Lauren
unbothered
Lauren, a self-described “creative nomadic spirit” is biracial. She shares similarities with Meleah in that she doesn’t have to think about her hair too much. Though at various points in her life, Lauren has preferred straight hair. “I was in a glam rock band. I mean, Nikki Sixx doesn’t have curly hair,” she says jokingly.
She tells me the story of the first time she ever went to stay with her grandmother, a racist white woman that had at one point disowned Lauren’s mother for having a child with a Black man. On day one of the visit, her grandmother took her to the salon to get her hair chemically straightened, unbeknownst to Lauren’s mother. Lauren described the experience as painful in that she didn’t understand its necessity. My mind flashes back to the hot combs and kiddie perms of my own childhood, the pain of the heat and chemical burns, and the confusion over what was so wrong with me that I had to go through this and none of my friends did.
Hot combs and kiddie perms.
Lauren continued, “A lot of my friends [in high school] would be like ‘well, it’s not like you can use the same products as we do or maybe you should use this different flat iron or let’s try blow drying your hair.’ It started putting this… it’s not just my grandmother who thinks this way… it’s this whole group of people that looks at my hair and thinks ‘that’s not what hair is supposed to do.’”
As Lauren tells me about herself, I’m surprised and intrigued. Her answers seem well-prepared but not necessarily untruthful. Still, something about her story feels exaggerated or untouchable.
The trip to the salon with her grandmother was the first and only time Lauren chemically straightened her hair, though she continued to regularly straighten it with a flat iron until about 10 years ago when she moved to Berlin.
“‘That’s not what hair is supposed to do.’”
“Really being in Berlin, a place that felt like home for many reasons but also a place that felt like home because the first question that people ask you when they meet you is not ‘what are you mixed with’ or ‘what are you’ which, being in the states and traveling around a lot, that was always a question so in Berlin I finally felt like… not only is this a time for me to experiment and be myself and just let my hair go free and it was a beautiful thing. No one ever asked to touch my hair. So, it’s been wonderful to be able to come back to the states with that perspective too, even if the vibrations are different.
‘I was walking around Tacoma yesterday and some guy comes up to me and he’s like, ‘My queen, my queen, what are you mixed with?’ And I’m like, I’m not your puppy I’m just... I’m not. And in Berlin the question is usually, ‘what’s your ethnic heritage’... that’s a question I’ll answer.”
It was at that moment I realized I was United-States-ing this interview. I judged Lauren as soon as I saw her. Even though she was sharing experiences of childhood trauma, social alienation and sexist disrespect that paralleled my own, I wasn’t connecting with her. I wasn’t seeing her.
United-states-ing this interview.
Like Chanelle, Meleah and myself, Lauren desires the ability to be both authentic and respected. Though (I think) I displayed no outward signs or language indicating my quick dismissal of Lauren’s relevance, I felt guilty about the work my mind had done to stratify her. I created this project to recognize the struggles and celebrate the triumphs of Black women in the face of white-dominated culture and here I was, flipping the gaze and essentially thinking she wasn’t Black enough to have applicable experiences.
I was able to course-correct quickly with Lauren because of the close proximity of our experiences and a genuine desire to get to know her. But where is that point of mediation in more starkly contrasting parties like Meleah, the struggling Black actress, and the wealthy white customers she serves? If it took me, someone with a shared local experience, this much intentional effort to see Lauren, how could a researcher with no shared experience? Perhaps my close proximity to the experience distorted my view or, in contrast, maybe it was the perceived cultural distance I felt from her as a fully Black, 4c-haired Black woman? As Toni Morrison described this social inquiry poignantly in her classic novel The Bluest Eye:
How can a 52-year-old white immigrant store keeper, with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eye virgin mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a Black girl? (Morrison, 1994: pg 48).
Seeing Blackness.
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.