The (Absurd) Rebelliousness of Short Hair as a Black Woman
I’m not proud of this, but I remember — as a young girl — running around the house with a pair of stockings on my head, pretending I had long hair. As a young Black girl, steeped in Eurocentric beauty standards, I equated beauty with long, light-weight, straight hair. And in my childish mind, stockings were the easiest path to beauty. Thankfully, my fascination with long hair was (mostly) short-lived. The older I got, the more I understood and aligned with the beauty in afrocentricity. I developed an intrinsic, defining appreciation for deep, dark skin and kinky, coily, gravity-defying hair. Way back in middle school, I fell in love with Blackness and haven’t faltered. When all the other Black girls had a thing for light-skinned boys, I was breathlessly captivated by the blackest boy in the building.
Was this an unspoken, covert (and therefore acceptable) form of cultural assimilation?
This afrocentric affinity naturally led me to become a founding participant in what eventually became “the natural hair movement.” For about a decade, I sported a bevy of glorious natural styles from a style I affectionately coined “lady lumps” to braid-outs, twist-outs, high (and low) buns — all of it. I was practically in heaven until the skull-crushing burden of wash days — the…
