While the pros and cons of relaxing hair are discussed in detail at black hair salons everywhere, at Nappturality.com, the Internet’s shrine to natural hair, chemical straighteners are not up for debate.
If you ask Patricia “Dee” Gaines, the Rhode Island-reared, Australia-dwelling founder of Nappturality, there are no pros to relaxing your hair.
“Hate is not strong enough word for how I feel about the product,” Gaines told Stereohyped. “Not only do I see what it does to women’s hair, I see what it does to their feelings about themselves. I relaxed for over 20 years. The mindset that I had when I was relaxing my hair for 20 years was that my own hair as it grew out of my head was not acceptable, and no one could tell me any different.”
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A few years ago at Spelman College, Lori Tharps was making an appearance to promote a book she co-wrote with her friend, Ayana Byrd. The book, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, examines the fascinating, often emotional relationship Black Americans have with their hair. And she was about to find out just how much it affected the people who read it.
During the question and answer period, a woman in the audience stood up, told an emotional story about growing out her relaxer and, when she was done, snatched off her wig, showing her natural tresses for the first time. She got a standing ovation.
“Hair Story came out in 2000,” Tharps told Stereohyped. “and it never ceases to amaze me that people are still so passionate about hair and the issues that it evokes. You hear something like the Glamour incident and the Don Imus incident, and you realized that these issues will never go away. I would suspect that anywhere there are black women there are black hair issues.”
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They have names like the Infamous Lisa B, Weavin’ Steven, Little Willie, Big Bad D, and Color Me Vic. No, they’re not rappers. They’re hair dressers. Excuse me, hair entertainers. And they’re just some of the creative experts that keep Hair Wars, an African American hair show known for its outrageous designs, afloat.
It all started in the ’80s at Detroit nightclubs, where David “Hump the Grinder” Humphries, a promoter and DJ, would stage hair shows as entertainment in the middle of parties. He knew nothing about hair or hair styling, but he knew he was onto something when he saw how well-received the hair shows were.
From the nightclub gimmick arose Hair Wars, a monster touring hair show that has piqued the curiosity of the mainstream media and made stars of its stylists. And there is nothing else like it.
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Carolivia Herron wrote the children’s book Nappy Hair expecting a little bit of controversy. You see, the lead character, a child named Brenda, had “the nappiest, fuzziest, the most screwed up, squeezed up, knotted hair.” Brenda was special. Unique. Herron figured parents might not like that she was putting this young character on a pedestal.
“I was claiming uniqueness for my character,” Herron told Stereohyped, “rather than claiming that this child represented African American people as a whole.”
But the controversy Herron got was of an entirely different sort. In 1998, a white elementary school teacher in the predominately black and Hispanic Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, infuriated parents after she read the book to her class and sent students home with copies. They considered Nappy Hair to be a racial slur. The administration eventually backed the book and the teacher’s decision to read it in class, but it was too late. The teacher had to request a transfer because she feared for her safety.
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Don Imus found out the hard way — until things got really easy and lucrative, of course — that hair is a touchy subject in the African American community. So touchy, in fact, that if you call a group of us nappy-headed, an army of people will want your head.
But why? Well, the obvious answer is that we live in a society that has an Anglo-influenced standard of beauty. And no matter how far we’ve come on our generations-long journey to love ourselves, not only in spite of the way we look but because of it, little black girls still have to battle against fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries that teach them, either directly or indirectly, that long and straight is in and short and kinky is out. Little black boys get the same message.They become adults with these ideas still firmly implanted in their heads…and the cycle continues.
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Two things:
1. Who forgot to give Italian Vogue the memo that Michael Jackson, who’s planning a “comeback,” as usual, hasn’t really been fashion magazine cover material since, oh, around the time this year’s current crop of college freshman were born?
ELUSIVE Michael Jackson’s wig takes longer to style than a supermodel’s. A source told us Jackson, who’s rumored to be in New York to shoot a cover spread for Italian Vogue, sat for three hours in the stylist’s chair until they perfected his freaky coif. The insider said Jackson has been holed up in a fancy Midtown hotel since Thursday afternoon “with an enormous entourage” and left only once, at 5 a.m., to take part in the 10-hour shoot for the fashion magazine. Reps for Jackson did not return calls.
2. Someone actually spent 3 hours on that mop of hair that could not look more like a wig if it was purchased in a Halloween costume shop? What a thankless job.
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• According to a very odd scientific study, straight gets more tangled than curly hair. I believe if I had participated in the trials the results would have skewed far in the other direction.
• A new outlines all the reasons that contribute to the relatively low life expectancy of African Americans.
• Primary biliary cirrhosis, among other things, could be a contributing factor to the whole life expectancy thing.
• So that Beyonce Lemonade diet wasn’t healthy? I never would have guessed.
• A piece of a meteorite that’s sacred to an Oklahoma Native American tribe is being sold to the highest bidder. Shockingly, people are about that.
• In addition to being on the lookout for blood diamonds, you know need to make sure your braids are cruelty-free. [APP]
• Jon Stewart uses R. Kelly’s “alien” masterpiece to make fun of Larry Craig, who really just made it so easy. [MTV]
• Osama hasn’t got a chance against these two. [OW]
• You’ve got to be really thirsty — and I mean that in a many different ways — for all of this. [C&D]
• All you ever wanted to know about Teedra Moses. [Clutch]
Foxy Brown’s jail experience sounds lonely and really embarrassing, but i don’t think she knows “suffering” if she thinks that’s what she’s doing.
Down-and-pout diva Foxy Brown is holed up in a cell at Rikers Island desperate for human contact as she spends her days flipping through the Bible, guzzling orange soda and fretting about her floundering hair weaves, former in mates said yesterday.
“Everyone who passes by looks at her - she’s usually sleeping or reading her books,” said Teresa Pandolfo, 39, of Park Slope, Brooklyn, who was housed in a cellblock near the slapper-rapper…
“Her hair looks like whoever did it ran. That’s how much the weave is coming apart,” she said.
Why is fake hair such an integral part of most Foxy stories? She thew the wig glue at the salespeople in Florida, she got her weave snatched during the Great Hearing Aid Robbery, and now, well, her weave seems to have been pretty offensive to her former cell mate. Maybe she should try a natural and see if that leads her away from a life of petty crime.
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Al Sharpton’s permed and slicked back tresses might be misguided, outdated, and just, really, really bad, but he’s never going to change his ‘do, no matter how many times David Banner calls him a “permed-out pimp.” Why? Because it’s a style he cultivated in order to emulate his pretend dad, James Brown.
Sharpton, who looks like more of a slightly younger brother of James Brown than his son, could be at age 53 young enough to be the Godfather of Soul’s offspring, since he’s only a youthful 53. For those of you shocked by the fact that Al Sharpton is, relatively speaking, a spring chicken, you aren’t the only ones.
