Royal: A Natural Hair Multimedia Storytelling Project

Royal.

This research was conducted as part of University of Münster's Visual Anthropology, Media and Documentary Practices Master of Arts program. The following paper has been edited for brevity and readability and published in multiple sections. The full paper may be requested at angelamoorer.com/contact.

1. Introduction

My earliest memory of my hair was pain. I was about four years old, sitting in a chair in front of the kitchen stove, my mother behind me watching as the metal pressing comb placed on the stovetop burner began to smoke. The smell of bacon still lingering from the morning’s breakfast mixing with the burning hair grease aroma of the comb. The TV hummed in the background-- a white man in an infomercial was trying to sell something. It was Sunday: wash day.

On slave plantations in the United States, Sundays were a day off for some of the African slaves during which slave women would gather and braid or iron one another’s hair after church. The styles were often intricate and created to remain in place for the whole week (Ellis-Hervey et al, 2016). These Sundays were not a de facto privilege but rather an evolution of the dehumanization of Black bodies imposed as soon as Europeans stole them. Upon arrival to the Americas, most Europeans would shave the heads of Africans, holding firmly in the belief popularized by scientist Peter A. Browne (as cited by Johnson & Bankhead, 2014) which claimed Africans and white men were different species due to their skin color and hair. He claimed that white men had hair on their heads, while Africans grew “wool.”

Slave masters gradually allowed slaves the time to care for their hair as slave owners began to judge one another on the condition of their slaves’ appearances. It became important for slaves to “look decent” in the presence of their masters or guests. But without the combs and herbal treatments they had used for centuries in Africa, slaves were forced to use bacon grease, butter and kerosene as conditioners and cleansers for their hair (Ellis-Hervey et al, 2016).

My mom took a large finger full of Blue Magic hair grease and plopped it on a section of my hair. “Hold still,” she said as she picked up the hot comb from the stove and watched me wince. She tried to get the comb as close to the root as possible so my hair wouldn’t be puffy— and that she did, burning my scalp in the process. “Sorry, baby,” she said in response to the cry in pain I let out. “I told you to sit still.”

Between detangling, blowing out, and hot-combing my tightly kinked hair, as a child I associated my hair only with pain. My hair felt like a punishment and I despised all the feelings it bestowed upon my head and my mind. As Lauren, one of the participants of this natural hair research, told me in recalling being forced to chemically straighten her hair by her white grandmother, “it was painful more on the level of, why does my grandmother think this is necessary?”

Chanelle, another participant, recalled her own hot comb nightmare: “The pressing comb? Girl, I got lotsa burns from that. I got a big burn from that one time,” she said pointing to her forehead. “My grandma was like, ‘oh, we’ll just put some bangs [to hide the burn]’ and burned me again… I was thinking, even as a child, sitting between her legs, scared because she’s getting close to my edges, I’m thinking, ‘why do we have to go through this?’”

“Why” is a good question. I think of my African ancestors gathering on Sundays, washing, braiding or ironing their hair. Both to please the slave master as well as to carve out a little piece of dignity for themselves in a world built on and by their oppression.

The standard remains the same and in daring to break that standard, Black women are met with white-supremacist gazes of scrutiny that can affect their careers, personal lives, and self-esteem.

This paper examines the experiences of three women with natural hair and the varying degrees of peace and conflict they have found in resisting the conformity the white gaze demands as well as the negotiations of self they have performed in order mitigate this gaze. These women, all in their 20s, from Seattle, Washington, were recruited through an open Facebook group for women with natural hair in Seattle. While the focus of this paper is hair, it is obviously about race as well—as hair is an important facet of the racial identity of Black women (Moss, 2018).