes and a Rastafarian barbershop. She initially began
mixing products at home because her son’s newborn skin was too sensitive for the commercial
products at her convenience store. Later, Stacey began selling her products to fill a gap she saw in
the market: “I do what I do for Black women…I don’t feel like there is enough out here for us.”
Her best seller is a hair and body moisturizing milk, a simple three ingredient product made with
aloe, a plant that grows wild throughout the Western Cape, olive oil, and natural lecithin. Like
many other environmentalists of color, she openly separates herself from the traditional,
mainstream environmental movement. Stacey continued:
They do all these things with the environment but they don’t know how to deal with these
Black people over here. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation.’ Walk into Clicks the aisle
for our hair, it is relaxing hair products, coloring hair products. Nothing is literally good
for you. Here is a group of women, and when I say women I take it for granted that I mean
Black women, trans Black women, this umbrella of people that no one pays attention to.

Stacey elaborates that “in Cape Town, things that are natural are still marketed to white people,
middle class and upper class people with all this money. These people who are light and love and
eat lentils and don’t do harm to animals. All these beautiful things but they just don’t deal with
race.” Her comments present both a structural critique of product availability in mainstream
convenience stores and a cultural critique of the green movement consumer niche’s privileged
ignorance of Black women’s needs. In short, an environmental consciousness is simply not enough
for many Black women to make more healthful choices. Natural hair entrepreneurs fill gaps caused
by regulatory neglect and ethnocentrism in the green consumer industry by providing alternatives
that serve natural-textured curly and kinky hair with natural ingredients.
Stacey actively prioritizes her peers as an underserved market by advertising her products
in a Cape Town natural hair Facebook support group, by vending at natural hair festivals, and by
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opting for farmer’s markets in Black and colored communities over big distribution deals with
national retailers. Other natural hair entrepreneurs spread environmental consciousness by
teaching Black women how to evaluate the toxicity in their hair care products. Sheila (45,
Johannesburg), the woman I introduced at the start of this chapter, views her business as a platform
for environmental education. She explained:
I really feel that people don’t know not because they don’t want to know but because
nobody is there to educate, so I really want to even in making my products I ensure that I
use conscious ingredients. If it is not certified organic, if it is not certified by ECOSET I
don’t use it. For me it is important. And also—the sustainability of it. If we take it from
somewhere and the tree is becoming extinct then we can’t use it. How is it sourced? You
look at those little things before you even try and use the product. If it is taken from a
country, who are they getting it from? Are people there enslaved to get the product? Every
single ingredient that goes in there it is consciously sourced it is a conscious product and
when you use it, it is biodegradable. I’m able to educate and buying the product becomes
the last thing I do after I’ve educated. You consciously buy because you understand what
you buy.

Sheila makes her products with crops indigenous to Southern Africa, like mongongo oil and
boabab oil. Everything she sells is sourced from Fare Trade and Community Trade initiatives, and
nothing contains alcohol, parabens, sulfates, mineral oil, or ingredients tested on animals.
Entrepreneur Sheryl (42, Los Angeles), similarly told me, “Even though a lot of those better
ingredients are more expensive, we’re going to have to cut our profits a little bit more to make sure
that we care about this world, the state of health of the world.” Her company also uses recyclable
and biodegradable packaging. For these business owners, selling natural haircare is the starting
place of a broader intersectional justice politics. Beyond catering to a natural aesthetic, their goals
include other issues that affect marginalized communities like the burdens of toxic waste, capitalist
imperialism, and slavery. Like other environmental activists operating outside of the mainstream
environmental movement, Sheila and Sheryl have “begun to shift the definition of
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environmentalism away from the exclusive focus on consumption to the sphere of work and
production” (Gottleib quoted in Melosi, 2006, p. 123).
Black women are frequently left out of dominant histories of environmental and gender-
based activism because they haven’t always labeled their work feminist, let alone ecofeminist, and
face different issues than those with race and/or gender privilege (hooks, 2014; Mann, 2011; Roth,
2004; Taylor, 1997; Collins, 1986; Zinn, Cannon, Higgenbotham & Thornton Dill, 1986). For
example, many Black women in the U.S. women’s movement eschewed feminism or opted for the
label “womanist” to emphasize how race and class intersect to shape how Black women experience
gender differently (Combahee River Collective, 1977; hooks, 1984). Moreover, women of color
often lack the resources to express their politics in privileged spaces, adding to their
marginalization from dominant activist and academic discourses (Roth, 2004; Collins, 1986; Zinn,
Cannon, Higgenbotham & Thornton Dill 1986). But, viewing Black women’s ideological and
advocacy work within the natural hair movement as intersectional environmental feminism
decenters environmental and feminist histories that exclusively emphasize the experiences,
methods and strategies of privileged groups. While not all these influencers identify as feminist,
womanist, or environmentalists, their deployment of naturalness is intersectional and activist in
effect. Naturalpreneurs have been in the forefront of the effort to create affordable, accessible,
consciously-sourced cosmetics products.
Dilemmas in Black Feminist Consumer Politics
Today’s natural hair politics is both constrained and enabled by its entanglement with
capitalism and consumer culture. Krystal (24, Tallahassee) describes the transformative
opportunities consumerism has provided her, stating, “Due to the plethora of products, women
are making a more personal choice because they are available. I can make a personal choice to
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deal with who I am at my core if I want to and I’m going to have the resources to do so.”
However, instead of being “creamy crack” addicts, natural hair communities can create “product
junkies” who amass an ever-growing supply of natural hair products in search of a regimen they
feel works well enough to achieve their styling goals. “Product junkie” has become a widespread
colloquialism in natural hair communities, and an expected stage for new naturals as they
endeavor to discover what “works” for them. My conversations in the field typically began with
compliments on my hair, followed by a pointed inquiry, “what do you use?” Given that I
amassed a multitude of free samples from attending hair events weekly, I tended to apply a
medley of whatever I had on hand at home and failed to have sufficient answers to give. In one
memorable instance, a beauty blogger waved me over and requested that I be featured on her
website. During the interview, she pressured me to reveal a favorite “must have” product and
became frustrated when I could not. This emphasis on commodification and consumer culture
makes sense in the current neoliberal context, where “rights-based political movements multiply
as disenfranchised individuals and groups use the technologies, processes, and subjectivities of
consumer culture to achieve their goals” (Butler, 2013, p. 41).
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Black women have long spent greater percentages of their income on beautification
(Wingfield, 2008), but partaking in “green” naturalness is not equally accessible to all. Many
Black communities in the United States and across the Black Atlantic continue to exist in food
deserts where organic produce and products for natural hair are unavailable or more expensive
than in middle-class neighborhoods. Evelyn (42, Johannesburg) traveled across town to a health
food store at an affluent mall in Sandton to find coconut oil and Shea butter, which she had
discovered were healthy products for use on natural hair after reading about them on blogs. She
acknowledged, “It’s harder if you don’t have much to spend.” We discussed affordability and food
deserts further in our interview:
Author: It is often the same thing in African American communities. It is mostly middle-
class Black American communities who have access to this whole natural hair world as
bloggers are creating it. It seems pretty similar [in South Africa].

Evelyn: Same here. Just across the road is Alexander, and Alexander is actually near
Sandton and the community is so, so, so bad, so sad. The food there is shit. It is not healthy
Figure 4.7: Viral Internet meme making fun of the “product junkie” persona in natural hair
culture (2015)
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at all. I wouldn’t just buy food there especially because I now know. It’s very cheap but
it’s what they can afford. Pick ‘n Pay there is different from Pick ‘n Pay here. There are
two different worlds. The income disparities are so, so, so different. There’s a big margin
between the haves and the have nots…There are now a few Blacks who have access to the
middle class but most people don’t have access to Internet to make conscious decisions
about what they are going to eat to have choice. Some people are just concerned about
filling their tummies, which is surviving. The thing is with poverty is it limits your options.

The privilege of choice that Krystal enjoys is not available to many people of African descent
living in the United States, and even fewer communities of African descent living in lesser
developed countries with more recent histories of state-sanctioned racial, economic and spatial
segregation, like during apartheid in South Africa just two decades ago.
But the pressure to purchase expensive healthy products remains, especially because many
women have little knowledge about caring for their natural hair and turn to the market for solutions.
Raven (26) explained, “Because it is fairly new, women try every product that they can. Being
natural has become an expensive movement. The first thing my friend said is where did you buy
your product and I told her and she said this is three times as much as my normal product. For
some people, you don’t have a choice but to end up blowing out your hair.” Corliss (62) aspires to
act on her new environmental consciousness, but her financial situation deters her from doing so.
She explained, “Because with my hair natural then I want to start using natural products, too. Right
now, I have what I have and I’m going to use what I have because I’m money conscious.” Brie
(35) resented the pressure of consumerism in a natural hair Facebook group that she regularly
participates in: “Sometimes the group, as much as it can be supportive, you can feel alienated
because you don’t follow that routine. I felt bad for not following that LOC method [a regimen
that requires a separate liquid, oil and cream product to style hair]. I’m a lazy natural and I don’t
do all of this.”
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Furthermore, because much of the biomedicalized discourse about natural hair begins and
ends online, poor women and women in developing countries with natural hair are more likely to
be read in their communities as unable to afford relatively inexpensive relaxers and not as
conscious or progressive consumers. For example, the first thing Sheila (45) did to symbolize her
economic mobility when she got her first job was straighten her hair: “My first salary I went to
relax my hair because for me, I was liberated. People need to see now that I can afford [getting my
hair done].” Sheila acted based on the understanding that hair texture and styling mattered within
her community, and that those around her would evaluate her character and achievements based
on her ability to relax her hair. As her reflection illustrates, Black women engage in an ongoing
dialog about self, status and society through their styling choices. Signifiers of economic security,
ideal womanhood and cultural competence are hugely dependent on context. While naturalness
increasingly constructs a privileged, liberated body in middle-class communities, relaxed hair
remains a signifier a privileged body in many working-class communities.
Neoliberal Naturalness as Gendered Racial Formation
The natural hair movement’s biomedicalized deployment of “naturalness” reshapes how
Blackness is managed, represented and configured more broadly. White supremacist ideologies
have repeatedly racialized Black bodies as closer to nature to legitimate Black people’s position at
the bottom of racial hierarchies (Riley, 2004, p. 414). A Western logic of oppositional nature-
culture dualism has helped to construct whiteness as the counter-image of Blackness, where Blacks
are disorderly, chaotic and wild and whites are rational, culturally superior, civilizing forces (Riley,
2004; Plumwood, 1993). By connecting Black bodies to nature, whites justify their supposed
imperatives to conquer, control, subjugate, and discipline both Black bodies and nature at the same
time. This racial project has been deeply gendered. Colonizers, slavers, scientists, and politicians
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alike have portrayed the Black female body as the essence of feminine primitiveness in a series of
racial representations over the last 500 years. As bell hooks and West (1991) point out, “from
slavery to the present day, the Black female body has been seen in Western eyes as the
quintessential symbol of a ‘natural’ female presence that is organic, closer to nature, animalistic,
primitive” (p. 153).
Sara Baartman’s story is perhaps the most powerful example of racialization of Black
women’s bodies as inferior though associations with a theoretically primitive nature. Born in the
Gamtoos Valley in South Africa, Baartman was sold to a British doctor and became known as the
“Hottentot Venus” from her caged exhibition in freak shows throughout 19
th
century Europe.
Baartman’s naked body, particularly her posterior, drew gaping spectators from near and far in
what Thomson (1997) calls “inverted, parodic beauty pageants” (p. 71). A series of white captors
exploited her body for financial gain, “scientifically” defining Black bodies as deviant,
hypersexual, and subhuman in the process. In their biography of Baartman’s life, Crais and Scully
(2009) argue that the spectacle of the Hottentot Venus “confirmed the inequality and unfitness of
all women, for women were closer to nature, and the Hottentot Venus was the closest of them all”
(p. 3). Onlookers gazed at Baartman’s dark body “not as a human being but as an extraordinary
object of nature existing at the edge of the exotic and grotesque” (Crais & Scully 2009, p. 80).
Associating Baartman’s body with nature served to legitimize racial inequality between Europeans
and Africans, and especially between Black and white women (Collins, 2005; Nagel, 2003).
Similarly, slave owners in the American South invoked gendered associations between
Blackness and nature through stereotypes about Black women’s unbridled sexuality and natural
propensity for childbirth (hooks & West, 1991; Collins, 1990). Black women were projected as
bestial to rationalize the most intimate forms of servitude, exploitation, and dehumanization. This
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enabled slavers to justify rape, the use of Black women as chattel breeders, and as wet nurses for
their own children (Roberts, 2016; West & hooks, 1991; Collins, 1990). The white elite in the
United States viewed breastfeeding as animalistic, so “breeder” enslaved women were forced to
breastfeed their slave mistress’ babies, often before or instead of feeding their own children. My
interviewee Anita, who is both a professional breastfeeding advocate and a natural hair event
organizer in Southern California, explained to me that this contributed to the malnourishment and
death of many enslaved Black children and forms the basis of continuing stigmas against
breastfeeding in Black communities. In the 20
th
century, the U.S. government deployed parallel
discourses about Black women’s bodies through tropes like the incessantly breeding “welfare
queen,” that blame poor Black women for their marginalized political, economic, and social
positions. Discourses depicting Black women as uncivilized and needing to be tamed have also
been used to justify forced sterilizations and other coercive birth control schemes (Roberts, 2016).
Heller (2010) notes that even left-leaning ecologists evoke racist and sexist tropes about Black
women’s nearness to nature to accuse poor women of color for using up too much of earth’s
resources by “overpopulating” (p. 230). By reducing Black women to either a source of labor or
social burden, each of these examples operate as gendered racial formation projects that explain
away unequal material relationships in white supremacist patriarchal and capitalist society. Black
women confront these essentialist understandings about their “exotic naturalness” when they
return to natural hairstyles, especially because stigmas that Black women are wild and
undisciplined have been mapped onto kinky and curly hair textures (Collins, 2004). Recall, this is
precisely why Black beauty culturists of the 20
th
century linked respectability to straight hair as a
racial uplift strategy.
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In her essay on eco-womanism, Riley (2004) points out that “because of the historical and
current treatment of Blacks in dominant Western ideology, Black womanists must confront the
dilemma of whether we should strive to sever or reinforce the traditional association of Black
people with nature that exists in dominant Western thought” (p. 414). The natural hair movement
decisively takes a position. Drawing on Black feminist and environmentalist themes, the natural
hair movement rearticulates associations between Black women’s bodies and nature, and by
centering Black women’s subjectivity, infuses them with new political meaning. Influencers and
businesses like Naptural85, Madame President, Mayavana, Sister Scientist and Sheila reclaim
colonial narratives and revise pejorative associations between Black women and nature by linking
natural hair with intersectional wellness ideologies and by foregrounding Black women’s
embodied experiences of illness and transformation. Instead of signifying wildness, laziness, or
backwardness, today’s natural hair politics disseminates counterhegemonic discourses that
naturalness is a healthy, progressive and responsible choice that is symbolic of the questioning of
authority—all marketable qualities in the 2010s. Black women with natural hair increasingly see
themselves and are read by others as politically “woke” discerning consumers. Furthermore, Black
women’s demand for natural products and the resultant explosion of entrepreneurship has
positioned Black women as leading authorities in the green consumer industry. Whereas proximity
to naturalness was used by whites to deny Black women’s access to citizenship in the 17
th
, 18
th
, 19
th

and 20
th
centuries, natural hair politics harnesses naturalness to align modern Black femininity with
21
st
century neoliberal understandings of good citizenship.
As feminist scholars of the body have argued, the biomedicalization of health and
bodywork under neoliberalism tends to have stratifying class dimensions (Berkowitz, 2017; Kaur,
2016). Consumerism and class are often tangled up with exercising “wokeness,” displaying good
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citizenship, participating in natural hair culture, and avoiding the trap of toxic hair care practices.
Just as smooth skin, white teeth, and toned bodies are increasingly made possible by access to
commodified technologies, services, and products, so too are many natural solutions for natural
hair. Naturalness, then, is one aspect of producing and exercising a middle-class Black
womanhood. Thus, it is not race alone that is constructed and reimagined through racial projects,
but subjects and communities that are also gendered, classed, and historically and globally
positioned. Scholars must theorize through an intersectional lens that is mindful of the co-
constitutive nature of social systems to fully understand the impact of sub-cultures, movements,
activists, and critics as racial formation projects.
Conclusion
Natural hair is understood differently today than it was during the Black is Beautiful
crusade of the late 1960s. Then, the Afro primarily symbolized Black Power by rejecting white
aesthetic standards and a celebrating a new Black cultural aesthetic. Today’s natural hair
movement extends those goals through a broader deployment of the term natural. As the health
consequences of relaxer use became widely publicized, natural has come to describe both kinky
or curly hair texture and the integrity of ingredients in haircare products and self-care practices.
By taking seriously Black women’s embodied experiences of pain, illness, pleasure and comfort,
natural hair has become more than the uniform of revolution. Today, it is also an embodied and
grassroots resistance against race, class and gender health disparities, colorblindness within the
growing green consumer industry and governmental regulatory neglect of communities of color.
This focus on health and wellness separates 21
st
century natural hair politics from previous
moments of Black beauty activism.
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Everyday women’s knowledge about their bodies is often dismissed or kept private,
especially if they live in marginalized communities, are poor, or are of color. As the canonical
feminist health text Our Bodies Ourselves (1971) has demonstrated over the last forty years, when
real women share their embodied experiences, they inspire other women to improve their health
care practices and catalyze radical movements at the community-level. Natural hair movement
influencers act as intersectional environmental activists by disseminating new practices that treat
Black women’s bodies as environments worthy of protection and that address the specific toxicity
concerns Black women face. In doing so, they rearticulate stereotypical associations between
Blackness and nature, constructing an ethos of naturalness and natural hair as progressive and
healthy ways to care for the body. Some women overcome lifelong insecurities about their hair
texture and are moved to resist external expectations for straight hair, suggesting that the authority
of science and power of biomedicalization can be harnessed from below in resistance against
gendered racism. But while biomedicalization can be a productive means for critiquing and
undoing the emotional and embodied manifestations of race and gender oppression,
biomedicalization simultaneously reproduces stratified class arrangements. Poor women,
especially those in the Global South, have limited access to the discourses, products, and culture
of natural wellness. So, racial projects do not only operate on racial systems; they have mutual
implications for class and gender systems as well.
That many women are initially attracted to natural hair as a wellness choice and not as an
outward political statement does not mean they do not come to see their hair as having political
implications for society. The experience of transitioning can be emotionally difficult, and Black
women encounter a wide variety of responses to their natural hair from others as they navigate
their lives. These reactions are also deeply important to what natural hair means today. In the
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following chapter, I describe how Africana women use their experiences of going natural and of
hair discrimination to interject their embodied stories in to social movements, electoral politics,
and organizations. Natural hair, for many, becomes a form of critical praxis to open up these
institutions, illustrate their blind-spots about Black women’s gendered experiences of racism, and
move an intersectional perspective from margin to center.

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Chapter 5
Natural Hair and Gendering Racial Protest in the Social Movement Sector
Sociologists have recognized the simultaneous influence of gender, race, and class
arrangements on beauty ideals, and in turn, how exclusionary beauty ideals stratify whose bodies
are considered valuable in the dating, labor, and fashion markets. When beauty scholars discuss
politics, they usually use the term as a way to acknowledge that systems and ideologies of
stratification reflect who gets what and why. Less understood is how women experience, engage,
and critique social movements through beauty culture. Even though the human body is taken up
in all social protests, social movement scholarship rarely engages the embodiment literature. Since
new collective identities are constituted through the gendered, sexed, and racialized body, studying
the function of the active and visible body is critical to understanding the goals, strategies, and
effects of social movements (Sasson-Levy & Rapoport, 2003). That Black women insist on calling
natural hair a “movement” rather than a trend is meaningful and telling, and this chapter takes
seriously their claims that natural hair is a movement. In this chapter, I consider the following
question: How does the body, and particularly natural hair, become a vehicle and agent of
intersectional resistance? I begin by situating natural hair politics within Black women’s long
histories, strategies, and experiences of intersectional activism. I then discuss how women of
African descent use natural hair as an intersectional political tool to connect gendered forms of
racism with more dominant, androcentric conversations occurring within the “social movement
sector” (McCarthy & Zald, 1977).
Social movement scholars have long been interested in the interconnectedness of social
movements, and how movement communities share frameworks. McCarthy and Zald (1977) use
the term social movement sector to describe the full set of collective actors and ideas engaged in
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political change in a given place and time. One contribution of this chapter is to show that local
social movement sectors influence how women engage the global natural hair movement on the
ground. I discuss this effect by analyzing patterns in natural hair conversations that emerge
alongside two local race-based social justice movements: 1) Black Lives Matter in the United
States and 2) Fees Must Fall in South Africa. Commonly, women in South Africa and in the United
States use natural hair as an embodied intersectional interjection into the broader movement sector,
where dominant discourses often erase Black women’s experiences by centering men’s bodily
integrity (in the U.S.) and right to take up space (in S.A.). The applications of natural hair in
protest differ in South Africa from applications in the United States, since, as Sutton (2007)
explains, “different social movement cultures, specific movement demands, and activists’
differential locations in the social structure shape embodied actions” and their meanings (p. 140).
Activism ßà Intersectionality
Black women activists have long used their situated lived experiences, or standpoints at
the intersection of race, class, and gender oppression to critique priorities and illuminate blindspots
within the social movement sector. For an early example, former slaves, abolitionists, and
feminists Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth were divided on whether women or Black men
should receive the right to vote first in mid-nineteenth century America. Believing that it was the
“Negro’s hour,” Douglass argued, “The government in this country loves women. They are the
sisters, mothers, wives and daughters of our rulers; but the negro is loathed… The negro needs
suffrage to protect his life and property, and to answer him with respect and education” (Douglass,
1868 quoted in Chesebrough, 1998, p. 67). His argument failed to acknowledge that Black women
are rarely embraced as wives and daughters of white leaders, but were more often exploited as
their property. Black women have also experienced exploitation in ways different from their Black
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male counterparts. For example, the Tignon Laws mandating that Black women cover their hair
was a response to the reality that enslaved Black women more likely to experience sexual violence
than enslaved Back men. Sojourner Truth criticized Douglass’ position, pointing out Black
women’s subordinate position to Black men within Black communities, as well. Perhaps because
Truth was also intimately familiar with the experience of patriarchal control, a privilege that Black
and white men exercise over Black women, she prioritized women’s suffrage to protect Black
women. Truth ([1867] 2011) claimed, “[Black men] have been having our right so long, that you
think, like a slaveholder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reigns
for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all better when it closes up again” (p. 38).
Women of color have often faced the pressure to choose allegiance with either co-ethnic
men or white-centered feminism in the social movement sector, what scholars have described as
love vs. trouble (hooks, 2014; Collins, 1990), nationalist vs. assimilationist (Lowe, 1996) or gender
vs. race (Wallace, 1999) dilemmas. Choosing race-centered activism, women of color in the
Chicano movement, the African American Civil Rights movement, and the Black Liberation
movement consistently reported that men minimized their labor, subjectivities, and claims to
dignity (Roth, 2004; Wallace, 1999; Collins, 1986). As Lorde (1984) notes, "The necessity for an
history of shared battle have made us, Black women, particularly vulnerable to the false accusation
that anti-sexist is anti-black. Meanwhile, woman-hating as a recourse of the powerless is sapping
strength from Black communities and our very lives" (p. 291). Many anti-racist movements,
especially ones that employ nationalist frameworks, tend to rest on patriarchal and hetero-
normative racial uplift strategies that disempower or exclude women of color. For example, in
discussion about her work with the Black Panther Party at the International Decolonial Black
Feminism Summer School in 2017, Angela Davis mentioned Carmichael’s comment that “the only
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position for women in SNCC is prone” and recalled when leaders of the Black Panther party put
all—and only—the women party members on probation and made them prove their loyalty to the
group. Eventually, leaders of the Black Panther Party mandated that members align themselves
with only one political group. Davis chose the Communist Party partly because of her experience
with sexism in the Black Panther Party. Some men in Black nationalist communities saw natural
hair as political for Black men but masculinizing for Black women, a heteronormative stance that
suggested that a Black woman’s primary role within the movement was as a sexual object for
Black men (Craig, 2006; Kelley, 1997). Black lesbians were considered especially threatening to
Black nationalism’s pursuit of racial solidarity because they elude patriarchal control altogether
(Lorde, 1984).
Black and Chicana feminists were also routinely ostracized by race and class biases in
second-wave feminist theorizing in the 1960s and 1970s (Roth, 2004; Laslett & Thorne, 1997;
hooks, 1981; Moraga & Anzaldua, 1983). Women of color felt alienated by liberal feminism’s
conceptualization of a public/private divide, since minority and working-class women have been
discriminated against alongside men in their communities and have long worked outside the home
to support their families (Davis, 1981). Feminist organizing as if the category “woman” is
monolithic ignores that white women have historically and systematically benefitted from white
supremacy, and Black feminists in the second wave found that many white feminists had little
concern for the issues poor and minority women face (hooks, 1981). As McIntosh (1989) observes,
privilege by nature is weightless and reproductive, and as a result, is easily invisible to those who
benefit from it.
Since feminist and antiracist movements tend not to acknowledge women-of-colors’
experiences of marginalization, feminist organizing along racial/ethnic lines blossomed in the
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1960s and 1970s (Roth, 2004). Through organizations like Las Hijas de Cuauhtemoc,
Organization of Pan-Asian women, Comision Femenil Mexicana, and the National Black Feminist
Organization, women of color pointed out that race and gender justice causes need not be
oppositional, since patriarchy upholds racial oppression. Women of color feminists tended to
distance themselves from radical feminist arguments that advanced separatism to subvert
patriarchy, recognizing their common stake with men of color in dismantling racism. For example,
Walker (1983) defines womanism, her version of Black feminism, as “committed to the survival
and wholeness of entire people, male and female” (p. xi). Black lesbian feminists further argued
that aggression against lesbians of color is misplaced given that the dominant source of violence
against Black communities comes from above in existing racist and capitalist social hierarchies
(Lorde 1984). Most famously, the Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) aimed at
ideologically articulating Black feminism using their resources as “tokens” within the educational
system. The Combahee River Collective’s statement critiques Marxist theory as only partially
explanatory of economic oppression, arguing that a socialist revolution can only liberate Black
women if it is also antiracist and feminist. The Collective further describes systems of racist,
patriarchal, and capitalist oppression as “interlocking” and mutually constitutive. Importantly,
they posited that their identities as women of color produce particular experiences of racial-sexual
oppression, locating the genesis of their anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-capitalist, and anti-heterosexist
politics in their lived struggles for survival.
Academic explanations of the relationships between racism, capitalism, patriarchy and
heteronormativity emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, perhaps because women of color were
receiving university training at higher levels than ever before. Scholars of color increasingly
interpreted their experiences in the social movement sector through theory-making (Zinn, Cannon,
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Higginbotham, & Thornton Dill, 1986). Women of color feminism made headway in academia
through Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) theory of “the matrix of domination,” which posits that
systems of oppression are interlocking, not simply additive. Similarly, using difference as an
analytical lens, Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the concept of “intersectionality” to describe
differential patterns of violence (1991) and employment discrimination (1989) against women of
color. Crenshaw further argued that Black women’s experiences of rape and battering become
invisible to policymakers, theorists, and activists because of their tendency to think of race and
gender as mutually exclusive categories (Crenshaw, 1991). In turn, laws that conceptualize
discrimination along only one axis—either race or gender—frequently dismiss women of color’s
grievances at the intersection of multiple axes of oppression. The conceptual term
“intersectionality,” its framework, and the resultant field of study builds upon the knowledge
projects of decades of Black’s activism. Women of color academics increasingly used
intersectional frameworks to revise, extend, and critique Eurocentric and androcentric biases
across the humanities and social sciences.
Given the birthplaces and historical origins of intersectional thinking—in women of colors’
social movement communities—academic intersectionality should always remain in conversation
with the forms, foci and evolutions of Black women’s organizing. The natural hair movement is a
useful site for documenting the sorts of intersectional knowledge-making Black women find
imperative today, especially since concurrent anti-racist social movements often still fail to
account for Black women’s gendered experiences of racism in their frameworks and discourses.
In what follows, I analyze the natural hair movement as an ongoing project of embodied
intersectional critical praxis that Black women use in response to current political affairs and
androcentric frameworks in their local social movement sectors.
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Black Lives Matter and the Natural Hair Politics in the United States
Organized in 2013 in response to George Zimmerman’s acquittal for Trayvon Martin’s
death by three queer Black women, Alicia Garza, Patrice Cullors and Opal Tometi, the
#BlackLivesMatter hashtag on social media aimed to intervene and call attention to the systematic
dehumanization, under-recognition, and deadly oppression of Black people and Black bodies. By
2016, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter had evolved into Black Lives Matter, a movement and a
formal organization with over 40 chapters across the United States and Canada. The deaths of
Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner, and the subsequent acquittals of
their murderers, woke up the nation a much too common form of tragedy.
As the movement and initiative grew, the dominant narrative seemed to center police
brutality against cis-men to the exclusion of women and trans-people. Although Garza, Cullors
and Tometi publicly and repeatedly used their platforms to advance gendered analyses of state,
violence against Black women’s bodies has not inspired the same level of outrage that violence
against Black men’s bodies has. The tragedies of Black women like Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd,
Tanisha Anderson, Yvette Smith and others who have been assaulted, killed or violently
intimidated by the police have rallied less attention. Crenshaw et al. (2015) lament this situation:
“The erasure of Black women is not purely a matter of missing facts. Even where women and girls
are present in the data, narratives framing police profiling and lethal force as exclusively male
experiences lead researchers, the media, and advocates to exclude them” (p. 4). Now, just as in the
past, Black women are not commonly thought of as representative of the experience of white
supremacy.
In May 2015, the #SayHerName initiative on social media was a major public step towards
recognizing, and remembering Black American women’s experiences of police violence. Brown
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et al. (2017) analyze #SayHerName as a case study of intersectional critical practice and
consciousness raising in the digital era, whereby racism and sexism are simultaneously
interrogated through social media networks to center trans and cis Black women’s deaths. While
#SayHerName has importantly raised awareness that not “all the Blacks are men” (Hull, Bell-Scott
& Smith, 1982), the campaign has done little to describe and illustrate the gendered ways in which
Black women encounter racism. Beginning with a narrative of police brutality occurring on the
street eclipses other, more common ways in which Black women, especially Black feminine
women, experience violence and racism. In an interview with Kaavya Asoka for the academic
journal Dissent, Marcia Chatelain (2015) suggests the greater likelihood for Black women to
experience violence in the private sphere explains their erasure from Black Lives Matter discourses
about anti-Black violence. Chatelain offers:
Black women are often targets of violence inside homes and in private spaces where people
cannot easily see them or galvanize around them. When we consider how and where people
organize, it’s important to remember these victims of brutality too, even if we can’t gather
at their specific sites of victimization (p. 56).

In other words, violence against Black women often looks different than violence against Black
men, often taking the forms of sexual harassment, rape, and other unwanted touching. Amid a
men-centered, street-centered movement against racial violence, the natural hair movement has
become a way for Black women to make their lived-experiences of racism and their right to bodily
integrity visible and legible.
Including Black Women by Referencing Natural Hair
In February 2016, the United States presidential primary campaigns were in full swing. On
the 23
rd
, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton sat on stage before a racially diverse group of citizens
for a Democratic Town Hall in Columbia, South Carolina. Rather than debating one another, they
held conversations with the crowd. A young Black woman Kyla Gray, rose to pose a question to
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Senator Hillary Clinton during her hour-long session. Wearing a black top, glasses, and shoulder
length natural hair parted in the center and pulled back in a low puffy pony tail, Gray used her
experience “going natural” to push presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton into a conversation about
growing anti-Black racism:
Recently I stated wearing my hair natural and I’ve noticed the difference in the way some
people address and look at me. In the wake of things like Ferguson and Black Lives Matter
and the recent backlash against Beyoncé for her ‘Formation’ video, there have been a lot
of racial tensions recently in our nation. So, my question to you is: What do you intend to
do to fix the broken racial tensions in our nation?

The way Gray poses her question to Sen. Clinton encapsulates the why and how of Black beauty
politics today. Like most women I interviewed, Gray does not suggest that she transitioned to
natural hair for political reasons. Rather, she speaks of noticing a difference in how people saw
and treated her as a Black woman with natural hair. Unlike during the Black Power era, when
Afros were considered a tool for revaluating Afro-centric beauty, today women more often
describe a process of politicization through the experience of transitioning to natural hair. Gray’s
question reveals that she comes to view the treatment of her body—because of her natural hair—
in racial terms, and as an expression of broader racial tensions in the United States. Natural hair
does not seem to be Gray’s uniform of rebellion, but it became a standpoint through which she
interprets the social systems she lives within. In other words, transitioning to natural hair entailed
a transition in her consciousness.
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Gray’s question also demonstrates how natural hair can be a rhetorical tool for resistance.
Bringing up stigmas against natural hair in interpersonal interactions redirects attention towards
Black women in a conversation about race that often marginalizes their experiences. Gray uses her
body as a political “argumentative resource” (De Lucca, 1999), “text” (Peterson, 2001), or a
symbol to convey political critique. Against dominant discourses about anti-Black racism in the
United States have largely excluded Black women, Gray deploys her natural hair to make her
personal experience of racism as a Black woman without celebrity status intelligible to others.
Natural hair enabled her to connect the daily racist and patriarchal microaggressions she and many
other Black women encounter with more privileged narratives, like the controversy around the
Black activist aesthetic of Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance and the murder of Michael Brown
in Ferguson, whose death became one of the foremost examples of police brutality in the Black
Lives Matter movement. Because many African American women are simultaneously Black and
feminine and working or middle-class, single-focus discourses about Black men’s experiences of
Figure 5.1: Kyla Gray addressing Senator Hillary Clinton at the Democratic Town Hall (2016)
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racism or celebrity women’s experiences of racism often leave little space to address the complex
social problems most Black women face, especially in the wake of a natural hair trend.
In a similar way, model Ebonee Davis used her experience transitioning to natural hair and
her standpoint as one of few Black models in high fashion to probe the role of racist and limited
media representations in perpetuating violence and implicit biases against Black bodies. I heard
Davis speak on a panel entitled “Race and Fashion” in November 2017, where she described how
modeling agencies repeatedly declined to represent her because their company portfolios already
had their token Black models. Those that did agree to sign her used her as their “back-up Black
girl” for when their other Black models were unavailable. It was not until Davis became a
spokesperson for diversity issues through a viral TED Talk on “Black Girl Magic in the Fashion
Industry” that an agency seeking models who could work in the influencer branding space agreed
to represent her. Davis’ (2017) TED talk opens with an anecdote from her childhood, where she
remembers begging her grandmother for a box of relaxer at the beauty supply store so that she
could have beautiful straight hair and abandon her “kinky coils.” She speaks of being painted grey
by makeup artists and forced to big chop because of stylists’ inability to work with her hair. On
the day Davis went natural, Alton Sterling had been shot and killed by police officers. The
coincidence inspired a critical reflection on the relationships between racism, fashion, and
violence. In her public letter for Harper’s Bazaar, Davis (2016) used analogies to beauty and hair
as argumentative resource when she wrote:
It is the same systemic racism that sees beauty products for “black” hair end up in a section
of their own (“the ethnic aisle”), that sees black men more likely to end up dead after a
police encounter than any other racial group. Systemic racism began with slavery and has
woven itself into the fabric of our culture, manifesting through police brutality, poverty,
lack of education, and incarceration. The most dangerous contributors? Advertising,
beauty, and fashion.

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Davis’ letter demands that the beauty industry expand the definition of beauty to be racially
inclusive, rather than forcing Black, Latina, Arab, and Asian women to assimilate into a white-
centered beauty norm: “We have a responsibility to re-humanize the systematically dehumanized,
and create of a society where each of us can be recognized, represented, and celebrated across the
board, so we can take pride in who we are and where we come from.” Here, Davis uses natural
hair and beauty as rhetorical tools for connecting Black women’s experiences negotiating a white-
centered beauty ideal and beauty industry with the movement to end police brutality. Davis’
experience also highlights the distinctive and powerful role of social media “influencers” as
political spokespersons in today’s digital era.
Frame Convergences—Implicit Bias and Bodily Integrity
I observed several other convergences between discourses in the natural hair movement
and the Black Lives Matter movement. The public conversation around police officers’ implicit
bias against Black men in hoodies mirrored an ongoing conversation about employers’ implicit
bias against natural hair in schools and workplaces. Legal cases regulating hair discrimination like
have been widely publicized since the 1980s, like Rogers v. American Airlines in 1981 and most
recently a 2016 Eleventh Circuit Federal Court of Appeals decision that protects employers for
firing employees with Dreadlocks. The Perception Institute’s (2017) “Good Hair Study” using IAT
methodology received extensive media attention for comparing implicit bias against Black women
wearing natural versus straightened hair styles, and found that most participants in its national
sample of Black and white men and women, regardless of race, show implicit bias against Black
women’s natural hair textures.
One of the most common discussion topics did not directly relate to hair at natural hair
gatherings I attended was the criminalization of Black girls. One particular natural hair event
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stands out in my field notes, during which the organizer connected hair relaxing to reproductive
injustice, mass incarceration, domestic violence. The organizer passed out a handout to the group
that informed attendees that there has been an 832% increase in the incarceration of women of
color in the United States since 1977 due to increased prison privatization. She further explained
that incarcerated women are forced to give birth in shackles, yet there are no data tying health
records to prison records. Describing both relaxers and maternal healthcare in the prison system
as forms of gender-based violence that alienate women from their own bodies, she continued,
“Knowing this data helps to embrace our sisters and to understand Black beauty politics. The
women I work with can’t trust their bodies to do anything. We need to know more and go deeper.
It is our responsibility to find out more.” African American women’s discussions connecting the
Black beauty politics with police violence and the prison industrial complex do not occur in a
vacuum. They draw upon the history of the surveillance and criminalization of Black women’s
bodies. Specifically, they speak to enduring cultural association of the Afro- wearing Black woman
with violent Black radicalism. Recall that hundreds or thousands of Afro-wearing Black women
were harassed by the police when Angela Davis’ image was circulated by the FBI in 1970. This
protestor, seen during fieldwork at a Black Lives Matter protest in Atlanta, Georgia (see Figure
6.2) evokes this history in her sign that read “My Afro is NOT a TARGET.”
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A focus on bodily integrity and personal safety among natural hair communities in the
United States also responds to Black Lives Matter’s anti-violence emphasis. In talking about their
experiences of gendered racism, numerous women in this study referenced instances where they
warded off invasive pets and disparaging comments from friends and strangers. Such instances are
reminders of and speak to a long history of treating Black women like spectacles and raiding their
personal space. “Don’t touch my hair” has become central slogan of the natural hair movement,
appearing repeatedly in recent music, books, natural hair forums, and newspaper articles. In 2016,
comedian Phoebe Robinson published her bestselling book on race, gender and pop culture entitled
You Can’t Touch My Hair—part media analysis, part memoir of the various racist and sexist micro-
aggressions she’s faced growing up and working in the entertainment industry. There are over
65,000 images tagged #donttouchmyhair on Instagram, mostly “selfies” or self-portraits of Black
Figure 5.2: Protestor at a Black Lives Matter march in Atlanta, GA (July 2016)
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women with natural hair. Also in 2016, Solange Knowles released her song “Don’t Touch My
Hair.” Knowles song is in many ways the contemporary response to India Arie’s hit single “I Am
Not My Hair,” released exactly ten years earlier. While Arie (2006) emphasizes that her soul is
“within,” Knowles posits that her hair is her soul, her pride, her emotions, and is off limits. In a
recorded conversation with her mother, Knowles explicitly connects her album to the movement
against police brutality for her website Saint Heron (2016):
When I felt afraid or when I felt like this record would be so different from my last, I would
see or hear another story of a young Black person in America having their life taken away
and having their freedom taken away. That would fuel me to go back and revisit and
sometimes rewrite some of these songs to go a little further and not be afraid to have the
conversation.

Knowles music video for “Don’t Touch My Hair” features herself and other feminine Black
women and men in a rotating array of hairstyles, including beaded cornrows with cowrie shells,
finger waves, and curly ‘fros. The aesthetic is distinctly Black, but necessarily Afrocentric. It
projects Black hair as playful, creative, and personal choice. Unlike the 1970s Black Power slogan
“Black is Beautiful” that focused on revaluating and self-valuating an Afrocentric culture the
2010s slogan “Don’t Touch My Hair” is a directive to others and a demand for bodily respect.
In 2013, Antoniah Opiah of Un-ruly.com challenged the “Don’t Touch My Hair” idea
through a social experiment entitled “You Can Touch My Hair.” For the experiment, three Black
women volunteers held signs inviting strangers in Union Square, New York to feel their hair
without consequence. Opiah’s intent was to inspire cultural exchange and undercut the curiosity
around Black hair. She explained, “Hair was the vulnerability that we offered up, a bargaining chip
we hoped would get us what we really want—one brick on the bridge we need to really integrate
as Americans.” Unsurprisingly, the experiment sparked a voracious debate on social media and
in real life. Some welcomed the conversation it began, which gave Black women another platform
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to explain the significance of the natural hair movement and the daily microaggressions Black
women face because of their hair. Others likened the experiment to a slave auction block, a petting
zoo, and the infamous exhibition of Sarah Baartman’s naked body for white enjoyment around
Europe in the early 1810s. On the second day of Opiah’s experiment, a group of women staged
counter protests, carrying signs saying “What’ll it be next…my butt?” and “don’t know where
your hands have been, so no.”

The counter-protesters to “You Can Touch My Hair” pointed out that curiosity cannot be benign
in a society defined by white supremacy and against the backdrop centuries of racist and sexist
violence against Black women’s bodies. Similarly Yancey (2016) powerfully explains:
Whether the white hand touches in the form of gentle embrace or touches out of curiosity,
what is important is that the Black woman expresses deep discomfort; she is not pleased,
and she clearly does not want or desire to be touched. After all, the history of whiteness
demonstrates that curious white hands can lead to violent acts of objectifying and
experimenting on Black bodies; and desirous white hands can lead to violent and
unspeakable acts of molestation, where the Black body undergoes tremendous pain and
trauma (p. xiii)
Figure 5.3 & 5.4 “You Can Touch My Hair” Social Experiment (left) and Don’t Touch My
Hair Counter Protest (right) in Union Square, NY (2013)
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The refrain “Don’t Touch My Hair” encapsulates this reality, demanding changes in the
treatment of Black women. The ongoing narrative critiquing invasive microaggressions against
natural hair does important work in highlighting patriarchal forms of violence against Black
women’s bodies in the United States alongside Black Lives Matter.
Fees Must Fall and Natural Hair Politics in South Africa
Like all race and gender projects, today’s natural hair movement in South Africa is shaped
by the country’s history and engages current political affairs. Apartheid ended with South Africa’s
democratic election in 1994, when the African National Congress (ANC) won and elected Nelson
Mandela president. Archbishop Desmond Tutu predicted that democratic South Africa would
become the Rainbow Nation—a place where the diverse population would live in peaceful
coexistence. However, upon Nelson Mandela’s death in 2013, the country was forced to reflect on
the ANC’s promise and vision of a multicultural, harmonic, and unified Rainbow Nation.” The
ANC’s stated vision of a “South Africa that belongs to all who live in it, black and white” (ANC,
1955) had not manifested twenty years later. Moreover, the Rainbow Nation goal was being
reconsidered with disappointment. In August 2016, the ANC faced its worst election loss post-
apartheid. The ANC’s central defining commitment to non-racialism was even receiving critique
from within the party for enabling white supremacist institutional and cultural racism to thrive
(Anciano, 2014). Over twenty years into democracy, race and racism continue to structure South
Africa’s educational system, geography and power elite. The radically leftist Economic Freedom
Fighter (EFF) party, led by Julius Malema, came in a distant third during the 2016 election, but
the party’s heightened visibility symbolized a growing demand for racialized pathways to social
justice. Malema dew support with promises to redistribute land still controlled by wealthy whites
to poor Black South Africans—a solution that the ANC and Democratic Alliance (DA) have shied
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away from. Malema’s Black nationalist and socialist vision for South Africa, including free
education up to the tertiary level, appealed to younger voters. While many millennial and older
South Africans of color believe in the potential of assimilating into a multiracial South African
elite, the so-called “born-free
9
” and newly enfranchised generation is more skeptical.
The Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall student movements arose from young South
Africans’ growing discontent with persistent inequality in South Africa, and the ANC’s failure to
redistribute land, space, and resources to South Africa’s people of color. In March 2016, a group
of students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) protested for the removal of a statue of Cecil
Rhodes, the mining entrepreneur responsible for British settler colonialism in South Africa. Since
1934, the larger-than-life figure sat perched high on Table Mountain, literally gazing down upon
the Cape Flats, an economically impoverished and predominantly Coloured township. Rhodes
Must Fall protestors argued that the statue was emblematic of racial and colonial oppression, and
a physical representation of how white supremacy continues to spatially, ideologically, and
demographically shape UCT. Activists’ arguments echoed with Steve Biko’s (1978) Black
Consciousness critique of integration forty years earlier, which cautioned against Blacks
“assimilating into an already set of norms and code of behavior set up by and maintained by
whites” (p. 24). By the time the August 2016 elections rolled around, Rhodes Must Fall had
garnered the support of tens of thousands of students. The growing outrage was more than
symbolic and ideological. Black and Coloured South African students are underrepresented at
UCT, despite their demographic majority in the Cape Town metropolitan area and in the country.

9
‘Born Free’ refers to the generation that was born around the time of the first full and free
democratic election in 1994.
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The Rhodes Must Fall initiative at UCT evolved into the nation-wide Fees Must Fall
student movement and took on an anti-capitalist orientation when the South African Minister of
Higher Education announced plans to increase tuition at all universities in September 2016. Fees
Must Fall became the largest student revolt since the anti-apartheid Soweto uprising of 1976.
Deploying a broad understanding of Blackness that includes other poor, rural, and socially
marginalized non-whites, the Fees Must Fall movement calls for free, decolonized education for
all. Youth across the country took to the streets, burning down centuries old paintings of colonizers
and setting libraries ablaze. Fees Must Fall and Rhodes Must Fall student activists occupied an
administrative building at the University of Cape Town, renaming it Azania House, and
transformed it into a space “removed from the white gaze and also from the violent constructions
of blackness in which other University spaces inform” (Sebambo, 2016, p. 108). Several
universities hired private security firms to protect their assets, shooting student protestors with
rubber bullets. The University of Cape Town, University of Witwatersrand, and University of
ZwaZulu-Natal canceled final exams, and there was a general sense of anxiety about how Fees
Must Fall would affect the national job market. This racial and economic discontent, prominently
targeting the educational system, contextualizes my ethnographic fieldwork about South Africa’s
natural hair movement, which took place from August to November 2016.
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Fees Must Fall and Feminism
“The similarity between Fees Must Fall and Black Lives Matter is that women were at the forefront
of those movements and there was a lot of centering of men, because men are seen as
revolutionary.” – Julie (26, Cape Town)

I met Julie, a former law student at the University of Cape Town, through mutual friends
engaged in feminist organizing in Cape Town. Due to her involvement in the Rhodes Must Fall
and Fees Must Fall movements and the burning of University artwork, Julie had been expelled
from and banned from setting foot on campus. Her intimate involvement with and eventual
separation from campus politics fostered insightful perspective and reflection about the gender and
sexual dynamics of the movement, which she hoped would advance a radical Black feminist
agenda. Julie explained, “One of the ideological pillars was Black radical feminism, and through
that, intersectionality. There was a critical way of looking at gender in the movement, through the
movement, and through movement exercise.” Her political framework stemmed from bell hooks’
(2014) work critiquing patriarchy and heteronormativity, seeing these systems as inherently
intertwined with capitalism and white supremacy. Julie expounded, “In order to achieve liberation,
Figure 5.5: Fees Must Fall protestors marching at the University of Cape Town to shut down
class instruction (2016)
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in order to achieve decolonization of our education and society we need to dismantle white
supremacy, ableism, capitalism, and patriarchy.” However, not all Fees Must Fall organizers
agreed with her perspective. She faced antagonism from men peers, which threatened to fracture
the movement. When I asked how this manifested, Julie explained:
There was the denial of the privilege of being a man. They’d say, let’s deal with race and
class now and gender at a later stage. No fuck that. In previous liberation movements and
struggles gender was put on the back burner and now it is time to center it in the work that
we’re doing.

Rebecca (22, Los Angeles), an African American student conducting an ethnography about the
gender politics of Fees Must Fall for her senior thesis from July to November 2016 likewise
observed:
Something that I noticed was that gender and sexuality were just constantly being brought
up without explicitly being said. They definitely tried to address rape culture in their pillars
and statements but when it came down to actual organizing tactics, their inability to address
these issues led to a lot of huge problems. There would be times that we’d be in meetings
and issues of hyper-masculinity would just dissolve the entire meeting. We couldn’t even
talk anymore, though it needed to get addressed especially as the movement got ramped up
and then shut down with the military that the university hired. We tried to define the space.
It never really got solved, but it kept coming up. Rifts between the hyper-masculinity of
the protestors and the hyper-masculinity of the police would just escalate the entire thing.

Movement organizers put on an exhibition called “Trans Capture” to highlight Fees Must Fall’s
accomplishments. The show attempted to include gender and sexuality as axes of identity and
unjust oppression that operate alongside racism and capitalism, but the trans community saw it as
disingenuous and tokenizing. Alex’s fellow Black radical feminists grew frustrated. “We can’t
fucking deal,” she reflected.
The Fees Must Fall protests in Gauteng province suffered similar issues with
heteropatriarchy. Based on their survey of 100 students at the University of Witwatersrand and the
University of Johannesburg involved in Fees Must Fall, Victor and Segun (2016) found that male
protestors were motivated not only by the goals of the movement, but also to a great degree by
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their egotistic desire to protect and possess fellow women students’ bodies. Victor and Segun
analyze their findings through a heteronormative lens, arguing that women should strive to be
complementary rather than competitive with men to achieve political goals because women’s mere
presence encourages men: “Women, when they participate in politics, often motivate men through
their bodies and through psychological factors as men who see themselves as superior will never
wait to be counted out when women are in action” (p. 7189). This view is incompatible with the
radical black feminist perspective advanced by many women and trans protestors at the University
of Cape Town, who see racism, capitalism, heteronormativity and patriarchy as interlocking and
mutually constitutive. And, as Julie’s reflections demonstrate, the experience of being considered
inferior to men and of dismissing non-cismen’s concerns is experienced as violently oppressive.
Hair, Hairstyling, and Women of Color’s Right to Educational Spaces
Wearing natural hair and public hairstyling protests were often used to express the
gendered experience of living and studying in colonized space. Julie recalled a day where women
and femme non-binary Fees Must Fall protestors sat in front of Azania house, an administrative
building they had occupied, and braided each other’s hair with pink and purple fiber (braiding
hair): “So what if my fiber is blonde, white, purple or whatever. There shouldn’t be a stereotypical
idea of what your blackness and femaleness should be. It is that you have the agency to be whatever
you want to be and to do that. That was really empowering in that way.” When protest is expressed
through the body, particularly through feminine displays and cultural forms, it is particularly
powerful because it challenges the existing patriarchal order (Young, 1990). Women’s bodies
represented not only a specific form of racial suffering in South Africa, but also intersectional
resistance and renewal. Julie described the moment as a form of collective care-taking and Black
feminist solidarity that was especially resistant for occurring in public space, since women’s
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beauty work is often invisible and takes place in the private sphere. Hair braiding at Azania house
did not simply challenge the activist narratives around space and belonging in South Africa; it
showed that patriarchal heteronormativity affects Black and Coloured women’s experiences of
racism in ways that differ from men of color at the university. The hair braiding protest challenged
both the University of Cape Town and Fees Must Fall cultures, which similarly compelled women
students to adhere to white-centric and patriarchal standards for feminine professionalism and
beauty.
Natural hair was also the centerpiece of girls’ demands for decolonized education in
primary and secondary schools, which garnered international media attention. The exact same
month that UCT students braided each other’s hair at Azania house, young high school students at
Pretoria Girls’ High School took to the streets to protest policies that required them to straighten
their hair and banned them from wearing large braids or dreadlocks. Afros were not explicitly
mentioned in the schools’ extensive grooming policy, but students complained that teachers forced
them to chemically straighten their hair as to not appear untidy. Teachers also allegedly told
students with dreadlocks that their hair looked like bird nests, and students recalled being pulled
out of class and given Vaseline to slick down their hair. Black students were also forbidden to
speak their native languages at school or hang out in large groups together. Pretoria Girls High
School was founded in 1901 and only allowed white students during apartheid. It admitted first
non-diplomatic student of color in 1991. In many elite, formerly white private schools like Pretoria
Girls High, grooming rules banning cultural signifiers routinely become obstacles for girls of color.
Schools surveil and control their bodies through such rules, as Marley a 26-year-old mathematics
teacher explained, “It becomes part of discipline and if your hair isn’t disciplined to the back you
are ill-disciplined.”
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Despite multiple racially and culturally discriminatory policies girls of color are subjected
to, at Pretoria Girls High, the University of Cape Town, and elsewhere, hair became the centerpiece
of young women’s protest for their right to take up space in South Africa’s elite schools. Sheila
(45, Johannesburg), whose daughter attends a neighboring school, told me:
The hair rules there are for us. Nobody else. [White girls’] hair they never see as funky. I
don’t understand what that means, but obviously, it is meant for us more than anything.
But it happens everywhere—whether it is in semi-model C schools [former whites-only
government schools]—but obviously at public schools it often doesn’t happen because it
is our space so nobody will give a policy that will oppress people who look like you.

Tens of thousands of people signed online petitions to combat racism at Pretoria Girls’ High by
dismantling the grooming policy, and the protest preoccupied political conversation on national
media outlets for weeks. The upper echelon of South Africa’s political scene all weighed in Twitter
and on television. The Democratic Alliance and the African National Congress Women’s League
both issued statements in support of the girls. Eventually, the head of education in Gauteng
province ordered an independent audit of racism at the school, and the code of conduct was revised.
Invoking hair advanced an intersectional critique of broader Fees Must Fall narratives that
lacked such an analysis of belonging. Wearing natural hair at school became a symbolic
celebration of Black beauty that aimed to reorganize and redistribute resources along intersecting
race, class and gender lines. By embracing a racialized physical feature, women and girl students
rejected the requirement that they adhere to Eurocentric standards to receive education, be
upwardly mobile, and pursue economic security. In other words, the natural hair protests were
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Black feminist racial formation projects—Black in their affirmation of a Black aesthetic, feminist
by centering of women, de-colonial by subverting colonially defined spatial boundaries.

South Africa’s “Born Free” generation uses natural hair styling primarily in contexts of
collective protest. The millennial and Generation X women of color I interviewed continued to be
isolated in their professional environments and negotiate hair politics on an individual basis. For
these women, conversations about the resistant nature of natural hair usually begin and end online.
Many women I interviewed described feeling pressured to straighten their hair to assimilate into
newly accessible elite institutions in alignment with the Rainbow Nation frameworks that
dominated South Africa’s understanding of reconciliation and nation-building when they came of
age. Zina (27, Johannesburg) felt proud of the Pretoria Girls High School students, she told me
that she felt insecure about whether the opportunities now available to her as a Black woman would
be sacrificed if she transgressed Eurocentric standards for beauty and professionalism, and she felt
this risk acutely as the daughter of an anti-apartheid freedom fighter who spent years as a political
prisoner on Robben Island. Sheila observed a reluctance to fight school grooming rules against
Figure 5.6: Student protest against grooming policies banning natural hair styles at Pretoria
Girls High School (2016)

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Afros among her parent peers, and explained, “It’s really important that we as parents stand up to
this because I’ve tried doing it with other parents and they distance themselves from me. You’re
too political. Everything is okay. When you’re too political it’s going to destabilize things.” As a
historically-specific manifestation of and response to race, class, and gender arrangements, the
2016 natural hair protests (as with Fees Must Fall more broadly) were interpreted differently by
different generations, who have had divergent experiences with the state and in society. Both
apartheid barriers and Rainbow Nation ideals live on through social structures, as well as in
peoples’ hopes, fears, and memories of segregation and exclusion.
Global Culture, Local Politics
A comparison of natural hair discourses in South Africa and in the United States suggests
that natural hair is political, but not necessarily a cohesive movement in and of itself. Like the Afro
of the 1960s and 1970s, natural hair is a symbol, expressed through bodies, with relative and
contextual meanings. State level conflicts determine the direction of local natural hair
communities’ political critique, for example, institutional exclusion in South Africa and bodily
integrity in the United States. Black women’s deployment of beauty politics transfers frames
developed in other highly publicized racial justice movements that are occurring at the same place
and time. Meyer and Whittier (1994) call this symbiotic transmission of activist symbolism,
orientation, and strategy “social movement spillover,” and suggest that the transference of social
movement frames are greatest when group membership overlaps. While there is much international
overlap in the discourse on natural hair care, fashion, and Black affirming aesthetics, there is less
overlap in membership of anti-racist social movements employing on the ground protest strategies.
So, natural hair is deployed to different ends in local contexts, where participants in natural hair
culture are simultaneously members of or sympathizers with the social movement organizations
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in the communities in which they live. In other words, while natural hair culture is global in scope,
its meanings and applications are shaped by local histories, racial regimes, geographies, and social
movement sectors.
Even as gendered racial projects and expressions of embodied intersectional praxis are
locally and historically situated, in a rapidly globalizing world, social movements across the Black
Atlantic often find inspiration from and solidarity with one another. Global Black feminist
networks and discourses circulate across the Black Atlantic, both digitally and physically,
spreading Black feminist analyses of gendered racism. Recall that Julie used American scholar
bell hook’s theoretical framework as the basis of her politics, and compared the marginalization
of women and trans-people within the Fees Must Fall movement to androcentric orientations in
Black Lives Matter. Diasporic groups use one another as resources, especially if they are struggling
against similar post-colonial, capitalist, white supremacist and patriarchal structures. In addition,
the Pretoria Girls’ hair protests garnered international attention by the likes of The New York Times,
Washington Post, BBC, and The Guardian, spurring transnational conversations about implicit
bias against natural hair in the workplace and in schools over social media. The hashtag
#StopRacismAtPretoriaGirlsHigh was used over 150,000 times on Twitter. Angela Davis
discussed links between the criminalization of her Afro in the 1970s and hair rules at Pretoria
Girls’ High with Zulaikha Patel, who became the unofficial spokesperson for the hair protests at
Pretoria Girls’ High School in October 2016. Six months later, Angela Davis and I compared our
sentiments about the Pretoria Girls’ protests at the International Decolonial Black Feminism
Summer School in Cachoiera, Brazil. These exchanges evidence the global, networked nature of
Black feminism. Political thought, including de-colonial Black feminist thought, transcends state
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boundaries. These examples highlight how racial formation projects can be simultaneously global,
local, interpersonal, and embodied.

Conclusion
This chapter described how today’s Black beauty politics participate in broad conversations
around social justice that often leave out Africana women’s unique, gendered experiences within
white supremacist patriarchal society. Women’s experiences with natural hair can be rhetorical
devices and protest symbols that make intersectionality visible and legible. In other words, I’ve
argued that natural hair can be used as embodied intersectional critical praxis (Collins & Bilge,
2016)—a tool for critiquing dominant social and political discourses that elevate one category of
analysis above others, like men’s experiences of white supremacist racism. Natural hair
accomplishes so much as a form of protest because hair styling is simultaneously gendered,
racialized, classed, and embodied. The performative, expressive and aesthetic aspects of gender
and Black hair’s cultural significance make natural hair ripe material for exemplifying
intersectional politics, identities, and experiences.
Figure 5.7: Angela Davis conversing with Zulaikha Patel, a student at Pretoria Girls High
School (2016)

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A comparison with natural hair protests in South Africa and the United States shows how
women apply natural hair as an argumentative resource in response to concurrent state-based
political debates. Natural hair politics are contextually situated gendered racial projects that
participate in the social movement sector, borrowing dominant frameworks and remixing them to
highlight gendered experiences of racism. These examples of Black women evoking the body in
relation to political resistance are important in these two countries, which continue to grapple with
open wounds and ongoing histories of white supremacist patriarchal politics that were violently
fought on the body, through forced labor, sexual assault, reproductive injustice, economic
exclusion, and controlling images.

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Chapter 6
Whose Movement is it Anyway?
Subversion is contextual, historical, and above all social. No matter how exciting the
“destabilizing” potential of texts, bodily or otherwise, whether texts are subversive or recuperative
or both or neither cannot be determined by abstraction from actual social practice.
-Susan Bordo

In June 2015, Rachel Dolezal catapulted from relative obscurity in the small city of
Spokane, Washington to worldwide fame when her local television station, with the help of her
biological parents who both identify as Caucasian, exposed that she’d been passing as Black for
years. Much of the fascination around Rachel Dolezal centered around her embodied performance
of race. Formerly blonde-haired and blue-eyed, Dolezal had physically transformed over the
course of a decade using spray tans and skillfully installed curly wigs, kinky weaves, faux
Figure 6.1: Screenshot of a Facebook post by Rachel Dolezal (November 2013)
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dreadlocks and micro braids. Since hair texture is a key signifier and differentiator of Blackness
(Mercer, 1994), her embrace of the “natural look” (see Figure 5.1) aided her ability to accomplish
a Black identity that her community accepted. Kara Brown (2015) wrote for Jezebel, “clearly
Rachel knew: Those spray tans would not be enough. The hair—she had to nail the hair—and boy
did she” (para. 2). Against the legacy of the “one-drop rule” of hypo-descent in the United States,
which legally categorized persons with any degree of African ancestry as Black regardless of
phenotype, ethnicity or migration history, few who knew Dolezal questioned her claim to a Black
racial identity because of her light skin. Her lightness did not prevent her from participating in
Blackness, but it did enable her to capitalize on colorism and white privilege.
At the time, Dolezal was president of Spokane’s NAACP chapter and an adjunct professor
in Africana Studies at nearby Eastern Washington University. Natural hair seemed to embody her
antiracist political and academic work. Dolezal was well-read on the politics and history of Black
hair, and video clips of her PowerPoint lectures on the topics surfaced online in the wake of the
media saga that ensued through the summer of 2015. In fact, over a decade earlier, she had written
Figure 6.2 : Screenshot of an “#AskRachel” Internet Meme (2016)
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and illustrated a book called “Ebony Tresses” for her Black adopted sister that celebrated the
“power” in her sister’s kinky hair (Sunderland, 2015). In the aftermath of the media controversy
as she struggled to find work, she began making a living braiding hair and installing weaves for
Black women in her community. Regardless of Dolezal’s long record of public, private and
embodied resistances to white supremacist racism, many were offended by her claim to a Black
racial identity, criticized her for culturally appropriating Black hairstyles and argued that she could
never understand the lived experience of Black womanhood. Much of this criticism circulated
online, making #AskRachel one of Black Twitter’s most popular hashtags in 2015 (See Figure
5.2). Several multiracial bloggers blamed Dolezal for increased and invasive demands that they
“prove their Blackness” through sharing experiences of racial discrimination and cultural
knowledge, and political scientist Joseph Lowndes used the term “political Blackface” to accuse
Dolezal of stealing Black intellectual and political leadership (Bensley, 2015; Nerding Out, 2015;
Luders-Manuel, 2015). By questioning Dolezal’s racial authenticity, her critics further questioned
her right to engage in identity politics and Black cultural forms, particularly through the body. The
heavy criticism and conflict around Dolezal increased doubt on hair texture and skin color as tools
for assessing, accomplishing or inhabiting Blackness and highlighted racial authenticity a requisite
for engaging in identity politics. I find Dolezal controversy compelling because it embodies
dynamics I observed in my own research. Similar debates about whether “natural” hairstyles are
meaningful and acceptable for white women probe the fragile boundary between cultural
appropriation and participation in collective identity politics to resist exclusionary Eurocentric
ideals of feminine beauty. In this chapter, I examine how different versions of what it means to be
Black are confirmed or challenged within natural hair movement spaces and discourses. This
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chapter unpacks a set of very basic, yet fundamentally important questions: Who can be natural,
where, and why?
Collective Identity Theory
I place 21
st
century natural hair politics within the scholarly conversation on new social
movements. New social movements are distinguished by their concern with cultural validation,
individual autonomy and self-transformation as opposed to traditional social movements that focus
on class arrangements, operate through formal organizations and appeal for state change (Pichardo,
1997; Buechler, 1995). Observing trends in feminist, gay and lesbian and green movements, social
movement scholars argue that new social movements are characterized by their strategic
politicization of collective identity to portray claims to political power, material resources and
representational control (Polletta & Jasper, 2001; Taylor & Whittier, 1999). Born out of the study
of new social movements, collective identity theory focuses on how groups construct and negotiate
boundaries to create insiders, who share common grievances and political outlooks, and outsiders,
who are seen as oppressors (Taylor & Whittier, 1999; Rupp & Taylor, 1999). In other words,
“Boundary markers…frame the interaction between members of the in-group and the out-group”
(Taylor & Whittier, 1999, p. 176). Taylor and Whittier further argue that “collective political actors
do not exist de facto by virtue of individuals sharing a common structural location,” but that
collective identities are strategically invoked to demarcate oppositional boundaries between the
oppressed group and others (p. 174). Correspondingly, collective identity theory understands all
identities, including racial and gender identities, as socially constructed projects. To understand
how new social movements participate in gendered racial formation, we must examine how and
whether groups invoke, reconstruct or deemphasize race and gender in appeals for material,
political and representational power (Carbado & Harris, 2012).
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For decades, Black feminists have politicized identity to form intellectual, social and
activist communities that reflect how racism, capitalism and patriarchy mutually shape their lived
experiences unique ways (Lau, 2011; Roth, 2004; Crenshaw, 1991; Combahee River Collective,
1977). The collective identity approach challenges us to not take the category “Black woman” as
static, cohesive, or for granted. Instead, it encourages scholars to unpack how groups come to draw
boundaries around Black womanhood to advance their political agendas. In a rare example that
centers the experiences of women of color, Sudbury (2001) uses collective identity theory to frame
how African, Asian and Caribbean women in Great Britain struggle to construct an effective
multiracial “Black” collective identity to advance various shared political concerns like
immigration policy and reproductive rights. Sudbury finds that Black British women’s movement
groups emphasize post-colonial history in boundary-making, and must deemphasize differences in
immigration histories, nationality, age, location and ethnic stereotypes to form successful
multiracial alliances.
Using predominantly U.S.-based interview and ethnographic data alongside media
analyses, this chapter discusses how women who participate in natural hair politics delimit for
whom the natural hair movement is meant to advocate. I describe both Black women’s boundary-
making and the forces they confront, critique, and organize against. As I will show, most women
in the natural hair movement view centering Blackness as a strategy for resisting prevailing white
beauty ideals, Black people’s displacement from the ethnic hair care market, and limited
representations of Black women in the media. Theorizing Black women’s activist strategies in the
21
st
century, Brittney Cooper (2017) asserts that “our commitment to discursive acts must be
measured—by our histories, by our material realities, by the psychic and social costs, and by the
attendant benefits of such acts for improving the quality of [our lives]” (p. 48). In other words,
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where women who participate in natural hair politics position and police boundaries around natural
hair culture is unavoidably constrained and informed by the cultural and material realities and
power relations of a racist, sexist and capitalist society—from controlling images of Black women
rooted in dominant ideologies to discrimination in the workplace—that have taken up kinky hair
as symbolic of Black women’s inferiority (Craig, 2002; Banks, 2000; Mercer, 1994). The
investment in drawing racial boundaries around the natural hair movement’s collective identity is
also rooted in a four-hundred-year long battle for power over Black hair’s political symbolism and
the Black beauty market.
Some believe that the explosion in product development by Black women for women with
coily hair is the best chance for redistributing economic power to Black beauty entrepreneurs and
aesthetic power to people of African descent. Since the 1980s, the beauty supply market has
operated and organized itself under a white supremacist beauty ideal. However, the natural hair
movement’s new aesthetic is disrupting institutionalized racism and the exclusion of Black-owned
businesses from the beauty supply industry as Black entrepreneurs monetize their experience
caring for their own hair. Sam Ennon, founder of the Black Owned Beauty Supply Association,
contemplates the influence of the natural hair movement has had on the beauty industry in our
interview and vividly illustrates how Black beauty politics are mutually rooted in the discursive,
the material and the symbolic:
I mean, the hair alone in Korean beauty supply stores—and remember there is 12,000 of
them--the hair alone at the average Korean beauty supply store at any given time has about
$150,000 worth of inventory on that wall for commercial hair. That’s changing because of
the fact that the hairstyle has gone natural... The problem is that [Korean business owners]
don’t want that to happen because when they sell a bundle of hair they make $30-40 off
that bundle. And that’s one bundle. When you sell a bottle of grease, and that’s the natural
product, you only make about $3-4. The Black-owned businesses welcome it because the
one thing about the natural hairstyle, you know the natural movement, is that it happened
outside of the box they are forcing.

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However, white supremacy functions in multiple ways to destabilize Black women’s attempts to
maintain a Black-affirming and Black women-centered natural hair movement—through the
control of resources and consumer orientations in the beauty industry, cultural appropriation, and
through texturism within Black communities. This research about natural hair politics is a fruitful
opportunity to center intersectionality, the body, and the political economy in collective identity
theory—a critically important move in a moment where individualism, autonomy, self-fashioning
and choice challenge previously take-for-granted categories but produce anxieties about
exploitative and opportunistic identity claims (Brubaker, 2016).
Racializing Representation and Centering Blackness
Women in the natural hair community largely judge the right of a business or individual to
participate in the natural hair market on racial terms, connecting Black disadvantages to white
advantages. The highest profile calls for centering Blackness in the natural hair space responded
to companies Carol’s Daughter and Shea Moisture. Both companies entered a market catering
towards a racialized feature—kinky and curly hair—in the midst of a burgeoning movement led
by Black women to re-valuate natural hair. Both companies eventually became viewed as having
capitalized on this movement, and then having facilitated the appropriation of its message by the
mainstream.
In 2014, African American natural cosmetics pioneer Lisa Price sold her 10-year-old
company, Carol’s Daughter, to L’Oréal as profits declined in her brick and mortar boutiques. Prior
to the sale, Carol’s Daughter hired Black celebrities like Jada Pinkett Smith, Solange Knowles,
Gabrielle Union and Mary J. Blige as spokespeople for its promotional materials. After the sale,
L’Oréal largely abandoned the Black-affirming images that initially made Carol’s Daughter
popular. L’Oréal’s president Frédéric Rozé explained that the company saw its acquisition of
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Carol’s Daughter as a way to “build a new and dedicated multicultural beauty division” (L’Oréal,
2014). The natural hair blogosphere reeled. From Christina Patrice’s (2014) point of view in her
post for popular natural hair website Black Girl with Long Hair, “To allow the brand to fall to the
point of being labeled as some bubbling cauldron of ethnically obscure and culturally ambiguous
dollar signs and hair milks is an insult to every woman of color who has ever supported Carol’s
Daughter.” Patrice clarifies later in her post that by woman of color, she specifically means
“women of the African Diaspora,” including those with multiethnic backgrounds. In doing so, she
adheres to hegemonic American understandings of Black racial hypodescent, and calls for a Black-
centered natural hair space.
Likewise, when Bain Capital acquired a minority stake in Sundial Brands, the parent
company of the popular natural hair and skincare line SheaMoisture founded by Liberian-born
Black American Richielieu Dennis, it began actively targeting a multicultural audience. A Bain
Capital representative told the Wall Street Journal that the firm’s “investment is aimed at boosting
growth by targeting a broader market that isn’t defined by ethnicity” (Ng & Dezember, 2015).
SheaMoisture’s #BreakTheWalls campaign, produced by marketing agency Droga5, was the first
major step to that end. In the minute-long commercial, a group of popular Black and Afro-Latina
YouTube influencers with varying hair textures search for products in the ethnic aisle at a grocery
store while gazing longingly at the aisle labeled “beauty.” There, a blonde white woman and her
daughter, who is only shown from behind but whose blonde coily-textured hair suggests a
multiracial background, unsuccessfully search for products. A disembodied voice asks, “is ethnic
not beautiful?” The shelving shakes and products fall to the ground, spilling their contents. The
commercial ends by announcing that SheaMoisture can now be found in the beauty aisle “where
we all belong.” In a 2015 Sundial press release explaining the company’s partnership with Bain
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Capital, Sundial CEO Richelieu Dennis said, “I have often said over the last 20 years that the
beauty aisle is the last place in America where segregation is still legal, and separating ‘beauty’
from ‘ethnic’ only served to further perpetuate narrow standards of what is considered beautiful in
our industry and society.”
Not everyone agreed with Dennis. #BreakTheWalls was met with mixed reviews. Some
women echoed the sentiment that the ethnic aisle makes them feel spatially marginalized, while
others saw the campaign as a naïve move towards colorblindness. Morgan Jerkins penned an article
in April 2017 about both SheaMoisture’s #BreakTheWalls campaign and the Carol’s Daughter
sale for the website Racked that went viral on social media. In it, she contemplated, “if Black
women feel de-centered, is the promotion worth it?” SheaMoisture responded to her article on
Facebook, pointing out that the company remains primarily Black-owned and emphasizing that
they value “listening to underserved consumers (whether the Naturalistas who began with us and
empowered women from all backgrounds who now embrace their natural beauty as a result) and
delivering on their unmet needs” (SheaMoisture, 2017). Nowhere did SheaMoisture racialize who
they meant by “Naturalistas.” Later that same month, SheaMoisture was shamed again for an ad
in their series “A Million Ways to Shea” that featured three white women (two redheads and one
blonde) and a light-skinned racially ambiguous woman of color with long spiral curls. Each woman
discussed her story of “hair hate” and coming to find “hair love” by embracing her natural hair.
Thousands of Black women threatened to boycott the company, accusing SheaMoisture of
whitewashing the company’s image to expand its consumer base. As Nielsen’s (2017) research
report “African American Women: Our Science, Her Magic” on current trends regarding Black
women consumer behavior explains:
Black women’s values spill over into all the things they watch, buy, and listen to, and while
they control the lion’s share of the African-American community’s $1.2 trillion in spending
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power, they are doing so with an eye toward the tangible and intangible value of those
dollars spent. Black women not only vote at the ballot box, they vote at the cash register
and with their highly influential voices on social media. (p. 2)

Black communities on the micro-blogging social media platform Twitter, collectively referred to
as “Black Twitter,” made “A Million Ways to Shea” a worldwide trending topic that overtook that
day’s top news stories, including conversations about the looming threat of war with North Korea
and Obama’s first public event since leaving the White House. Kimberly Foster (2017), the
founder of Black feminist website For Harriet denounced the “#AllLivesMatter marketing”
tweeting, “Black women built SheaMoisture. And not the ‘I was teased for having good hair’ Black
women. Black women will take it right on down too” (1.5k+ retweets). In an explosion of viral
memes, Rachel Dolezal came to symbolize SheaMoisture’s use of white women to reconstruct and
deracialize Black aesthetic politics. SheaMoisture (2017) responded on Facebook and Twitter:
“Wow- we really f-ed this one up! Please know that our intent was not, & would never be, to
disrespect our community.” SheaMoisture circumvented racializing “our community” in their
reply to the backlash. Their choice not to acknowledge Black women as their main consumer group
highlights deep fault lines between profit imperatives and politics.
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The push for a Black-centered representation in the natural hair community aligns with
broader political perspectives of the 2010s. Departing from 1990s multicultural appeals for
diversity, today’s Black politics often emphasizes the continuing significance of anti-Black racism
in determining how bodies are depicted, treated, policed, and disciplined. After George
Zimmerman was acquitted for Trayvon Martin’s murder in 2012, #BlackLivesMatter formed “in
response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society and to call attention to the
ways in which Black people are systematically targeted by state violence” (Black Lives Matter,
2017). Critics of Black Lives Matter retorted with #AllLivesMatter, and #BLM supporters
responded by pointing out that Black people are not yet included in the idea of “all lives” having
been legally reduced to partial humanity as slaves, presumed violent even when unarmed and
Figure 6.3: Screenshot of a viral Twitter reaction to Shea Moisture’s “Break the Walls”
campaign (2017)
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laying on the ground, and disproportionately incarcerated. The white-washing of natural hair
discourse is akin to an “All Lives Matter” approach to hair. Just as whiteness shapes our ideas
about whose lives matter through the repeated exoneration of police officers who murder unarmed
and legally armed Black people (Butler & Yancey, 2015), whiteness takes hold of our ideas about
class and beauty through expectations that Black women minimize and discipline their racialized
features to be considered employable, respectable or desirable. The natural hair movement’s
investment in defining boundaries around Blackness highlights how post-racial arguments against
the continuing significance of race fail to account for the lived and perceived experiences of
discrimination women face because of their Blackness while striving for representation in the
media, for material resources as entrepreneurs and consumers, and for bodily security in everyday
life.
Policing Appropriation and Authenticity
The principal way that natural hair communities invoke racial boundaries at the individual-
level is through accusations of cultural appropriation—a conversation that has flourished in online
spaces. Cultural appropriation refers to when “members of one culture [take] something that
originates in another cultural context” (Young & Brunk, 2012, p. 3). While most academic
researchers discuss cultural appropriation in a value-free sense, natural hair communities use the
term to imply an exploitative and fetishistic adoption of hair styles originating from Africa or the
African diaspora by non-Black women. Women in natural hair communities express disdain for
white women who wear braids, cornrows, dreadlocks or manipulate their hair to appear kinky, and
especially those who achieve roles as spokespeople or representatives for these styles, seeing them
as profiting from Black culture without showing respect for issues facing Black communities.
When I asked Olivia (32, Brooklyn) who could be natural she gave a typical response: “White
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people are definitely not. Some things just aren’t for you. Everything else in the world is for you.
It doesn’t have to be for you. You can enjoy it as well. You are welcome to enjoy it [on Black
women]. But do you need fauxlocks?” Here, Olivia decisively argues that naturalness, and even
artificial naturalness, is for Black women only. Despite market conflicts between Koreans and
Blacks and a thriving hip hop culture in Asia, natural hair communities seem most concerned about
white women appropriating Black hairstyles. The focus on white appropriation makes sense in
societies like the United States and South Africa that are defined by white supremacy, and is also
likely because few Asian stars have joined the highest celebrity ranks in the West to be seen as
materially profiting from the appropriation of Black hair styles.
Although most white women do not permanently manipulate the texture of their hair and
thus adhere to prevailing definitions of naturalness in the natural hair community, most of my
interviewees decisively positioned white women outside of the boundaries of the collective
identity around natural hair. Lauren (26, Brooklyn) expressed the broad domain of naturalness but
the political intent of natural hair politics when she told me, “I mean, [white women’s] hair is
naturally straight. I guess their hair is natural but it’s like, less meaningful.” While Lauren’s
statement does not account for the actual diversity in hair texture among white women, it highlights
the continuing significance of race in how many Black women understand body politics and the
subversive aspect of going natural for Black women. Aph Ko (2014) advanced this perspective for
Natural Hair Mag, writing:
Natural hair was never meant to only focus on texture. It’s a political movement that’s
framed around a particular type of identity resisting white supremacy. To have white
women join the movement is counter-productive because they still benefit from white
supremacy, regardless of their hair texture.

If natural hair is to be a project to celebrate Black beauty in a white-supremacist society, including
white women in the natural hair movement’s collective identity, regardless of hair texture,
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depoliticizes the movement and reinforces the status quo. However, as more Black women
embrace their natural hair textures, market imperatives in the fashion industry react by depicting
curly and kinky hair as a trend. This is a central feature of capitalism. As mainstream markets
attempt to expand, they appropriate countercultural and “revolutionary” styles to sell back to the
masses as products of individual self-expression rather than collective critique. In the process of
converting political symbols into profitable options for self-fashioning, the capitalist marketplace
contains rebellious politics. This was the case for the 1970s Afro; recall Corliss (62, Charlotte) and
her Afro wig and activist Angela Davis’ (1994) lamentation about the “humiliating” reduction of
her politics of liberation into a politics of fashion (p. 37). In today’s natural hair movement,
appropriation and capitalist co-optation continues to be expressed through a push and pull over the
racial meanings of curly and coily hair styles traditionally associated with Black and African
peoples, over the racial boundaries around natural hair culture, and over the limits of fashion.
Allure Magazine’s 1970s-inspired tutorial spread “You (Yes, You) Can Have an Afro Even if You
Have Straight Hair” offers an example (Pergament, 2015). The title’s additional and emphatic
“Yes You” implies the target audience for the piece: women without the racial, ethnic or diasporic
background referred to by the descriptor “Afro.” The article presents the hairstyle as an apolitical
trend, featuring a white model, no Black women, and no historical or cultural context explaining
the empowering political symbolism Afros had for African Americans during the Black Power and
Civil Rights eras of that time.
Many have come to view the Kardashian-Jenner families as the epitome of the cultural
appropriation of Black beauty politics. The celebrity family’s position as model appropriators is
fueled by their massive influence on how fashion is circulated and interpreted, especially in the
age of visual social media. Entrepreneur Shantee (42, Chicago) noted, “The standard of beauty
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today is the Kim Kardashian look. That’s what I think our culture is obsessed with.” For example,
in March 2016, New York Post writer Alev Aktar commented on Sasha Obama’s cornrows at that
year’s state dinner:
The first daughter joins a raft of high-profile beauties sporting a version of the now-
ubiquitous boxer braids. Fueled by celebrities and the popularity of UFC fighters, the
center-parted reverse French braid style has surged back into fashion. The woven look,
dating back to ancient Africa, has been worn by celebs including the Kardashian clan.

Black women, including the Sasha and Malia, have been wearing cornrows continuously and long
before they were popularized by the Kardashians. Shantee observed how pop culture refuses to
acknowledge Black beauty unless it is performed on a white body:
They think behind the scenes that we’re beautiful and that’s why they steal all of our things,
like having a big butt and wearing braids and things that come from our culture. When a
Kylie Jenner rocks it oh, it’s hot, but when a Black woman rocks it nobody notices. Until
Kylie or Kim wears cornrows then everyone wants to rock cornrows but we’ve been
rocking cornrows for how long?

Similarly, after athlete Ronda Rousey wore her hair tied back into two underhanded braids for a
fight, fashion magazines began calling them “boxer braids” as if Rousey innovated the style. In
reaction to the rebranding of cornrows into boxer braids, Lauren (26, Brooklyn) exclaimed in our
interview, “They even changed--it’s a new name they are calling cornrows. Like, what is that?”
The mainstream media’s attribution of cornrows to Rousey is reminiscent of almost 40 years ago
when, in 1980, Bo Derek popularized cornrows for white women as “Bo Braids.” It is undeniable
that Black women’s bodies are desired by whites—the systematic and condoned rape of Black
women since slavery evidences that. Instead of mandating that Black women cover their hair to
uphold white beauty standards, as with 18
th
century Louisiana Tignon Laws, white privilege today
maintains itself through colorblind tactics that adopt and appropriate Black hair styles without
citing their cultural referents. Journalist Kara Brown (2016) responded to the boxer braid “trend”
on Jezebel writing, “Perhaps Black people would care less about white people taking hairstyles
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from us, if they weren’t also busy taking our lives and basic sense of humanity on a regular basis.”
These women’s reactions frame natural hairstyles, the label attached to them, and the right to wear
them as belonging to an in-group of Black women and unavailable to white outsiders. Brown’s
statement further politicizes cultural appropriation of Black hair styles by connecting it to white
oppression and the concurrent racial justice conversation around disproportionate police brutality
against African Americans. When Solange Knowles released her record A Seat at The Table in
2016, it became the unofficial soundtrack of the natural hair movement. The songs “FUBU” (for
us by us) and “Don’t Touch My Hair” distilled the thoughts and feelings of the natural hair
movement into lyrics: Black hair is for Black women—keep your hands off it and off Black
women’s bodies.
Actress Amandla Stenberg weighed in on the conversation around white celebrity
appropriation of Black hairstyles in a video she created as a school project that went viral online.
The project, entitled “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows” (2015), flashes images of entertainers
Fergie, Kim and Kylie Kardashian, Christina Aguilera, Katie Perry and Riff Raff. Stenberg’s
exclusive use of white celebrities as examples of cultural appropriation frames whites as
oppressors and Blacks as the oppressed group, adhering to dominant Black-white racial boundary-
making around the natural hair movement’s collective identity. She asks the viewer, “What would
America be like if we loved Black people as much as we love Black culture?” Her question points
to the vast difference between the performance of Blackness by celebrities and the lived experience
of being read as Black in America, a society defined by capitalism, racism, a history of European
colonization and the legacy of slavery. Celebrity appropriation of Black culture is predicated on
class power and privilege, as people who not only escape being fired for wearing cornrows or
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kinky hair, but are rewarded for being creative, edgy and fashion forward—and who return to
whiteness when their photoshoots end.
Models, celebrities and magazine editors with race and class privilege may understand their
appropriation of Black hair styles as representing a progressive change in racial attitudes and an
acceptance or appreciation of Black cultural forms. However, when whites appropriate Black
culture without providing a referent or historical context, they “affect a fetishistic ‘escape’ into the
Other to transcend the rigidity of their own whiteness, as well as to feed on the capitalist gains of
commodified Blackness” (Johnson, 2003, p. 5). hooks (2015) further asserts that “when race and
ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as
the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of
dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power over in intimate relations with the
Other” (p. 23). The revolutionary potential for privileged groups to subvert racist domination by
expressing desire for the Other through appropriating the phenotypical signifiers and cultures of
marginalized groups is limited, especially in the case of Black hair, since Black women are
routinely stigmatized as violent, unprofessional, ghetto or undesirable for not straightening their
hair (Collins, 2005; Craig, 2002; Banks, 2000; Davis, 1994; Caldwell, 1991).
At the same time, a wide range in phenotypes and definitions of Blackness challenges
efforts to stabilize a racialized natural hair politics. When Teen Vogue prominently featured a
model who many readers assumed was white in a feature on Senegalese twists, a style similar to
braids originating in West Africa, the natural hair community on Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram
responded critically. One twitter user wrote, “@TeenVogue, why’s your magazine so anti-
Black?????” Teen Vogue editor Elaine Welteroth defended the article by pointing to the model’s
Fijian, Tongan, French, English and American ethnically-mixed roots and connecting them to her
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own Blackness as a biracial woman with an African American mother and white father.
Welteroth’s rebuttal to one blogger on Instagram read, “How do you define Black? Just curious.
Is it about skin color? Eye color? Hair texture? I ask because this mixed-race model is as Black as
I am. Also, how do you define cultural appropriation? I ask only because I want to better
understand your point of view” (quoted by Fuller, 2015). It’s unclear from Welteroth’s post how
she defines Blackness even as her response reinforced critics’ viewpoints that authentic Blackness
is a requisite for wearing the hairstyle.
Olivia (32, Brooklyn) expressed this same investment in authenticity while recognizing the
difficulty in regulating such a subjective requirement when she told me, “I just think it’s like, come
from an authentic place. I think you can feel that. I can tell if you’re really about that life. It’s not
really up to me to tell you [that] you can be or you can’t be. Just be real. I feel like I don’t want to
be the natural police because some of the natural police can come at me.” As Johnson (2003)
argues, when something as slippery and dynamic as Blackness is appropriated to the exclusion of
others, authenticity can become “yet another trope manipulated for cultural capital” (p. 3). In
theory, a focus on authenticity enables marginalized groups to resist oppression and exclusion and
police cultural appropriation. In practice, racial authenticity is always at threat of contestation. The
difficulty in stabilizing racial boundaries around the natural hair movement demonstrates limits of
collective mobilization when a culturally and phenotypically diverse group bases its racial politics
on the body.
Alternative Alliances: Colorblind Naturalness
That one of the oldest and most prominent websites for natural hair was founded by two
white American women in the late 1990s, years before Facebook existed and blogging became
trendy or profitable, further complicates the effort racialize natural hair politics. By 2017, the site
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reported attracting a global audience of sixteen million readers monthly, and has become a leading
natural hair content creator and an influential consultant on the curly hair market to cosmetics
corporations across the globe. I met with Marla, one of the site’s founders, to learn how she
manages to force multiracial alliances across the curly hair media and commerce space in the wake
of the natural hair movement. Her thick, dark chocolate curls rested on her shoulders as she relayed
her natural hair journey, from childhood to middle-age. The narrative Marla tells about her natural
hair journey steadies her right to exist within the natural hair collective space as a non-Black
woman. She foregrounds shared trauma with Black women of not fitting into idealized and
restrictive notions femininity, as well as the struggle to find material and educational resources to
care for her hair texture. Her experience aligns with collective identity theory’s loophole argument
that “boundaries may be subverted when other axes of differentiation create alternative alliances”
(Sudbury, 2001, p. 36). “I hated my hair,” Marla told me, “and I definitely did not fit into the
California look that my peers had.” Until she became a teenager, Marla wore a one inch pixie cut
because her mother did not know how to care for her hair texture any other way. “When I finally
let my hair grow out, they called me bozo the clown.” As the years progressed Marla tried on
different looks, from ironing her hair into a stiff Farrah Fawcett feathers to applying chemical
relaxers that disintegrated chunks of her hair.
In the 1990s, Marla and a friend discussed their mutual struggle to find resources to care
for their curly hair and came up with the idea to start an online message board. With the help of a
14-year-old web-designer, their site was born. When the natural hair movement gained momentum
years after Marla started the site, she and her business partner found themselves in a key position
of power and influence. Their site transformed from a simple message board to a company that
produces a wide range of online content, retails products, throws festivals and consults emerging
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businesses. As they grew, they struggled to come to grips with a community that was organizing
itself around racial politics and Black womanhood. Marla’s team responded by featuring more
women of African descent, taking classes on white privilege and providing filters in their online
shop to identify both women-owned and Black-owned brands. One article published in 2017
advises white women with curly hair to avoid culturally specific hairstyles, buy products from
Black entrepreneurs, acknowledge the specific impact of anti-Black racism and take initiative to
self-educate on racial politics. The article recognizes the logic and political symbolism of
racialized boundaries around natural hair communities while also making space for non-Black
women with similar hair textures to participate in conversations about natural hair. More often
than not, however, the site’s approach to natural haircare evades explicit discussions of race. The
website takes credit for popularizing and expanding celebrity hair stylist Andre Walker’s texture
typing system. Walker’s original system classified hair texture on a scale from 1 (straight) to 4
(coily). Marla’s site added letters a, b and c to break down the original scale into intermediate
categories. Many people find texture typing useful in customizing their haircare regimens. Women
can use the number and letter system to search for bloggers and YouTubers by hair texture and
identify techniques to try on their own hair at home.
Figure 6.4 : Graphic of a popular natural hair texture typing system
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Hair typing discursively makes space for broad, multiple, and multiracial representations
of the “natural” body. While most people who participate in natural hair communities identify as
Black and have a 3 or 4 hair texture, the acknowledgement of embodied diversity departs from
dominant and narrow 1970s views that Black identity or political consciousness is dependent upon
one’s ability to achieve an Afro (Ford, 2016; Byrd & Tharps, 2014; Mercer, 1994). At the same
time, hair typing can function as a colorblind system that eclipses the role of race and racism in
how hair texture is seen and understood on racialized bodies in social life. A result of the backlash
against the civil rights movement, colorblind ideology asserts that racial and ethnic groups are
essentially the same despite unequal social locations and distinctive histories (Bonilla-Silva, 2006;
Carr, 1997). In natural hair spaces, colorblind hair typing tends to subtly reproduce a texture
hierarchy where looser curls and a physical proximity to whiteness are considered more beautiful.
The scaled system evokes legacies of good vs. bad “grades” of hair. This effect in a space where
many women seek to find resources that re-valuate Blackness is not lost on Marla’s site’s
readership, and the website’s comment sections often become a space for critical exchange.
“People write some nasty things in our comment section,” Marla told me. She pulled out her iPhone
to show me a photo of a very light complexioned woman with Arab features and waist-length, dark
brown loosely wavy hair that she recently posted on her site’s Facebook page. One commenter
complained that the subject’s hair texture did not represent the natural hair community. Another
user retorted that the prior commenter was “just jealous.”
This tug of war over inclusion, privilege, and representation personally implicates Marla
because she is often called upon to speak on panels at natural hair events and because the site’s
business model relies on collaborations with Black women entrepreneurs. In our interview and
frequently in her public talks at natural hair events, Marla emphasizes that classmates and sorority
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sisters were all blonde. By noting hair color alongside hair texture, she acknowledges an Anglo-
centric beauty ideal without explicitly naming whiteness—astutely positioning herself inside the
boundaries of racialized naturalness even though her website frequently features blonde, wavy and
curly haired models. Marla also told me that Black women often enter business interactions with
her unsure of her intent and expecting to dislike her on account of her whiteness. “People want to
claim things for them, especially when they are not aware of our [website’s] history. I didn’t come
into this to make money. I came into this to provide resources.” Here, Marla discursively distances
herself from accusations of cultural appropriating Black culture by understating her profit
imperative and emphasizing her commitment to natural hair over time. Her statement also
recognizes that her right to participate in natural hair movement spaces relies on constructing a
multiracial and inclusive collective identity—one that tolerates her whiteness.
Negotiating Diversity Within a Black Collective Identity
Many participants, influencers and discussants on Black hair politics are multiracial, like
my interviewee Olivia, Amandla Stenberg who produced “Don’t Cash Crop My Cornrows,” and
Teen Vogue’s Elaine Welteroth who defended her model’s Senegalese Twists--all of whom I’ve
introduced in this chapter. Tate’s (2007) study about multiracial or light-skinned women and anti-
racist aesthetics similarly documented their inclusion within binary Black-white oppositional
aesthetic politics. Based on interviews from the 1990s, Tate argued that the multiracial women in
her study dis-identify with their embodied privilege as they critique other Black women for
straightening their hair, wearing weaves and otherwise taking “unnatural” steps to appeal to a white
aesthetic. She argues that multiracial women’s dis-identification is triggered by shame and
melancholy about their distance from the politicized Black beauty ideal of dark skin and tightly
coiled hair. However, the politicized Black beauty ideal has shifted since the moment during which
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Tate collected her data. The women in Tate’s study were reacting to the political legacy of the
1970s “Black Is Beautiful” era, when the ability to achieve an Afro was viewed as the benchmark
of ethnic legitimacy and when “the Blacker the berry the sweeter the juice” was a common refrain
among Black folks. In contrast, the natural hair movement today prizes curls rather than kinks.
Two of the earliest popularized brands catering towards naturally curly hair textures were
developed by multiracial Black women—Mixed Chicks and Miss Jessie’s—and their images of
silky cascading curls formed the bulk of natural hair representation in the through the 2000s and
early 2010s. Like Mixed Chicks and Miss Jessie’s, most natural hair products aim to reduce frizz,
combat shrinkage and perfect twist-outs. Certainly, no one can argue that natural hair spaces
entirely eschew artifice and texture manipulation. Many women come to assume that achieving
beautiful natural hair requires hard work and consumption, an assumption that is reinforced by an
economy of digital tutorials and product review blogs. But, the “doing” of natural hair tends to
operate in one direction—towards looser, longer, more defined curls. Mixed-race Black beauty is
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no longer outside of the bounds of politicized Black beauty. Instead, it has become the ideal form
of racialized natural beauty.
Fannie (45, Los Angeles), a natural hair expert who travels internationally to present at
natural hair conferences, observed of the natural hair movement: “They like the light-skinned curly
mixed look. Its exotic to them. They really do like light-skinned, curly-hair girls. That was just
because we were trained not to like our Blackness.” Jha (2016) notes this resurgence of colorism
in her analysis of the shift and commodification of anti-racist Black beauty aesthetics since the
1990s. She argues that today’s idealized image of political Black beauty is contradictory and best
symbolized by performer-entrepreneur Beyoncé, who approximates many aspects white feminine
beauty ideals while taking advantage of being racially perceived as Black to sell herself, Black
culture and feminist empowerment at the same time. For example, in the video for her latest Black
girl power call for solidarity “Formation” (2016) Beyoncé sings, “I like my baby heir with baby
hair and Afros” while she alternates between a blonde “natural” curly lace-front weave that drapes
Figure 6.5 (left): Angela Davis in the 1970s wearing an Afro, a style distinguished by its round,
picked out appearance.
Figure 6.6 (right): Angela Davis in 2010 wearing today’s “natural look,” favoring defined curls.
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to her mid-back and blonde braided extensions. And so, even in a movement widely invested in
Blackness, dark-skinned Blackness fights to be seen. Not only does white supremacy challenge
the natural hair movement community’s maintenance of a Black-centered collective identity
through market dynamics and white appropriation, but also though enduring colorism and
texturism within Black communities.
Overt colorism and texturism have always been contested within Black communities
(Craig, 2002). The associated ideologies were widely and publicly challenged during the Black
Power movement and in iconic pieces like The Bluest Eye (Morrison, 1970) and School Daze (Lee,
1988), which portray the emotional and social destruction color and texture competition produces
among Black women. Recent documentaries Dark Girls (2011) and Light Girls (2015) have
revived a conversation about colorism in Black America, portraying how color-based stereotypes
hurt all Black women, albeit in different ways. Yet notwithstanding these proud, reflective and
satirical cultural critiques, skin tone and proximity to Anglo features continues to shape Black
peoples’ lives. Glenn (2008) and Hunter (2005) both argue that the racial awareness of the 1960s
and 1970s did not reduce skin color discrimination among Black Americans. Hochschild and
Weaver (2007) further find that “dark-skinned Blacks have lower socioeconomic status, more
punitive relationships with the criminal justice system, diminished prestige, and less likelihood of
holding elective office compared with their lighter counterparts” (p. 643). Colorism and texturism
intersect with gender, as both light skin and long hair are considered not only more beautiful, but
also more feminine. Research also finds that skin tone and hair texture stratify Black women’s
dating experiences and their representation in the media (Thompson, 2009; Hunter, 2005). Salah
(19) a second-generation Trinidadian woman with deep brown skin, recalled how colorism and
texturism diminished her self-esteem as a child during our interview: “I had a cousin who was
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mixed white and Black and she had the nice hair, the long hair down her back and I always used
to tell her I love the way you look. She would tell me I was pretty too, but I never felt that I was
compared to her.” Image activist and former fashion editor at Essence Magazine Michaela Angela
Davis summarized in Light Girls, “Black women have been cultured to compare, not connect”
(Duke, 2015).
The influence of texturism is exacerbated by the fact that many new naturals have never
seen their hair unprocessed as adults. Some women evaluate the possibility their and other
women’s decisions to transition to natural hair based on the “goodness” of that person’s hair
texture. For example, Corliss (62, retired) told me about a conversation she had a week before our
interview, where a friend told her she “had a nice grade of hair, so when it grows out naturally it
is going to be beautiful.” Many women are anxious to discover a hair texture that looks like the
bloggers that they follow for inspiration and encouragement. In an article for the natural hair
publication CRWN Magazine, Howze (2017) describes a similar experience, writing:
As I excitedly watched my own curls emerged, I decided they were a tight 3C. I couldn’t
wait to have bouncy S-curls popping loosely from my head. However, when I big chopped
in February 2015, something wasn’t quite right. My hair was not 3 anything, except for the
soft patch near the nape of my neck. It was all over 100% Type 4 and I was shocked.
Terrified. Shamefully disappointed…The main reason I went natural was because I wanted
to know what my real texture was, what the real me looked like. But now, I just felt
disappointed by the truth. (p. 121)

Howze’s discovery that her natural hair texture is more tightly coiled than those she followed on
social media had a politicizing effect: “This sobering revelation opened my eyes to an issue we
must overcome: texture discrimination and representation.” Michelle (49) describes her own hair
texture as a tightly coiled 4C or 4B, and described her reluctance to compare her own hair texture
with influencers in the natural hair blogosphere when she told me:
There’s a girl Naputral85 and another girl MahoganyCurls. You can just tell they have a
different texture of hair. They’re mixed with something and no matter what they do with
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their hair it’s going to curl up and give them the best twist-out and the best whatever… I
don’t want to be in a conversation where everyone’s just like, ‘Oh, you’ve got good hair.’
It shouldn’t be that conversation.

Women with tighter textures or no curl pattern are vocal about the impact of texturism on their
experiences of the natural hair movement. In an article for the Huffington Post, Zeba Blay (2016)
describes her personal struggle to love her kinky hair texture despite her political commitment to
its anti-racist symbolism, blaming colorism in the natural hair community. She appropriately
observes, “the politics of [natural] hair don’t necessarily escape the influence of white beauty
standards.” For example, mega-popular beauty blogger and influencer Taren Guy publicly
critiqued a natural hair expo on social media for canceling her as a speaker after she abandoned
her long, bouncy curls and started the process of free-form locking her natural hair. She discussed
her experience in a caption on Instagram:
DEAR NATURAL HAIR COMMUNITY: Transitioning into locs has really shown me
the tremendous love and vulnerability that women of color posses with words of support,
wisdom, relatable testimonies and hopefulness of one day letting go of those things that
keep them from moving forward in their truth. I've also experienced the B side of the
online natural hair community that I was aware of but still sort of blind to. A side that has
truly turned this beautiful space into a commercialized industry. My locs haven't even
been a week old and I've already been canceled for a NATURAL HAIR event due to my
hair change as it "doesn't fit the demo and audience of the attendees" nor does it sit well
with sponsors. I'm a bit disappointed, not because I won't be attending, but because a
space that was created to empower women of color with ALL types of natural hair has
turned into a show that only support one type of natural. This post is not meant to be
negative... It's just real. And it's a problem. Shout out to all of the beautiful women out
there who celebrate their uniqueness while empowering and supporting women trying to
do the same... Women who are keeping this beautiful space alive with the intention to
educate, inspire and express themselves freely! (@Auset_ntru, 2016)

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The cancellation of Guy’s speaking engagement demonstrates one way that texturism and
capitalism mutually reinforce one another—by excluding certain bodies from representation and
economic opportunity.

Some Instagram and Tumblr accounts dedicated to exclusively celebrating women with
kinkier textures and increasing their representation in the media and beauty industries have become
grassroots sub-communities within natural hair spaces. These groups create new collective
identities framed both by race and texture, and they may have real impact on how some women
see themselves. High school teacher Tina (25, Los Angeles) told me she follows dozens of dark-
skinned women she’s never met on social media to boost her own self-esteem as a deep-
complexioned Black woman with tightly kinky hair. She credits these accounts for inspiring her
Figure 6.7: Viral Internet meme posted on a natural hair Instagram page critiquing texturisim in
the natural hair community (2016)
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choice to abandon synthetic twists and to dreadlock her own hair. Sherronda Brown penned a
separatist 4c movement manifesto in in response to SheaMoisture’s “A Million Ways to Shea”
commercial. In it, she declared: “This movement is for and about the people with the type of hair
that shrinks all the way up to our ears, like the way this society demands we shrink our Blackness
for the comfort of others.” Preferring the term negro hair to natural hair, Brown discursively
emphasizes Blackness in rewriting desirability politics, and calls attention to body size and facial
features as additional axes of exclusion within natural hair representation. Even still, Brown
acknowledges that she often asked what she’s mixed with and told she has good hair, despite that
she identifies as a “type 4” natural.
Accepting and Reproducing Texture Privilege
Unlike Tate (2007) who concludes that light-skinned women feel melancholy about their
distance from a dark-skinned politicized ideal, I find that the idealization of curls inspires
ambivalent acceptance by women with light skin or loosely textured hair about capitalizing on
embodied privileges. Over the course of this research, I observed several women elevate to
positions of power in natural hair spaces because they fit into this ideal for light-to-medium
complexioned skin and big bouncy “natural” curls. For example, an English and American mixed-
race young woman I’ll call Monet described catapulting to natural hair influencer status based on
her appearance alone during a speech at a natural hair event. I had seen Monet’s blonde curly halo
and heard about her in interviews years before I met her. Fannie, the hairstylist I introduced above,
explicitly used Monet as the example of the prized “exotic” look and as a figure women “freak
out” over. Monet’s influence reached so far and wide that Marlene (45, Cape Town), a teacher,
confessed to me in a whisper that she follows Monet on social media but that Monet’s apparent
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happiness, beautiful hair, and toned bikini beach photos on Instagram make Marlene feel ashamed,
inadequate and irrelevant as a middle-aged woman.
Three months later, I met Monet at a technology and music conference that hosted a natural
hair meet-up that reported over 4,000 attendees. Monet was a featured panelist who discussed her
natural hair journey alongside five other natural hair influencers. The event coordinator moderated
while Monet’s friend videotaped her responses on Snapchat and Instagram live from the first row.
Monet sat cross legged on a director’s chair dressed in a Black lace mini-dress and thigh-high
suede boots, sandwiched between a natural haircare product entrepreneur and Marla, the website
owner. By coincidence but not unnoticeably, the panelists were arranged by skin tone from darkest
to lightest. In a hypnotizing British accent, Monet explained that around three years earlier she
casually took some photographs with a friend. When Monet posted them on her personal Instagram
page natural hair websites and their associated Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest accounts copied
and saved her pictures, which they likely identified through the natural hair hashtags she used in
her captions. By reposting them on their own social media pages, these natural hair accounts
disseminated her image to their thousands of followers without her explicit consent. Many of these
accounts tagged her personal page, leading Monet to amass over a quarter million Instagram
followers. She eventually became a highly sought-after speaker at natural hair conferences around
the world. Monet has since capitalized on her appeal by becoming a brand ambassador to many
high-profile fashion, hair, and travel companies and blogs full-time. All of this ensued without any
initial intent of becoming a natural hair blogger and without any specialized knowledge about
haircare. During her talk at the tech conference, Monet stressed the importance of having a likeable
personality in her advice to prospective bloggers in the audience, emphasizing that looks are not
enough to maintain an engaged following. Indeed, natural hairstylist Fannie said of Monet, “She’s
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just a pretty girl anyway so people love her and she’s sweet.” Accentuating likability, especially
to an audience diverse in phenotypes and age, acts to restore a sense that a career as a natural hair
influencer requires merit, and that texturism does not discount the effort that conventionally
beautiful women expend to maintain their status and celebrity.
Women I spoke with often pursued and banked on the privileges of looser curls, albeit
uneasily. Through trial and error with her look over ten years of auditioning as an actor in
Hollywood, Aaliyah (30, Los Angeles) was acutely aware of the social and material privileges
loosely curly natural hair affords Black women, especially as the natural hair trend became
embraced by the mainstream media in the mid 2010s. Aaliyah has milk-chocolate skin and
describes her hair as 4C, but she successfully booked three national commercials with a curly
weave that was less coarse than her natural hair texture. Her weave shifted how people interpreted
her deep brown complexion, almond shaped eyes and overall racial-ethnic background. She noted,
“everybody likes to throw out the exotic word… people would ask me, ‘oh your hair, your eyes,
what are you mixed with?” She scoffed, rolled her eyes and replied to me in proxy, “I’m just mixed
with Northern Black and Southern Black.” Aaliyah became disillusioned with the entertainment
industry’s partial acceptance of Black beauty and her acquiescence to a mixed-race Black beauty
ideal. Speaking about her weave, she explained, “I just want to be me, and I’m just at a place where
I’m just done faking it you know?” She continued:
I don’t think some people would dispute the fact that we live in a country that has
conditioned us to hate the part of us that’s African ever since we got here and you know
there have been points in history where I think like Black beauty has been like celebrated
but it’s a certain type of Black beauty. It’s certain, like, body features so I just don’t want
the uphill battle I have to fight with raising a child that is half Black and half something
else and then me having to teach them that this something else doesn’t make you more
beautiful because the person who is 100% Black is beautiful, whatever 100% Black means.
You get what I’m saying, the person who’s 100% white is beautiful. Our differences make
us beautiful, but you’re not more beautiful because your hair has a looser curl or because
your skin is light or your eyes are lighter or that doesn’t make you more beautiful. But I
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feel like, I don’t know man, we live, we live in a world where it’s like you go to a school
and there’s a whole bunch of different kids in a classroom, you know. Nobody’s walking
up to the Black girl with like short braids or pigtails telling her how beautiful her hair is,
but people are going to do it to the kid that’s mixed. And I think, I just, I’ve always wanted
to raise Black children to be proud of who they are no matter how they look. And you
know, if it happens for me and I end up, you know, having mixed kids so be it. But I just
feel like I have to fight a little bit of an uphill battle in terms of, you know, making them
really be proud of being Black because they’re going to be taught it’s the other part of them
that makes them more beautiful.

Aaliyah includes mixed-race women within the bounds of Black identity and Black beauty,
recognizing that “100% Black” is neither a stable nor useful requisite for a racialized beauty
politics. At the same time, Aaliyah notes how texturism and colorism continue to marginalize
darker skinned women and girls, including her own natural beauty. A few months after I
interviewed Aaliyah, she shaved her head, ended her career as an actress, and left Hollywood for
seminary. Her decision reflected her inability to reconcile her pursuit of unconditional Christian
self-love with demands from her agents that she deemphasize her racialized features to become
more commercially marketable in the entertainment industry.
I personally felt the ambivalence Aaliyah described as I navigated the field in my medium-
complexioned brown body. I made a habit of writing preliminary field notes on my appearance,
since hairstyle and attire tended to facilitate my conversations with other attendees in the field. As
I reached the saturation point in my research process, I discovered that I had more fruitful
interactions with research participants when I manipulated my hair to mimic a looser curl pattern.
If I wore my hair in braids, a head wrap, or in a “wash and go” with my unaltered tightly coiled
hair texture, I faded into the background and was ignored for hours at a time in the field. Like
many other women easily read as Black, my right to participate in natural hair spaces and the
categorization any manipulated hair style I wore as “natural” were never questioned. Most people
assumed my twisted hair grew with that curl pattern because my hazel eyes and skin tone suggested
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a mixed-race background. For example, Corliss (62, Charlotte) invoked my appearance in our
interview to explain the difference between the Black beauty ideal today and the Black beauty
aesthetic of the 1970s: “People are not just wearing Afros. They wear it like you and curly. People
would wear puffballs then, but they weren’t like you. They weren’t curly.” Once, at a women’s
month event on natural hair held at a Black history museum in Los Angeles, a group of elderly
African American ladies dismissed me, asserting that I had no understanding of the pain of Black
hair. “Look at you,” they simply said, and swiftly ended our conversation. I left without comment,
because I understood their desire to privilege their own experiences as senior women who
navigated decades of intensely hurtful colorism, and I knew from experience that my voice in
natural hair spaces was granted more attention and power when I looked the way I did that day—
young, able-bodied, lighter-skinned, and with hair styled in a twist-out. Overall, however, I
received little pushback against my color privilege during my three years in the field.
The Thursday before the International Natural Hair Meetup Day event in Brooklyn, NY, I
washed and twisted my kinky hair so that it could air dry in time to fall into crisp, frizz-free spirals
by the weekend. Sure enough, three different natural hair websites and a prestigious national news
magazine interviewed me that day—not about my academic research but to feature my “look.”
The news magazine even invited me to participate in a later photoshoot alongside two Olympic
athletes who were to be competing later that summer in the Rio de Janeiro summer games. I jumped
at the chance, viewing the shoot as an ethnographic opportunity during which I could record field
notes among a hard-to-access elite community. Like the famed natural hair blogger Monet, I found
myself trying to deemphasize my embodied capital by emphasizing my scholarly orientation to
the natural hair movement. I eventually ended up discussing my dissertation in an interview with
the journalists, but I knew that it was my appearance and not my research expertise that initially
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afforded me the opportunity to be there. Another time, an entrepreneur I interviewed invited me to
participate in a photoshoot after meeting me with my hair twisted. I obliged her, rationalizing my
acquiescence as an effort to reciprocate the time and trust she dedicated to my work by sharing her
story with me. However, I knew that in doing so I contributed to the greater representation of
lighter-skinned women in natural hair spaces. These types of situations were common for me, and
I reflect critically on my positionality in the field and the ways this research was facilitated by my
proximity to white beauty ideals while still looking decidedly Black. The natural hair movement
is most welcoming to people who look like me.
Almost every woman I interviewed expressed an acute awareness of this colorism and
texturism in the natural hair movement community and in Black culture more broadly, even if they
stood to profit from these hierarchical ideals. Shantee (42, Chicago) is a natural hair care business
owner who has light brown skin and waist-length spiral curls. Since she was a child, Shantee
dreamed of being a hair model like the little girls on the Just for Me relaxer box. But paradoxically,
Shantee hated being heralded as the “pretty girl” with light skin and long hair among her peers in
middle and high school because she felt that such comments undermined and dismissed her
experience with racism as a Black girl. As an adult, Shantee made her childhood modeling
ambitions come true by serving as the spokesperson for her own natural hair care company. She
expresses her continued ambivalence to the exclusionary light skinned beauty ideal by instructing
her social media staff to “post all different hair textures and hair types and skin colors because we
feel that’s a better representation of us.” Shantee’s business exclusively posts women and girls of
African descent on its Instagram account. However, her followers are quick to push her to center
not only Blackness, but dark-skinned beauty. Shantee’s voice quivered when she told me:
I’ve noticed that when we post someone that is light skinned and a looser curl pattern we’ll
get comments that say well you guys never post anyone with 4C hair or a tighter curl pattern
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and we could just have posted someone with a tighter curl pattern or five minutes ago…we
constantly want to tear someone else down. I get it too. People want to argue me up and
down and say that you’re not Black. You’re not fully Black because you’re light skinned
and your hair is long. How come I can’t be fully Black? Because I’m light-skinned with
long hair? It is hatred in our own race.

Her response highlights that the division and hurt texturism causes operates in multiple directions.
While few question Shantee’s right to participate in natural hair politics, her elevated position
within natural hair spaces and her right to represent her own business is constantly up for debate.
Though perhaps Shantee’s testimony is optimistic—women privileged by hair type can and do
strive to use their influence to actively prioritize diverse representations of Black women.
Olivia (32, Brooklyn), a mixed-race light-skinned woman, also feared capitalizing on
colorism to sell her print publication on natural hair. She attempted to remove her body from view
entirely, and initially searched for a dark-skinned business partner who could serve as her
company’s public spokesperson. She explained her choice to do so during our conversation:
I know that my experience is very different than other experiences and I don’t think it’s the
most important…It’s still like being light skinned with curly hair is more acceptable.
Putting a darker brown skinned woman on the cover with Afro is more of a statement. I
means something, and not only that but it speaks to women who are so often ignored and
it’s just like, I don’t want to talk about myself too much. I want to do something bigger and
greater for people who are way too often written out of the conversation.

Olivia eventually decided that she had the right to speak in natural hair spaces upon considering
how slavery, Jim Crow and anti-Black discrimination have affected her and her family’s history.
She pulled up screen shots taken of old sepia photographs of her mother as a child riding a horse
in their poor Midwestern neighborhood: “They grew up with nothing really, in the country
too…That’s the stock I’m coming from on my Black side. I think we all have a strong sense of
being Black American and that if you are here today you have survived some craziness and you
are strong.” She justifies her right to participate in Black politics in general, and natural hair politics
in particular, by pointing toward the lived effects of race and anti-Black racism on her family.
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Reflecting on her initial ambivalence in starting an endeavor in the natural hair space, she told me,
“There’s a definite difference [in how my hair is perceived] but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t
have a dialog and we can still find beauty in each other. Me feeling like I couldn’t voice that you
are beautiful with your natural hair—I’m entitled to that too.” In her view, her personal, familial
and historical experiences of racial marginalization authenticate her right to express a Black-
affirming beauty politics as a light-skinned and mixed-race woman. Zaire (23, Los Angeles)
similarly pointed to a lived experience of Blackness when she told me:
Some people who are a few shades darker than me feel like they’ve earned their Blackness.
I don’t think the tone of my skin determines whether I’m Black or not, like my features,
my family, the texture of my hair, everything that I’ve known is living the life of a Black
person. I wouldn’t be able to attain the privilege that white people have so no matter how
much people jokingly or being mean try to tell me that I’m not Black, there’s nothing else
that I can be.

Since hair textures are relative, diverse and malleable, hair is a medium through which Black
women continuously construct and deconstruct extremely complex identity politics at the
intersection of racism, sexism, colorism, capitalism, power and beauty.
Contextualizing Texturism, Style, and Boundary-Making
Critiques of texturism, unequal representation, white supremacy and cultural appropriation
also occur in the natural hair communities I observed outside of the United States. It is beyond the
scope of this chapter to adequately unpack each of these debates, as local racial formations,
immigration histories and colonial legacies across the African diaspora differentially contextualize
women’s efforts to stabilize and racialize the natural hair movement’s collective identity.
However, these brief comparisons between interviewees from Senegal, Brazil, South Africa, and
The Netherlands highlight how local race, ethnic, and gender regimes differently impact women’s
reflections about colorism and texturism across a transnational natural hair trend.
“Hair, No Matter”: Creative Styling in Senegalese-Brooklyn
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A group of Senegalese immigrant women I interviewed in a Brooklyn braiding shop did
not see texturism as an issue. They emphasized that hair straightening and straight hair styling are
forms of creative self-expression in their community, and that relaxers are simply a matter of
convenience—no more no less. The salon owner Fatima (38, Brooklyn) explained, “Our parents
never believed in chemicals. Oil and Shea butter. If our parents didn’t want to deal with our hair
they would braid it.” Fatima only experimented with relaxers as an adult to mimic celebrities in
magazines and on television. She pointed to the glossy images of Rihanna’s asymmetrical bob that
hung on the shop’s wall as her current fashion inspiration and clarified, “I do weaves because I
like it. If I don’t have it, I’m good. I’m doing it because I like it.” Per this woman’s view, colorism
and skin bleaching are important issues but texture hierarchies are an “American thing.” Fatima
continued, “Our men like a pretty face and if you have a booty! Hair, no matter. Now maybe
natural hair is a trend back home because of TV.” Mercer (1994) similarly notes that while the
1970s Afro was a political project for the diaspora, the style was a mark of a metropolitanism for
West Africans. Like Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngosi Adichie has detailed, “Black” isn’t a
concept in most of Africa. Rather, tribe and ethnicity were much more important factors for the
West African women I interviewed. Mina (34, Brooklyn), another woman at the Senegalese
braiding salon, told me, “Back home we have tribes, right? So our tribe is the hair stylist, the
fashion, make up, stylist. Back home we make clothes. Like, she’s a stylist (points to another
woman, Aisha). The men make jewelry, shoes, and bags. Gmegno. The Guewel, they do the drums
and talk too much.” Being workers in an ethnic enclave economy, these women did not describe
the anxieties about negotiating hairstyling in a racist job market that my American and South
African interviewees did.
“It Would Have Been Okay to Create an Exclusive Space”: Fragile Boundaries in South
Africa
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Boundary-making and breaking were significant issues for interviewees in South Africa
due to the relationship between phenotype, racial categorization, and racial privilege during
apartheid. There are four main racial categories in South Africa: Black, Coloured, Indian, and
white. The apartheid government constructed Black and Coloured racial categories as mutually
exclusive, and Coloured South Africans received preferential treatment in jobs, prisons, hospitals,
and schools. Most Coloured South Africans are the multiethnic descendants of European
colonizers, sub-Saharan African tribes, indigenous Khoi Khoi and San tribes, and former slaves
from Southeast Asia. Coloured people’s hair textures range from gladdes (straight/sleek) and
krulle (curls) to kroes (kinks)—often in the same family—while most Black South Africans have
very kinky hair. Wearing one’s natural hair texture undermines the blurry boundary between Black
and Coloured because the groups’ hair textures overlap. Raven (26, Cape Town) explained, “When
it comes to hair, having your hair in this [natural] state is degrading, basically, because it looks
more like the next Black person’s hair. It doesn’t look like the next Coloured person’s hair or the
next white person’s hair. For Coloured people, being whiter is better but being Black is a
downgrade.” Brie (35, Cape Town) concurred, “I find that the majority of Coloured people I know
highlight their European ancestry rather than the Khoi San or the indigenous side of us.” No person
was ever legally reclassified from Black to white during apartheid, but some Coloured people
successfully legislated their way to whiteness through the “pencil test” that rewarded gladdes hair.
The cultural significance of hair texture in the Coloured community is evident through insults like
bossiekop, an Afrikaans term that translates to “bushy head” in English, used to tease and bully
Coloured women with kinky or tightly coiled hair.
As an intermediate group in an apartheid racial hierarchy that privileged whiteness and
denigrated Blackness, Coloured people have stood to gain more socially, politically and materially
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by appealing to white aesthetic ideals and distancing themselves from Blackness. But for several
Coloured South African women I spoke with, transitioning to natural hair was a pathway to
embracing a Black identity and possible African ancestry for the first time. For example, Raven
grew up in an exclusively Coloured community and never met or communicated with any Black
South African people until she went to college in her late teens. Upon being misread as Black by
others with her newly natural hair, Raven began to identify as Black in addition to Coloured. She
told me:
I consider myself Black actually. Because I have such a distorted background of my family
tree, I’m not quite sure if I might have some Black genes in me. As far as I know, both of
my parents are Coloured, but I have features that look Black so I have started becoming
more conscious… I just feel like I can relate. I have started reading the likes of Oliver
Tambo and Steve Biko. I’m reading them now for the third time because every time I read
it, it speaks to something different in my life.

Coloured and Black women participate in the same natural hair movement online and event
spaces, which tend to deemphasize or ignore racial differences to create cohesive communities that
focus on self-esteem, styling, transitioning and coping with kinky-curly hair stigma. Many
Coloured and some Black South Africans understand crafting a multiracial natural hair collective
as a strategy for deconstructing Black-Coloured distinctions rooted in South Africa’s white
supremacist European colonial history. However, enduring texture hierarchies subtly reinforce the
apartheid racial order and complicate alliances between Black and Coloured women, who are more
likely to have looser curls. Sheila (45, Johannesburg), a Black South African woman, explained
how texturism exacerbates preexisting racial divides when she told me:
There’s that debate about the goodness of your hair. Your hair is good because you’re
mixed. Its less coily if you’re mixed so there’s that thing that oh well you’re mixed so it’s
not that natural. It is natural but. It’s a natural but if you didn’t have white blood in you it
wouldn’t look like that. So, there is that debate. It goes deep. There’s always that what do
you call it? A clash between the races about what is natural and what should it look like
and that’s where the Coloured and the Black will then come in.

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Most influential bloggers in Cape Town’s natural hair scene are Coloured women with long, silky
defined curls, and several Black South African interviewees expressed disappointment that a
Coloured student of Black and Indian descent became the symbolic figure of the protest at Pretoria
Girl’s High School against white-centered school grooming policies, despite that the protest was
organized by a mostly Black collective of students. Sheila observed:
You see the Pretoria Girl’s issue if you see who is in the forefront...It’s the girls that are
experiencing the struggle not a single girl but now they’ve changed it to be about this girl.
That’s the type of girl they would go for because the other girl is not good enough. Her
hair is not good enough. You don’t have the good hair therefore you don’t fit the mold.

Texturism in South Africa’s natural hair movement can often feel like the reification of apartheid
racial hierarchies that privilege Coloured women over Black South African women.
Some Black women I spoke with felt that Coloured women appropriate Black African
hairstyles like bantu knots and should form separate natural hair spaces to mitigate hurtful
distinctions between “good” mixed hair and “bad” Black African hair. Stacey (29, Cape Town), a
Black South African woman of Kenyan descent rationalized:
For Coloured women especially, the battle around hair is big for them too. I feel that it is
good that they are doing this but I kind of feel like they should acknowledge the people
that started it and it would have been okay to create an exclusive space. I think we struggle
to acknowledge these differences and dark skinned women bear the brunt of it…It’s one
thing for a whole group of women to be erased because we just don’t have any of these
appearing white, closer to white features, and to know that and then to have someone who
is, whose hair is less kinky. Whose hair makes a prettier Afro because let’s face it, all the
Afros we say we like are these loose bouncing Afros.”

Stacey’s statement highlights the broad appeal of natural hair politics for women of African
descent living in former European colonies. Her position also aptly emphasizes how local and
relative racial understandings, hierarchies and histories shape whether today’s natural hair
aesthetic is experienced as reproductive or resistant, for a suggestion that multiracial women take
initiative to form a separate natural hair community in the United States would be taboo against
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the backdrop of brown paper bag tests that barred darker skinned Blacks from elite social
organizations in the Jim Crow era.
Lindi (41,Cape Town) resented the idea of separate Coloured and Black natural hair spaces,
arguing that her hair curly hair texture and multiethnic background should not exclude her from a
Black identity and does not produce a less meaningful experience of transitioning to natural hair:
[Coloured people] always sitting in the middle of it. We sat in the middle with apartheid
and we are sitting in the middle now. With apartheid job preference went to us first and we
got looked down at from our Black brothers and sisters. I want to break divides, I want to
break down that wall and break down that barrier because I look at myself as Black. Don’t
get me wrong in saying that I am proud to be who I am. I am proud of who I am. Our
history is big, its massive, but it includes Black people and it includes white people as well
so why isn’t that okay? Who says that it wasn’t as hard for you to actually make the move
to return to natural? I had this conversation with someone I call a friend and she said it’s
really great that you have decided to do this but we need to get our kinkier curlier girls to
do this as well. What about my story? Yeah, but you weren’t really pointed at school. Bull!
Yes I was. Absolutely! I was. I was called a bossiekop. I was told please do something
about your hair because you’re natural. I went through hell. Don’t make it as if what I went
through is less than what you’ve went through because you’ve got a thicker texture.
Embrace yourself. That’s all.

Lindi’s statement acknowledges the Coloured community’s privileges over Black South Africans
during and after apartheid, while challenging the notion that Blackness and Colouredness are
mutually exclusive identities. Lindi notes her white ancestry, but she does not claim whiteness.
Instead, she emphasizes Black and Coloured women’s similarly painful experiences of not
matching up to white-centered beauty ideals in a society slow to dismantle its recent history as a
white racial dictatorship. Perhaps Lindi’s suggestion to work towards self-love is the best chance
for overcoming the divides created by texturism and colorism within natural hair spaces, since
each person’s subjective experience of hair hate is never fully knowable to others.
“Open Your Color” in the Caribbean
Caribbean women interviewees also described how colorism and texturism shape their
lives. For example, Gina (47, Amsterdam), an Afro-Surinamese and Guyanese woman, noted the
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Caribbean idea of encouraging children to “opo yu kloro,” or “open up your color.” In other words,
opo yu kloro means to pursue romantic relationships with lighter-skinned partners to increase one’s
chance of having children with closer-to-white features. Gina told me:
My grandmother, who was of mixed race from British Guyana, and one of my aunts
disliked my mother because of her darker skin color. My grandmother even fainted when
she first saw my mother's picture. How could her favorite son move to Europe and choose
a woman whose skin is darker than his? They were actually relieved when my parents
divorced and my father is now married to a woman with a light skin color and straight
hair. My grandmother’s sister was married to a Chinese man so her children have Asian
features (one of her granddaughters was at my birthday with her family). When one of her
daughters moved to the USA and my grandmother's sister found out she was dating an
African American she took a flight to take her daughter back home. Sad isn't it?

While Gina proudly wears her dreadlocks around family, her half-sister has been effectively
disowned by the other side of her family for wearing her hair out in an Afro. Gina’s personal
family history of racial mixing and international migration across the Black Atlantic highlights the
ongoing, transcultural, and transgenerational conversations that Africana communities have
around race and beauty politics.
Global Debates about Texturism and Belonging
The nature of the Internet allows for broad discussions about colorism and texturism that
transcend families, state boundaries and the particularity of local histories. Women across the
African diaspora engage in an ongoing debate about race and gender, picking up aspects of one
another’s political ideologies and discarding ideas they consider irrelevant. For example, Tiffany,
the original author of the post shown in Figure 5.8 below, lives in the United States. In the post,
Tiffany expresses her opinion that two mixed-race bloggers originating from Western Europe have
“hijacked” the natural hair movement because of their light skin and texture privilege. Lauren (left)
is a Dutch national of Nicaraguan descent and Nia (right) is a UK national with German and
Zimbabwean parents. The two bloggers were in the middle of a global natural hair tour when
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Tiffany’s post went viral in the natural hair blogosphere. This screenshot was posted Facebook
group of Black and Coloured women in Cape Town, South Africa, garnering dozens of responses
in a heated debate. This member affirmed Tiffany’s critique of these influencers’ privilege
commenting:
Smh at some you yal with this #AllCurlsMatter nonsense. You lying to everyone when you
fail to understand what the person in the post was saying. Pls try to look deeper and have
more empathy for dark skinned, 4C folx. We don’t all have the same struggles. Some have
it harder and its not ok to disregard them when they point out what hurts them… and
recognising the struggles of someone else does not automatically mean you haven’t
struggled. Don’t be like white people pls.

Her reference to #AllLivesMatter through the hashtag #AllCurlsMatter suggests that calls to center
Blackness and the U.S.-based Black Lives Matter movement against anti-Black police brutality
circulate globally. As Gilroy (1993) points out, the Black Atlantic is an intercultural and diasporic
sort of nation of its own that is connected by a common history of white supremacist violence and
a complicity in racialization. People, ideas, and products move back and forth across state lines;
local cultures are not entirely independent, but are formed in relation to one another. Diasporic
connections within the Black Atlantic are exponentially strengthened in the 21
st
century because of
the Internet, and through the racialized sub-communities that organize Black discourses through
online hashtags. This discussion suggests that the racialization of natural hair is not only important
beyond the U.S. context, but also that women across the African diaspora consume and revise
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American political discourse to suit the needs of local conflicts. Racialized natural hair discourse
may have the potential to advance Black affirming racial projects around the world.
Conclusion
So, whose movement is it anyway? This question preoccupies natural hair spaces, and yet
the boundaries around natural hair politics continue to be messy and unstable. The constant
negotiation of who can appropriate natural hair styles and their political meanings, documented
here, operates as an embodied and gendered racial formation project that illuminates 21
st
century
social justice agendas. The African American social movement community today favors Black-
centered and race-conscious strategies to combatting anti-Black racism, and Ijeoma Oluo’s (2017)
analysis of her interview with Dolezal for The Stranger succinctly summarizes many Black
women’s view on the political nature of Black feminine embodiment:
Figure 6.8: Screenshot of a post South African natural hair Facebook group critiquing
texturism in the natural hair community (2017)
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Even if there were thousands of Rachel Dolezals in the country, would their claims of
Blackness do anything to open up the definition of whiteness to those with darker skin,
courser hair, or racialized features? The degree to which you are excluded from white
privilege is largely dependent on the degree to which your appearance deviates from
whiteness. You can be extremely light skinned and still be Black, but you cannot be
extremely or even moderately dark-skinned and be treated as white—ever.

Oluo argues categorical exclusion of Black women, both light-skinned and dark-skinned, from
whiteness and white privilege requires an exclusionary Black feminist collective identity if Black
feminism is to subvert white supremacy. Similarly, natural hair communities largely protect
natural hair as a project specifically of and for women of African descent that makes claims for
social recognition and inclusion for those same women into dominant notions of attractiveness and
professionalism, which have historically privileged white middle-class femininity. Wearing kinky
hair has become a symbolic celebration of Black beauty and a form of intersectional critical praxis
that aims to reorganize and redistribute resources—representation in the media, market share,
employment opportunities, access to healthy haircare options, aesthetic and cultural value—along
intersecting race and gender lines. In doing so, women of African descent have produced new
knowledge and ways of caring for their bodies, and given new politicized meanings to the kinky,
braided and twisted hairstyles that they’ve claimed as their own. Including non-Black women in
natural hair representation is often likened to reducing the anti-police brutality campaign Black
Lives Matter into a colorblind “all lives matter” image. Given the long history of racial conflict
over Black hair’s political symbolism and over market share within the “ethnic” hair care industry,
centering women of African descent in natural hair politics has become a political and moral
priority for many. Fannie’s (45, Los Angeles) assertion summarized dominant sentiments: “The
only way that Black lives will matter is if we stop spending money in communities that aren’t
ours.” The racialization of natural hair’s collective identity, while fragile and challenging, remains
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an important mobilization strategy for combatting anti-Black gendered racism in the United States
and beyond.
The descriptor “natural hair” does not overtly connote the racialized image that many Black
women intend. Black women’s efforts to create representational and affirming space for
themselves requires that they construct a boundary around the natural hair movement’s collective
identity that frames Black women as an oppressed group fighting for representation. This
boundary-making requires constant maintenance, especially as market interests routinely threaten
to depoliticize natural hair’s anti-racist symbolism for Black women. To appeal to the broadest
possible consumer base, many beauty and haircare companies project a colorblind multiracial
vision of natural hair that downplays different racial histories and the privileges of proximity to
whiteness. Likewise, as the fashion and entertainment industries take notice of more Black women
embracing their natural hair, journalists, stylists and editors interpret kinky hair and braids as edgy
style trends open to anyone for the choosing. In doing so, these industries neglect the cultural and
historical significance of hair and hair texture for women of African descent. As with many other
consumer-based political projects, global capitalism does its best to absorb and profit from the
natural hair movement’s grassroots community. While many women of color rightly experience
advertisers’, celebrities’ and mainstream corporations’ colorblind representations of natural hair
culture as co-optations of a movement they feel is political, for some naturalpreneurs, class
interests supersede race and gender politics. To reassert the political intent of the natural hair
movement in a neoliberal capitalist moment that celebrates self-fashioning and choice, some Black
consumers actively push back and reassert boundaries around a collective identity they claim as
their own. As I’ve documented here, communities of Black women use the language of cultural
appropriation to call out fetishistic and exploitative adoptions of Black hair styles and movement
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discourse, deeming white women as unauthentic outsiders and Black businesses attempting to
racially diversify their consumer base as shameful sell-outs.
However, Black identity itself is diverse, shifting, and varies from place to place. This
diversity complicates the radical potential of an embodied Black feminist identity politics.
Texturism and colorism continue to hierarchize Black women’s natural beauty in societies founded
on white supremacist ideals. This issue is clearly observable in advertisements and in the upper
echelons of the beauty influencer community. It is a source of deep hurt anger that darker-skinned
women and women with tighter coils remain underrepresented and stigmatized within natural hair
communities. Black women with highly textured hair, especially those with darker complexions,
are unequivocally justified in their critiques of the natural hair movement’s exclusionary ideal that
subtly privileges proximity to whiteness. How can those who are invested in centering Blackness
practically and responsibly deal with difference? I argue that natural hair politics can avoid
essentializing Blackness or reviving regressive blood quantum debates among Black women by
foregrounding the experience of racial marginalization through hair texture. Omi and Winant
(1994) warn us that racial projects become racist when they rely on essentialist logic. Crafting a
collective identity that emphasizes a shared subjectivity and advocates for non-comparative self-
love while recognizing and actively counteracting the underrepresentation of dark-skinned Black
women offers the best chance for overcoming the divides created by texturism and colorism within
natural hair spaces. A greater acknowledgement of the affective aspect of embodiment pushes past
the dichotomous and oppositional mind-body divides inherent in Western thought and encourages
respectful empathy for oneself and for others. Collins’ (2000) conceptualization of the Afrocentric
notion of beauty is a helpful starting place, which includes mind, spirit, and body as simultaneous
factors in aesthetic assessment.
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Racial essentialism unproductively asserts that those with relative power and privilege are
unable to understand or empathize across race and color lines. Effective calls for change
necessitate acknowledgement by outsiders and gatekeepers who learn to analyze social life through
an intersectional lens. Some white women, like Marla, can and do endeavor to work alongside
Black women without culturally appropriating Black hair and its political symbolism. Moreover,
most light-skinned women I interviewed, like Olivia and Shantee, are sensitive to their color and
hair texture privilege and actively prioritize inclusivity. At the same time, we cannot fully remove
ourselves from the culture in which we currently live, where images often circulate without context
and without the voices of those depicted in them. For the natural hair movement to operate as a
Black feminist project in a capitalist, patriarchal and white supremacist society, participants must
always be mindful that we act from within the social relations and subject positions we wish to
change.

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Chapter 7
Conclusion
Blk Rhetoric
who's gonna make all
that beautiful blk/rhetoric
mean something.
like
I mean
who's gonna take
words
blk/beautiful
and make more of it
than blk/capitalism.
u dig?
i mean
like who's gonna
take all the young/long/haired/
natural/brothers and sisters
and let them
grow till
all that is
imp't is them
selves
moving in straight/
revolutionary/lines/toward the enemy
(and we know who that is)
like. man.
who's gonna give our young
blk people new heros
[. . . .]
( instead of quick/fucks
in the hall/way of
white/america's
mind)
like. this. is an S.0.S.
me. calling. . . .
calling. . . .
some/one.
pleasereplysoon.
-Sonia Sanchez (1970)
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This dissertation theorized beauty politics as projects of gendered racial formation. While
sociologists tend only to apply racial formation theory to study state-level politics, this research
has highlighted how the state and market are concerned with the micro-regulation of bodies, and
how race is constructed and contested through the styling and self-presentation choices individual
people make. I’ve argued that bodies are a terrain through which groups compete to define and
assert race, gender and power relations.
This project considers a contemporary gendered racial project that takes up hair—the
natural hair movement—to theorize Black women’s experiences within an increasingly global and
commercialized field of race and gender relations. Relying on qualitative methods and a grounded
theory approach, I based this project in the lived experiences of everyday women of color who
negotiate a politicized trend of wearing natural hair with disparate expectations of state institutions,
family members, and employers. In this study, I bring attention to ongoing shifts in Black women’s
collective consciousness around hair, race, gender, and beauty.
This dissertation addressed four questions: How are women of African descent
reproducing, negotiating and challenging beauty ideals through natural hair? How is race being
constituted in the current discourse on Black hair styles and natural hair politics? How does the
current commercialized neoliberal context constrain, enable and inform Black women’s beauty
practices and their meanings? How does the natural hair movement reorganize Black women’s
relationships to the global market and within the Black beauty industry? I have shown how the
natural hair movement challenges the racial order of the beauty industry through consumer
capitalism, and in turn, Black women’s possibilities for consumption and entrepreneurialism. I
have also shown how, in some cases, natural hair transcends the limits of the market to influence
self-care practices, inform political identities, and challenge interpersonal power relations. I have
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described how natural hair meanings are inserted into social movements in ways that assert
intersectional politics, making women’s experience of racism legible. Finally, I have discussed
how natural hair communities in United States and in other parts of the African diaspora grapple
with legacies and evolving forms of white supremacy like colorism and texturism through racial
boundary-making and remaking.
Race and Resistance
The cultural significance, texture and manipulability of African peoples’ hair has made it
an especially ripe medium for social control and critique over the last 400 years. To justify the
transatlantic slave trade, Europeans racialized Sub-Saharan African people’s curly and coily hair
textures as signifiers of their Blackness, and in turn, of their inferiority. Associating Black hair
with a primitive natural state and in opposition to white cultural superiority rationalized a white
supremacist plantation economy that relied on Black bodies to toil the land. Women of African
descent have always felt this devaluation of curly hair most acutely because women in Western
patriarchal society are more likely than men to be valued proximity to beauty ideals and their
ability to bear children. Chapter 2 traced how the ways in which Black hair has been styled,
represented, and discussed have evolved alongside economic, cultural and political shifts, and as
groups struggle to exert control over their lives and their worlds. Racial formation theory’s view
of race as a project of hegemonic dominance, coercion, consent, and contestation is useful to
making sense of these shifts. In many moments throughout history, politicizing beauty has enabled
Black women to imagine their bodies differently and negotiate the social structures they live
within. For example, hair straightening has been a useful, though contested form of respectability
politics that enables some Black women to navigate the confines of Eurocentric cultures within
corporate workplaces and texturism within Black communities. And in the 1970s, the Afro
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symbolized a counter-hegemonic politics in the context of Black Power’s calls for race and class
justice.
Chapter 3 discussed the continuing significance of race through the second decade of the
21
st
century, as expressed through discriminatory institutional policies and as demonstrated by
persistent stigmas against Black bodies and natural hair. Colorblind discourses that evoke
longstanding stereotypes of Black people as wild, hypersexual, unprofessional, or ugly without
explicitly discussing or naming race complicate Black people’s experiences of racism today.
Disparaging comments by television pundits, family members and coworkers, in addition to
institutional grooming policies that disproportionately affect Black women, put pressure on
women of African descent to change their appearance towards a white, middle-class beauty ideal.
Hair straightening can be a mindful and strategic practice to ensure upward mobility through
employment and the dating markets, but many research participants express having internalized
patriarchal and white supremacist messages from the media, their families, and coworkers that
lighter skin and long, straight hair are more beautiful, more professional and more feminine. Many
women choose natural hairstyles despite holding such beliefs; however, their embodied transitions
to natural hair often inspire a reconsideration of Eurocentric ideals. The experience of discovering
one’s natural hair texture often begot critical inquiry of oneself, one’s interactions, and one’s
community, especially when women of African descent encounter intense interpersonal forms of
gendered racism because of their natural hair, like comments from colleagues at work and
admonitions from family members.
Women who participate natural hair movement broadly describe and experience the natural
hair as an intimate project of self-love, self-care, and self-confidence. Going natural produces new
knowledge—new ways of thinking about self and society—that foreground Black women’s
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subjectivity. Online natural hair forums aid in this process by collecting, archiving, and globally
disseminating self-valuating images and counter-hegemonic ideologies, produced through Back
women’s everyday hair care practices and experiences negotiating discrimination. For some
multiracial women in South Africa and Brazil, embracing natural hair further spurred an embrace
of a Black identity for the first time. That Brazilian and South African women describe
transitioning into a Black identity is theoretically significant, and highlights the necessity of multi-
level analyses of racial formation. If we only consider how the state represents race and without
recognizing how individual people shift their decisions to physically represent themselves and self-
identify at the micro-level, we miss out on an entire dimension of how race can be and is being
critiqued, reworked, and reimagined. The body is a medium between and productive of racial
consciousness and social racial identity.
In chapter 4, I discussed how naturalness has assumed new definitions in the 21
st
century,
alongside a burgeoning green movement. “Natural” has become descriptive both of hair texture
and the integrity of ingredients in hair care products. This multi-faceted definition of naturalness
is the distinguishing feature of 21
st
century Black beauty activism. Black women embrace
broadened definitions of naturalness over and against racist associations between Blackness and
primitive uncivilized naturalness—connotations that have been used to rationalize white-
supremacist chattel slavery, legitimize forced sterilizations, and justify rape and other forms of
violence against Black women. The natural hair movement is a gendered racial project that undoes
and remakes ties between Black womanhood and naturalness, advancing ideas that natural styling
is responsible, discerning, and noble. Natural hair spaces transform natural hair from a controlling
stigma to an ideal by taking up neoliberal biomedical frameworks and highlighting Black women’s
alignment with contemporary understandings of responsible citizenship, healthy behavior, and
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good mothering through precautionary consumption. Through natural hair blogs, vlogs, beauty
shops, and meet-ups, lay Black women are learning to take seriously their embodied experiences
of pain, honor their embodied knowledge, and treat themselves as environments worthy of
protection. Thus, the implications of the natural hair movement are more than ideological; the
natural hair movement has become an intersectional public health project that fills gaps left by
governments, mainstream corporations and activists groups, which commonly neglect Black
women’s needs by focusing on more privileged groups and more publicly visible environmental
issues.
In chapter 5, I discussed how some Black women use their natural hair as a form of
intersectional critical praxis (Collins & Bilge, 2016) to make their gendered experiences of racism
legible. Women across the African diaspora use their subjective experiences of transition and
natural hair discourses generated within globally accessible online spaces to embody intersectional
critiques against dominant male-centered anti-racist movements where they live. For example,
natural hair talk allows Black American women to make their gendered experiences of racism and
their right to bodily integrity legible alongside the male-centered, street-focused Black Lives
Matter Movement against police brutality. Similarly, dismantling grooming policies against
natural hair in schools was the centerpiece of South African girls’ demands for decolonized
education alongside the Fees Must Fall Movement, which otherwise failed to advance a consistent
gender analysis. This dissertation showed that gender and context shape both racial formation and
political praxis.
While chapter 5 considered the relationship between the natural hair movement and
concurrent social justice activism across the social movement sector, chapter 6 focused on
women’s efforts to stabilize the natural hair movement’s internal collective identity. I described
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how interviewees and social commentators construct racial boundaries around the right to wear
and sell natural hair to ensure that natural hair politics centers Black women. This is racial
formation at work. By calling out white women with braids and Afros as cultural appropriators
and by shaming Black-owned companies who “sell out” on social media, natural hair communities
strive to reserve the movement’s symbolism, aesthetic, and economic opportunities for people of
African descent. But I’ve also pointed out that the resistant potential of natural hair politics does
not ripple out to empower a homogenous group of Black women. Racial, ethnic, and phenotypical
diversity among women who participate in natural hair culture challenges efforts to establish a
cohesive collective identity. Texturism, or the idea that curly hair is more beautiful than kinky hair,
operates even within natural hair spaces and privileges women with looser curl patterns while
constraining representation and limiting economic opportunities for women with Dreadlocks and
women with tight curls.
Texturism also shapes whether women experience the natural hair movement’s beauty
ideal as resistant or reproductive of hegemonic beauty norms and racial hierarchies. For example,
several Coloured South Africans embraced a Black identity for the first time upon transitioning to
natural hair, which undermined dominant, legislated constructions of Blackness and Colouredness
as racially distinct. In contrast, some Black South African women felt that the celebration of
defined curls in natural hair spaces privileges Coloured women over Black women and in doing
so reproduces apartheid racial hierarchies. Many women manipulate their natural hair to mimic a
looser texture to gain access and opportunity. I did just that during the research process when I
realized it enhanced my data collection in the field. Like hair straightening to navigate corporate
workplaces and family pressures, styling to appeal to texture hierarchies can be mindful, strategic,
reluctant, uncritical, creative or any combination of the above. The objectives and outcomes of
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resistance are relative.
This study supports and adds to previous research on colorblind racism, which has
described how privileged folks and institutions perpetuate white supremacy in the post-Jim Crow/
post-apartheid era without explicitly naming race (eg. Bonilla-Silva, 2006; Carr, 1997). But, this
study’s discussions of texturism and of natural hair companies’ attempts to appeal to the widest
possible consumer base also shows how colorblind discourses operate within Black communities
to maintain hierarchy and inequality. Individual Black women’s and natural hair entrepreneurs’
strategic downplays of color and texture differences within the natural hair community, driven by
market promotion and today’s dominant Black-first anti-racist political ideology, often fail to
address histories of elitist colorism within communities of color and threaten to depoliticize and
individualize the natural hair movement.
Theorizing Neoliberal Black Beauty
The natural hair movement is not just a microcosm of the neoliberal global economy, but
also a critical space where Black feminist discourses and praxis are traded in a circle of
performative displays of stylized femininity, consumerist distinction, and digital aesthetic
production. The rise of interactive Internet technology alongside natural hair politics enables
women of African descent, with their highly valued social, aesthetic, and emotional skills, to
circumvent retail and distribution systems that have historically excluded them through online
retail, natural hair meet-ups, and influencer vlogging. Today’s natural hair movement, like
yesterday’s pressing comb, produces more possibilities for a Black middle-class through additional
modes of online entrepreneurship. Black women entrepreneurs, with their intimate knowledge of
caring for Afro textured hair, are reclaiming expertise, reentering the Black beauty industry, and
recirculating profit within their communities. Many of the naturalpreneurs I interviewed
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exemplified possibilities for pushing against the stratifying economic, political, and industry
structures they work within, challenging the ways most scholars have understood the
characteristics, scope, and outcomes of capitalist politics, beauty politics, and identity politics.
Feminist analyses of neoliberal capitalism predominantly suggest that consumer-based
strategies for empowerment cannot produce meaningful feminist or antiracist change (Butler,
2013; Gill & Scharff, 2011; McRobbie, 2009; Gill, 2007; Duggan, 2003). However, women’s
experiences of and agency within beauty cultures are often omitted from these critiques of
neoliberal beauty. By highlighting the subjective experience of Black women’s beauty work, I
showed that natural hair can both political and transformative notwithstanding and at times because
of its consumer capitalist orientation. A combination of identity politics and new products for
“natural” hair has catalyzed critiques of exclusionary media representations and the racial order of
the global beauty industry. Many women turn to naturalness as a wellness practice, and find in
natural hair spaces the tools and information to overcome toxic gendered racism within the beauty
industry. Though much of sociological literature about race and Blackness focuses on the Black
underclass, but my interview sample that consists mainly of economically mobile Black women
highlights how experiences and outcomes within neoliberal capitalism are not monolithically
negative for Black people, but diverse and potentially unexpected. Researchers should not take for
granted how race, gender, culture, and social location shape how people experience and respond
to neoliberalism, or what communities stand to gain through engagement with its pressures.
This research has described how today’s organizing around natural hair accommodates
neoliberal biomedicalized frameworks from the green movement to politicize wellness, self-care,
and self-love as forms of Black feminist praxis. Though is clear that biomedical discourses of self-
scrutiny operate in the interest of global capitalism, and that class certainly stratifies who has
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access to natural hair discourses and healthy products, it is also important to note that many
naturalpreneurs actively engage with poor and working-class Black communities in ways and to
depths that environmental feminists, environmental justice advocates, government regulatory
bodies, and large retailers have not. In chapter 4, I introduced naturalpreneur manufacturers who
have created careers brewing organic and ethically sourced hair potions to sell to health-conscious
Black women in their local communities, and naturalpreneurs social media influencers who
suggest DIY alternatives. Both market a “green” natural hair politics in the process, advancing
precautionary consumption as a Black feminist wellness project. For example, upon struggling to
find affordable natural hair products in her area, Paula created her own low-cost natural product
line. She describes her business as “a means to an end…an end to being anything but completely
and wholly without boundaries—boundaries put on us by society, by time, and by money.”
Some women in natural hair communities are pushing to secure greater access to healthy
foods in low income areas, gaining literacy in evaluating the toxicity of chemicals in their cosmetic
and food products, and connecting natural hair politics to other causes like mental health and
breastfeeding. In other words, natural hair culture goes with the flow of neoliberalism, but in ways
that promote not just individual body projects, but also collective efforts at health promotion as
responses to past unhealthy practices grounded in gendered racism. Non-profits like Black Women
for Wellness are already educating at natural hair events, and more wellness activists should
consider using salons, cosmetology schools, natural hair events, and natural hair online forums as
sites for public health advocacy. This could do crucial work, since much recent medical research
links chemical relaxers to various reproductive health illnesses that Black women
disproportionately experience (BWW, 2016; Stiel et al., 2016; Wise et al., 2012; Donovan et al.,
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2007; Rosenberg et al., 2007). We need more interdisciplinary and intersectional research on the
relationships between beauty ideals, beauty practices, and health disparities.
Beyond Race, Class and Gender: Natural Hair in a Global Perspective
This study demonstrates the need for sociologists to further study the ways in which Black
women’s positions and experiences differ across the Black Atlantic and vis a vis one another.
While research about Black beauty politics has focused on Black women’s exclusion from
representations of beauty in the mainstream media, less work has discussed how Black women in
unevenly developing countries like South African and Brazil are further marginalized within Black
spaces that are, in theory, globally accessible in today’s digital era. When we zoom out from a
focus on the United States, it is apparent that global political and economic arrangements also
stratify women’s access to power within the natural hair movement. While Black American women
live at the bottom of race, gender and often class hierarchies in United States, they are privileged
by their status as Americans living in the developed Global North. Black American natural hair
influencers and entrepreneurs dominate the Black hair care market and production of natural hair
culture globally, spreading many American-centered frameworks like analogies between
#AllLivesMatter and #AllCurlsMatter.
American hegemony, global capitalism, and white supremacy intersect to constrain the
possibilities for cultural production and consumption in much of the diaspora. In South Africa,
Brazil, The Netherlands, France and Spain, almost all the products for Black consumers that are
available in beauty supply and convenience stores are not only made for straight hairstyling, but
are manufactured by American companies. Even though African American naturalpreneurs
struggle to compete in a hostile and exclusionary beauty market at home, they benefit from
American cultural and economic privileges abroad. Women living in the United States are
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overrepresented in the natural hair blogosphere, and the content they produce casts American
products as must-have “holy grails” while ignoring the fact that most American-made products are
inaccessible to or prohibitively expensive for the rest of the African diaspora. This affects market
demand abroad. On several occasions, potential interviewees for this project in South Africa
negotiated samples of American natural hair products as compensation despite affordable,
effective and accessible alternatives manufactured by local businesses. This sort of Black
American cultural imperialism also shapes women’s natural hair organizing efforts outside of the
United States. The first natural hair organizer in The Netherlands told me that she started a
company importing hard-to-get American natural hair products. She then began hosting natural
hair events to teach her customers how to use them.
Not all women outside of the United States welcome or idealize American influences.
Some women explicitly acknowledge and work to counteract unequal global relations within this
diasporic cultural movement. In Cape Town, I sat in on a collective of natural hair bloggers and
entrepreneurs as they strategized against rumors that companies SheaMoisture and Cantu had
contracts with major South African convenience stores in the works. These women entrepreneurs
were highly aware that a sole emphasis on Black representation within the natural hair movement
ignores intersecting social positions like class and global location that privilege some Black
women over others in an unevenly globalizing world. The South African naturalpreneurs worried
about their livelihoods, and they also pointed out that their needs were unmet by the American
market due to differences in climate, hair textures, and cultural tastes. Future researchers might
further probe how global inequality stratifies other efforts at diasporic and pan-African politics,
collaborations, and cultural exchange.
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Since I was interested in theorizing natural hair politics as a gendered racial project and a
potential form of Black feminist resistance, I chose field sites with similar histories of European
settler colonialism and slavery. Not all Black women are alike, but as a group, Black women have
a particular historical and political reality in white supremacist contexts. At the same time, I hoped
to show that women of African descent across the Black Atlantic are not monolithic. Throughout
the research process, I strived to remain wary of imposing my own Black American perspectives
on women who live outside of the Unites States. I was reminded of the importance of reflexivity
and positionality when an American entrepreneur I interviewed, whose products focus on “mixed”
naturally curly hair, explicitly described South Africa as a new frontier for her business to conquer.
It was clear to me that she did not realize that Coloured people do not think of themselves as
“mixed-race” in the same way some multiracial Americans do, nor was she aware of Coloured
people’s experiences of forced removal and segregation from both Black and white South
Africans, and it worried me that she spoke of her business’s mission that way.
This research cannot predict or generalize about what natural hair means to all Africana
women. But, given that new natural hair salons, online forums, and meet-ups are proliferating in
places less defined by racial difference including Kenya, Nigeria and Ethiopia, future research
might further investigate what contemporary natural hair cultures on the African continent might
tell us about globalization, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, and identity in a digital era.
Final Thoughts
The Afro of the 1960s and 1970s depoliticized as Black-owned businesses were bought out
and as mainstream media coopted its resistant symbolism. It is this situation that Sonia Sanchez
comments on in the opening poem to this chapter, “Blk Rhetoric” (1970). Notwithstanding this
historical lesson, I am optimistic about the potential for today’s natural hair movement to create
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lasting change. Inner healing, I hope, will endure what Sanchez calls “quick fucks” with white
power, in this case, shifting style trends, institutional policies, and the wax and wane of the market.
The women I interviewed describe finding a greater sense of self through the experience
of transition, such that they feel more confident wearing straightened hair, weaves, braids, and
coils alike. And, since many women align transitions to natural hair with other wellness choices
like exercise and healthy eating, I expect natural haircare practices to be just one aspect of peoples’
enduring lifestyle changes. Given that many grooming policies against Dreadlocks and Afros are
still intact and legally legitimatized, I know that many Black mothers will continue to advise their
daughters to straighten their hair to maximize their chances on the job and dating markets. In
addition to if not instead of such cautionary advice, I expect that the natural hair movement
generation will teach their loved ones to say “I’m beautiful” to their reflections in the mirror, “don’t
touch me” when touch is unwanted, and “I belong here” anywhere they go. This, I hope, will make
all this beautiful Black rhetoric mean something.
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Appendix A: Glossary of Popular Terms Used in Black Hair Culture

Big Chop v. A form of transitioning where a person cuts or shaves the entire head to
immediately remove hair. Most often used to remove permanently straightened due to
chemical relaxers, heat styling, or another damaging process. In some rare but highly
publicized cases, natural hair influencers have filmed second “big chops” of their natural
hair to resist perceived over-attachment and an excessive identification with their long
hair.
Braids n. Hair that is sectioned into three parts and woven together (also referred to as “plaits.”)
Can be styled with one’s real hair, or by adding synthetic hair for length and/or easier
maintenance. Cornrows are hair that is braided along the scalp by adding additional
pieces of hair in a desired direction.
Creamy Crack n. A phrase used to refer to the chemicals used to relax hair. Relaxers have a
thick, creamy like substance and like cocaine, are white. Implies that those who use
relaxers have an obsessive, drug-like dependence on hair straightening.
Dreadlocks n. Hair that is matted together, or “locked,” in sections. Has roots in the Rastafarian
religion, but many wear dreadlocks as a political statement or fashion choice. Some
dreadlocks are grown “freeform,” where hair is left to group and create sections on its
own. Others deliberately style dreadlocks by parting hair into even sections. “Sisterlocks”
and “Brotherlocks” are an increasingly popular form of tiny dreadlocks originated by Dr.
JoAnne Cornwell in 1993, where hair is sectioned into a small grid and knotted together
using a specialized tool.
Good Hair adj. A term in Black culture used to describe hair that is naturally straighter in
texture. “Good hair” can be wavy or curly, but is not tightly coiled enough to be
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considered nappy or kinky. Defined as the opposite of “bad” or “nappy hair,” and is
perceived as more beautiful and manageable. Natural hair communities tend to redefine
“good hair” as healthy hair of any texture in resistance to texturism.
Hair Typing n. A system that classifies hair texture into categories: 1 (straight), 2 (wavy), 3
(curly), and 4 (kinky or coily). Each category is further broken down into A, B, and C for
more detail. Some believe that hair typing hierarchizes hair texture and reinforces
texturism and “good/bad hair grades,” while others find the system helpful in describing
their hair in more detail and finding influencers to follow whose hair texture is like their
own. In addition to typing curl pattern, discussions in natural hair culture often but less
frequently type hair by porosity, or the degree to which a person’s hair absorbs and holds
moisture.
Influencer n. An individual who uses his or her popularity on social media networking sites or
blogs to influence the opinions, behavior, taste, or consumer choices of his or her
audience. Being an influencer is a new form of entrepreneurship that relies on digital
content creation, sponsorship from companies, and/or residuals from video views. For
natural hair influencers, content creation often takes the form of reviewing and marketing
hair products and creating styling tutorials or writing opinion pieces about beauty culture.
Natural hair influencers are highly sought after to make guest appearances at natural hair
shows. Some create their own natural hair tour “meet and greets” to monetize authority
offline.
Line of Demarcation n. The point where virgin and processed hair meet.
Nappy adj A term for natural hair textures that are kinky or tightly coiled. Often used in a
derogatory sense and defined as the negative opposite of “good hair.” However, many
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Blacks have reclaimed term “nappy” as a celebratory or value-neutral descriptive term for
tightly coiled hair.
Natural adj. 1) Hair that has not been processed by chemical relaxers and is worn in a state that
does not require straightening of any kind. Dreadlocks are considered a natural hairstyle.
Braids, cornrows, twists and twist-outs are also considered natural hairstyles even though
they require manipulating hair and mechanically alter hair texture. 2) In reference to
products, natural refers to goods that are free from chemicals like preservatives, parabens,
silicones, and sulfates.
Product Junkie n. A person who has amassed a large collection natural hair products. Women
tend to become product junkies if they enjoy trying out new items or because they have
not yet learned what products they prefer. An online culture in which influencers review
natural hair products and a natural hair meet-up culture centered around vendors likely
may contributes to the “product junkie” phenomenon.
Protective Style n. A style worn for multiple days, weeks, or months at a time to reduce the need
to manipulate one’s hair. Popular protective styles include two-strand twists, braids, and
cornrows. Some women wear weaves and wigs over protective styles.
Relaxed Hair (permed hair) n. Hair that has been permanently straightened by applying a
chemical solution of sodium hydroxide (lye) or calcium hydroxide (no lye).
Texturism n A belief that privileges straighter hair is more beautiful, feminine and superior. In
natural hair communities, texturism contributes to the overrepresentation of women with
wavy and curly hair, and the underrepresentation of women with tightly coiled or kinky
hair.
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Transitioning v. The process of growing out chemically treated or damaged hair to reveal one’s
natural hair texture. Transitioning typically happens in one of two ways: 1) Big chopping
by shaving the entire head at once or 2) growing out relaxed or damaged hair over time to
retain a desired hair length.
TWA “teeny weeny Afro” n Short hair in beginning stages of transition, just after a “big chop.”
Two Strand Twists n. A popular protective style for natural hair achieved by weaving two
strands of hair around each other. A “twist out” is a hairstyle where two strand twists are
unwoven after hair has had time take on the spiral texture from the twists. “Senegalese
twists” are a hairstyle in which synthetic hair is added to small twisted sections.
Weave n. A hairstyle in which wefts of synthetic or human hair are sewn, glued, or bonded over
one’s own plaited or cornrowed hair.

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Appendix B: Participant Demographic Information
Table B.1 Demographic Information for Interviewees in the United States
Name Age Location Hairstyle Occupation
Aaliyah 30 California Natural Actor/ Make-Up Artist Black American
Aimee 40 New York Natural, Dreadlocks High School Educator
Black American
(Senegalese)
Alexis 33 California Natural Music Producer and Hair Business Owner Black American
Alma 68 Louisiana Natural Retired Educator Black American (Creole)
Anita 47 California Natural
Breastfeeding Advocate and Natural Hair
organizer Black American
Ashley 24 California Natural High School Educator
Multiracial (Pilipino,
Chinese, African American)
Ava 21 Illinois Natural, Dreadlocks
College Student and Natural Hair Business
Owner Black American
Bridgette 27 North Carolina Natural Dentist Black American
Chaunice 37 California Natural Filmmaker, Natural Hair Documentary Black American
Corliss 62 North Carolina Transitioning, Pressed Retired Educator Black American
Fannie 45 California Natural Natural Hairstylist Black American
Fatima 38 New York
Natural with a straight
weave Braiding Shop Owner
Black American
(Senegalese)
Isis 32 California Natural Filmmaker Black American
Jane 42 California Natural, Curly Weave Television executive Black American
Julie 40 New York Natural, Braids Administrative Assistant Black American (Jamaican)
Krystal 24 Florida Natural Graduate student in education/actress Black American
LaToya 23 Texas Natural, Straight Weave IT Analyst Black American
Lauren 26 New York Natural Waitress and Entrepreneur Black American
Lisa 35 California Natural, Straight Weave University Administrator
Black American (Afro-
Belizean)
Loretta 44 California Natural Personal Trainer Black American
Loriel 36 New York Natural, Braids Hair Braider Senegalese American
Margaret 27 California Natural Biotech Executive Black American
Mariam 26 California Natural Physical Therapist Black American (Eritrean)
Marla 42 New York Natural Jewelry Designer Black American
Marta 35 California Natural Make-Up Artist
Bi-Racial American (Black
& White)
Michelle 42 California Natural Healthcare Worker, Natural Hair Blogger Black American
Mina 34 New York
Natural (head shaved) with a
wig Hair Braider
Black American
(Senegalese)
Nala 33 California Natural Natural Hair Business Owner Black American
Nicki 31 California Natural, Straight Weave Screenwriter Black American
Nina 62 California Natural Professor Black American
Nora 34 California Natural Musician and Natural Hair Organizer Black American
Olivia 32 New York Natural Natural Hair Magazine Editor
Bi-Racial American (Black
& White)
Paula 27 California Natural
Natural Hair Business Owner and TV
Producer Black American
Rebecca 22 California Natural Non-Profit Worker
Black American (Afro-
Belizean)
Ruby 28 North Carolina Relaxed College Recruiter
Black American (Ghanaian
& African American)
Salah 19 New York Natural, Straight Weave Beauty Supply Retail Associate
Black American
(Trinidadian)
Shantee 42 Indiana Natural Natural Hair Business Owner Black American
Shauna 24 California Natural Car Salesperson Black American
Shauna 24 Pennsylvania Natural, Braids Graduate Student Black American
Shawna 23 New York Natural Graduate Student Black American
Sheryl 42 California Natural Natural Hair Business Owner Multiracial
Stacey 37 California Natural, Dreadlocks School Principal Black American
Tatiana 39 North Carolina Natural College Administrator Black American
Tina 25 California Natural, Dreadlocks High School Educator
Black American (Afro-
Peruvian)
Tinzi 25 California Natural, Faux Dreadlocks Actor Black American
Xena 25 Florida Natural Social Worker
Bi-Racial American (Black
& White)
Zaire 23 California Natural Graduate Student Black American
*All Interviewees Identified as Female

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Table B.2 Demographic Information for Interviewees Outside of the United States
Name Age Location Hairstyle Occupation Race/ethnicity
BRAZIL
Lola 28 Bahia Natural Graduate Student Afro-Brazilian
Pina 28 Bahia Natural Graduate Student Afro-Brazilian
FRANCE
Francesca 25 Paris Natural Medical Student Black French (Senegalese)
Anya 27 Paris Natural Artist Black French (Senegalese)
Kelly 32 Paris Natural Artist Black French (Senegalese)
THE NETHERLANDS
Gina 47 Amsterdam Natural Marketing Executive
Black Dutch (Afro-
Surinamese)
SPAIN
Roxy 28 Valencia Natural Administrative Assistant
Black Spanish (Equatorial
Guinea)
Jordan 23 Valencia Natural, pressed, weave Graduate Student
Black Spanish (Equatorial
Guinea)
SOUTH AFRICA
Sheila 45 Western Cape Natural Coffee Shop Owner Black South African
Stacey 29 Western Cape Natural Natural Hair Business Owner
Black South African
(Kenyan)
Tori 26 Western Cape Natural HR Recruiter Coloured South African
Lindi 41 Western Cape Natural
Administrative Assistant and Natural Hair
Blogger Coloured South African
Brie 35 Western Cape Natural University Administrator Coloured South African
Tammy 27 Western Cape Natural Hospitality and Natural Hair Blogger Coloured South African
Marley 26 Western Cape Natural High School Educator Coloured South African
Rhonda 34 Western Cape Natural, Braids Non-Profit Executive Coloured South African
Marlene 45 Western Cape Natural Middle School Educator Coloured South African
Raven 26 Western Cape Natural Journalist Coloured South African
Julie 26 Western Cape Natural Law School Student Coloured South African
Zina 27 Gauteng Natural with straight weave Advertising executive
Black & Coloured South
African
Sheila 45 Gauteng Natural Natural Hair Business Owner Black South African
Thembi 22 Gauteng Natural Student Black South African
Evelyn 42 Gauteng Natural Natural Hair Business Owner Black Zimbabwean
*All Interviewees Identified as Female

Table B.3 Demographic Information for Other Interviewees Working in Natural Hair Spaces
Name Age Location Occupation Race/Ethnicity Sex

Bryan 31 New York Natural Hair Filmmaker Black American (Dominican) Male
Frederick 52 Washington DC Natural Hair Photographer Black American Male
Henry 30 New York Beauty Supply Store Owner Korean American Male
Ishwar 31 Amsterdam Beauty Supply Store Owner Dutch Pakistani Male
Marla 52 Texas Founder, Natural Hair Website White American Female
Maurice 58 Washington DC
Founder, Beauty Supply Manufacturer’s
Organization Black American Male
Ritesh 22 New York Beauty Tools Manufacturer Indian American Male
Shaunik 41 Amsterdam Beauty Supply Store Owner Dutch Pakistani Male
Suyi 38 Valencia, Spain Beauty Supply Store Owner Spanish/ Equatorial Guinea Male
Vince 36 California Natural Hair Filmmaker and Tech Executive
Bi-Racial American (Black &
White) Male

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Appendix C: Informed Consent Form

University of Southern California
Department of Sociology
851 Downey Way
Hazel Stanley Hall 314
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1059

INFORMED CONSENT TO PARTICIPATE IN
RESEARCH

You are invited to participate in a research study conducted by Chelsea Johnson at the University
of Southern California. We are seeking participants who patron, own, manage or operate a beauty
business, are over 18 years old, and are proficient in English. Your participation is voluntary. You
should read the information below, and ask questions about anything you do not understand, before
deciding whether to participate. Please take as much time as you need to read the consent form.
You may also decide to discuss participation with your family or friends. If you decide to
participate, you will be asked to sign this form. You will be given a copy of this form.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
To better understand how race, class, and gender shape beauty and body politics for women of
color. The study uses the natural hair movement as a lens to explore the connections between black
women’s politics, identity, and presentations of self.

STUDY PROCEDURES
If you volunteer to participate in this study, you will be interviewed individually. Interview
questions will concern your personal opinions and experiences socially and regarding your
styling regimens over time. In addition, the interview will ask about your beauty purchasing
habits and preferences. The conversational style interview will take approximately one hour and,
with your permission, will be audiotaped for transcription purposes only. The interviews will
take place in a convenient place for you, such as online, your store, home or at a local library.

POTENTIAL RISKS AND DISCOMFORTS
There are no anticipated risks associated with this study. Your interview responses will be kept
confidential, available only to the researchers for analysis purposes. You may stop the interview
at any time no consequence to you.

POTENTIAL BENEFITS TO PARTICIPANTS AND/OR TO SOCIETY
Although there are no direct benefits to you for participating in this study, we anticipate that
your participation will benefit the way society understands how history, gender, citizenship, and
culture interact to facilitate and shape economic activity across race.

CONFIDENTIALITY
We will keep your records for this study confidential as far as permitted by law. However, if we
are required to do so by law, we will disclose confidential information about you. The members
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

270
of the research team and the University of Southern California’s Human Subjects Protection
Program (HSPP) may access the data. The HSPP reviews and monitors research studies to protect
the rights and welfare of research subjects.

The data will be stored in password-protected files on the researchers’ computers to prevent access
by unauthorized personnel. Authorized personnel include Chelsea Johnson and Dr. Elaine Bell
Kaplan. Only the researchers will listen to and transcribe the information you provide. Audiotapes
will not be used in any public presentation.

Interview responses will not be linked to your name or address. The data will be coded, stored,
published, and presented using pseudonyms to disguise your personal identity. The audiotapes will
be deleted after completion of the study. The transcribed data will be kept indefinitely by only the
researchers mentioned above after completion of the study.

PARTICIPATION AND WITHDRAWAL
Your participation is voluntary. Your refusal to participate will involve no penalty or loss of
benefits to which you are otherwise entitled. You may withdraw your consent at any time and
discontinue participation without penalty. You are not waiving any legal claims, rights or remedies
because of your participation in this research study.

INVESTIGATOR’S CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have any questions or concerns about the research, please feel free to contact:
• Principal Investigator Chelsea Johnson at chelseamej@gmail.com or (630) 605-1926
• Faculty Advisor Dr. Elaine Bell Kaplan at ekaplan@usc.edu or (213) 714-8865

Mailing address:
University of Southern California
Department of Sociology
851 Downey Way
Hazel Stanley Hall 314
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1059

RIGHTS OF RESEARCH PARTICIPANT – IRB CONTACT INFORMATION
If you have questions, concerns, or complaints about your rights as a research participant or the
research in general and are unable to contact the research team, or if you want to talk to someone
independent of the research team, please contact the University Park Institutional Review Board
(UPIRB), 3720 South Flower Street #301, Los Angeles, CA 90089-0702, (213) 821-5272 or
upirb@usc.edu

SIGNATURE OF RESEARCH PARTICIPANT

I have read the information provided above. I have been given a chance to ask questions. My
questions have been answered to my satisfaction, and I agree to participate in this study. I have
been given a copy of this form.
EACH NEW CURL HOWLING A WAR CRY

271

Name of Participant

Signature of Participant Date

SIGNATURE OF INVESTIGATOR

I have explained the research to the participant and answered all of his/her questions. I believe
that he/she understands the information described in this document and freely consents to
participate.

Name of Person Obtaining Consent

Signature of Person Obtaining Consent Date

Age: ___________________________________________________________________

Occupation: ______________________________________________________________

Sex_____________________________________________________________________

Racial Identification: ________________________________________________________

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272
Appendix D: Interview Guide

1. Collect Informed Consent.

2. Explain research topic.

3. Opening Script: Remember that your responses will never be connected to your name. I
want you to feel as comfortable talking to me about what hair means to you, and what
you think the importance of hair is for black women. The more you say, the better! It is
helpful for me if you share as many reflections as possible. I’m interested in your stories
and hearing your opinions. I’m happy I can share this research process with you. There
aren’t many times where we get to talk about ourselves without any repercussions as
women of color, so I’m hoping you find it as fun and interesting as I do!

Introductory questions
How do you identify racially?
What do you do for work?
Tell me a little bit about where you were born and where you grew up and a little about your
family background.

Hair History (probe about relaxers, weaves, what was “cool” at the time)
What was your mother doing around that time? How did she wear her hair? How did she feel
about what your hair should look like?
Take me through your own hair history. How did you wear your hair as a child? (Who
decided and how?)
Did you and your friends play with hair? What about as a teenager?

Going Natural
When did you decide to go natural? Why then?
What was that process like for you?
How would you describe the texture of your hair? Was it what you expected?
How did your family react when you decided to go natural? (Probe: People at work?
Significant others?)
How do you think others view your hair? Can you recall any recent conversations or
comments about your hair?

Hair Today
What is the most recent conversation you’ve had about hair?
What is the most memorable conversation you’ve ever had about your hair?
Now that you are natural, what do you think your hair says about you?
What frustrates you most about your hair?

Styling
Tell me about how you choose to wear your hair. What is your styling regimen? How do you
get styling ideas?
How does your hair look on a good hair day? On a bad hair day?
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273
What motivates your styling choices?
What hair products and services do you purchase? How much would you say you spend on
beauty products monthly? Has this changed in the last 5, 10, 15 years?
Where do you get your products?
What is important to you in a beauty product? (Ingredients, price)
Who are your style role models?

Politics, and Natural Hair as a Social Movement
What do you think hair means in your culture?
What is your definition of natural hair?
Would you consider natural hair a movement? Why is hair important?
Who can be natural? Can white women be natural?
Is all natural hair equal?
Would you consider yourself part of this movement?
Why do you think is prompting the natural hair movement now?
Does your hair reflect your political identity? Do you think other people believe it does?
Do you think it is different from women wearing natural hair in the past?
What is the role of social media within the natural hair community?

Beauty Ideals
What do you think society views as the most beautiful today? Why do you think so?
Do you think this varies by race?
What do you think men find attractive? Why do you think so?
Who do you consider beautiful?
When do you feel most beautiful?

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Asset Metadata

Creator Johnson, Chelsea Mary Elise (author)

Core Title “Each new curl howling a war cry”: Black women, embodiment, and gendered racial formation

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 03/13/2019

Defense Date 03/06/2019

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag beauty,Black feminism,diaspora,embodiment,ethnography,feminist theory,gender,intersectionality,natural hair,OAI-PMH Harvest,qualitative sociology,race, class, gender,racial formation,social movements,Sociology

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Messner, Michael (committee chair), Bell Kaplan, Elaine (committee member), Jacobs, Lanita (committee member)

Creator Email chelseamej@gmail.com,chelsemj@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-132711

Unique identifier UC11675769

Identifier etd-JohnsonChe-7156.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-132711 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-JohnsonChe-7156.pdf

Dmrecord 132711

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Johnson, Chelsea Mary Elise

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA