My Hair Isn't Always Curly and That's Okay

My experience with Texture Discrimination

For the majority of the last 7 years, I’ve worn my hair in its natural state every day, only straightening or rocking extensions occasionally. The last two years were much different than the previous 7, as I became a full-time remote employee. Prior to this, I worked in an office 5 days a week. During that time, I noticed that different hairstyles received different reactions from my coworkers.

This took place towards the end of the second natural hair movement of the ‘00s and early ‘10s. I remember at this time it felt like I was one of the rare, afro rocking girls walking around downtown Chicago. I seriously rarely saw another girl wearing her kinky hair out. Then, I constantly got questions and criticism from both strangers and familiar folks concerning how I wore my hair. Now, thank god, natural hair is the norm so I’m rarely asked anything about my hair. It might have been a new thing at one point but by the end of the natural hair moment, you could see men and women with afros in ad campaigns everywhere, movies, TV shows, and in the music industry. The natural hair movement touched nearly every aspect of society but even so it felt as if black women are still made to seem like anything but normal when in the workplace. I know this isn’t the case in every place of work, but the experiences we had and continue to have didn’t happen in a vacuum. To this day a great number of black women still have apprehension about wearing their hair naturally to work.

Anytime we change our hair it has the possibility to become a day or week-long conversation in the office. For some, the attention may be welcomed but for me, I’d just like to do my work and go home. I’d love to not have conversations about how and why my hair does what it does while dodging unwelcomed fingers flying towards my head. Yes, it’s happened and unfortunately, yes they still have all their fingers. I get the most of these encounters or comments on my hair when I wear it straight after it being kinky and fluffy for months. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you at all, as we have always been made to feel that straighter is greater. This part of the black experiences goes all the way back to the early 1900s. Enter Madame CJ Walker with her hot comb & Garrett Augustus Morgan with his lye relaxer. Straight black hair was a relief to white people and treated as a token of acceptance into white-dominated spaces, corporate America being the main space we needed access to.

I’ve also noticed that there is even a difference in how people respond to the different natural styles I wear. When I wear my hair in a neat rod-out or twist out I always get compliments but after a few days of not retwisting my hair, those manufactured curls turn into tightly wound, frizzy coils the compliments shift to everything but my hair if I get any at all. In my own personal experience I’ve never been blatantly discriminated against because of my hair or explicitly told “Do not wear your hair this way”, but the types of comments I get send a message about where we really are as a society. Comments like, “I like your hair like that”, “your hair is so pretty today” and “Oh! You did your hair!” when I wear my hair straight are deeply coded responses. The commentators often may be unaware of how problematic they are actually being but that’s me giving them the benefit of the doubt.

Those people and their microaggressive words are saying “Your hair should be straight and if you must wear it curly, then wear it neatly curled, in a way that I can understand it”. And I would love to say their reactions don’t affect how I choose to wear my hair but to be honest, sometimes it does. Women with type 4 hair are very familiar with this type of texture discrimination. Since our ancestors were in chains, texture discrimination and colorism laid a heavy burden on our community. The ideas of “good hair”, the paper bag test, forced assimilation, and more divisive practices have been embedded in our society’s standard of beauty and internalized, to their detriment, by black people. Before job interviews and even on a regular basis I, and I’m sure a lot of my natural sistas, have a mental battle about what to do with our hair so that it won’t ruffle feathers, be too noticeable or too ethnic.

Wearing our hair naturally should be an easy, stress-free thing but instead, we end up spending a lot of time, money, and energy developing and maintaining a hair care routine in order to keep our natural hair looking a certain way. There is an insane amount of pressure from both inside and outside of the community to have the right kind of natural. Typically this looks like loose, type 3 ringlet curls, where the hair falls over the shoulders in silky, bouncy coils. If your hair doesn’t look like this and god forbid you have the kinky, type 4 stuff, you’d better keep it neatly twisted, edges slicked, and tamed to be accepted. The nerve-racking upkeep is honestly another form of code-switching if you think about it, but this time we are code-switching for our people as well as outsiders.

Being a girl with thick, type 4 hair I can tell you that during my transition I heard a lot of “Your hair is too thick to be natural” and alternatively, “You’ll be fine as long as you’re not one of those naturals that don’t comb their hair” from people whose hair, sans perm, would look just like mine. What’s worse is that I’ve been told this by men whose mothers and grandmothers would’ve looked just like mine had they not been chemically altering it for 20+ years.

Curl Acceptance

Now that I have had so many of these experiences and have read up on the black experience in America as it relates to hair specifically, I have changed a lot of my views and practices. I am able to understand how these things affected me, especially during my transition phase. This is a complicated period in a woman’s hair journey. During this time we are shedding our addiction to relaxer straight hair and untangling the importance of straight hair with our personal identity and self-worth. We are learning to accept our curls, even though they aren’t loose ringlets or easily managed tresses. Curl acceptance is a huge hurdle to cross. I am much more lax about maintaining perfectly twisted out hair but I still struggle with what ‘presentable’ means to me. It’s exhausting but important work. It’s made easier by the fact that here in 2020, natural is pretty normal in a lot of cases. It is very rare for me to come across a large number of black girls with relaxed hair, but many still choose to heat train, or habitually straighten their hair, instead. To each their own!

Within the last two years, I have still experienced unsolicited critiques of my hair and been made a spectacle of while changing my hair in a corporate setting. I’ve just come to accept that these interactions are just a part of the natural hair experience, the part that no youtube tutorial taught me about. There is not much I can do about the words and actions of others but I can work on my own inner dialogue and change my ways.

After letting go of the practice of chemically altering your hair in order to be accepted you have to free yourself from manually altering your hair as well and learn to accept your natural curl pattern. Don’t get me wrong, I love rocking a fresh twist out and I do so often but my hair isn’t always in the perfect ringlet or loopy curls of a fresh twist out. It shouldn’t have to be in order to be considered beautiful. It has taken me a long time to get to this point but I’m happy that I have arrived. Internally I battle with the woman that doesn’t care if my hair is ‘presentable’ and the woman that dreads the stares and inevitable questions. Ultimately I want to find a balance between the two and grow a genuine love for my hair without the voice of assimilation inside, working me like a puppet. For the sake of our daughters and ourselves, some of us have to realize that our hair isn’t always curly and that’s okay too. As long as it’s healthy and flourishing who cares! I dare you to rock a wild afro like Solange and Zazee beets or a tight, asymmetrical shaped fro like Lupita and I dare anyone to question your beauty! Natural hair love is about loving your hair the way it naturally is no matter what that looks like or what anyone says or feels about it. Be unapologetically Black and unapologetically YOU. Everybody else will just have to deal.