Meleah
blessed
Everything is rooted in something.
Meleah, a 21-year-old acting student and waitress, told me about some of her racial anxieties— all of which she views as separate from any feelings or interactions regarding her hair. Like Chanelle, her hair is a source of pride, but unlike Chanelle, she tells me her hair has “never been a problem,” except some teasing as a kid. As an adult she “gets compliments all the time.” Admittedly, I am green with envy as Meleah explains to me that she hasn’t “done” her hair today while patting her perfectly messy curl-defined loose afro.
At the beginning of our interview she expressed displeasure toward the #BlackGirlMagic campaign, a social media hashtag celebrating Black women that went viral in the mid 2010s (Smith, 2016). I’m taken aback by this as I couldn’t imagine why a Black woman would take issue with a campaign that celebrates our authentic being. I thought back to previous interviews I conducted in which I was too quick to form opinions and I restrained my initial instincts to challenge her opinion and experience. I remained open and asked her to elaborate.
“For example, all that kind of stuff, ‘we’re going to give it to them no matter if they like it or not.’ And that’s fine in my opinion… you can be whoever you want to be in any setting but I think sometimes I see memes or posts that are almost too far for me where it’s like we’re trying to be too exclusive.
“If I am hateful toward something, it doesn’t help me.”
‘Because I don’t want to be put in a category where people think I’m hateful because of how Black hair has been treated for a long time. Which, I mean, it’s fair to be angry. Obviously, people are upset for how they’ve been treated but for me I guess, generally, if I am hateful toward something it doesn’t help me.”
I take note of the tightrope Meleah is carefully trying to walk and the mediator language she is using— possibly in part to please or avoid upsetting me. I consider what life may have been like for her as a half Black and half white kid in a primarily white environment and the many tightropes she may have been forced to walk.
“I got into a lot of trouble when I was in junior high and high school,” Meleah told me. “It was for things that… I didn’t really think were a huge issue. Like talking too loud, being too loud… generally just being Black I guess. I mean I got like 18 detentions in one year and I got suspended twice in one year and that’s kind of crazy because I mean I didn’t do anything like too crazy.”
“I would say for sure one of the suspension was valid [and] maybe like a quarter of the detentions but in my opinion, I was always, like, the odd one out. I felt like I was always being watched under a microscope type shit. Like I couldn’t just be myself. I had to be quiet and just sit there otherwise I’d get in trouble I felt like so... (Meleah pauses to think). I guess maybe from that because I was angry from getting in trouble in the first place and then I continued to be angry and maybe more expressive than what I normally would have been in my neutral non-aggressive state and I saw those consequences from that and I think maybe that’s why I feel this way about this black girl magic type retaliation… I don’t wanna say retaliation…I don’t know, I’m trying to like put pieces together for like why I think this way and sometimes it’s hard to know why.”
“Girl, you got to play the game.”
I realized that Meleah and I are not just in an “interview,” we are working out the narrative of her life. This conversation could change the way she sees herself and her social world. I ask Meleah if maybe she is saying that because she was punished for being herself and displaying qualities that she associates with blackness during high school she now responds negatively to other black women who outwardly and vocally defy social norms dictated by whiteness.
“Yeah I think so. I think that’s where a lot of it stems from. Because…yeah, you just, in this world, you kind of just have to play the game. That’s what a lot of black women are trying not to accept, which I think is a good thing, but at the same time it’s like, girl, you got to play the game.”
The proverbial game she is referencing is the negotiation of self that Black people and other marginalized communities are subjected to in the United States in order to enter white spaces without conflict. While Chanelle has spent the majority of her life hiding her hair with relaxers and weaves, Meleah has spent the majority of her life learning to hide or “tone down” her personality. As Black women, these types of identity negotiations are common, as we often must mute the loudest part of who we are if we want to win the “game.”
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.