From Blue Ivy To Kim Kardashian’s Braids, Here’s Why Black Hair Will Never Be ‘Just Hair’

‘Her hair has been disappointing people since birth,’ reads a strapline on Don’t Touch My Hair, a new book by academic and TV host Emma Dabiri. Had I not had similar reactions to my hair growing up as a mixed race woman in the UK, I would have found this statement utterly bewildering.

Too curly, too coarse, too unmanageable – Dabiri argues that black hair is never just “normal”. Beauty is, as ever, imagined through the characteristics of a standard not designed to include us: ‘The only way Afro hair can seemingly fulfil the criteria for beauty is if we make it look like European hair – if we make ourselves something we are not.’

If you pick up Dabiri’s book thinking it will be about beauty, you’d only be partly right. Using hair as a vehicle, Dabiri takes the reader seamlessly from pre-colonial Africa through the Harlem Renaissance, Black Power, into today’s Natural Hair Movement and beyond – to the future of fractal braiding, mapping and encoding… stopping off at cultural appropriation on the way, of course.

But before we get onto Kim Kardashian’s braids, I asked Dabiri – who was born to a white Trinidadian mother and black Nigerian father - about how her personal relationship with her hair began.

Your Hair Texture Defines Your Racial Identity

‘My hair has been something that I’ve been thinking about for as long as I can remember,’ says Dabiri. 'It’s been significant since my early childhood, I’ve had quite a tortured relationship with it.’

It’s this difficult relationship that led Dabiri to start the research that became her book, which aims to dispel the myth that black hair is ‘just hair.’ After chemically relaxing her hair for 15 years, she decided to chop it all off and go back to her natural texture, and started writing about the process from there.

While Dabiri’s book isn’t about the practicalities of styling black hair, she says the rise of black hair YouTubers and bloggers, as well as the Natural Hair Movement on social media has meant a book like hers - that covers the socio-political history of black hair - is more likely to be noticed.

‘I was really interested in the role that hair texture played in people’s racial identity,’ says Dabiri.

‘10 years ago, even 5 years ago, such a book might not have like piqued the interest in such a way, it might have been perceived as too niche, but all of the content, that was happening around hair and social media really made the kind of mainstream realise that there’s a big demand and desire to talk about this topic.’

‘It’s Never Just Hair’

It’s the history of attitudes towards black hair that Dabiri includes in the book that will likely prove the most shocking to readers.

She tells of the consistent racist attacks against black hair boldly and without flinching; from the churches that wouldn’t let prospective congregants in unless a comb could pass smoothly through their hair to the pencil test performed in some South African schools ‘where a child’s race was determined by whether or not their hair could hold a pencil,’ and the more recent hatred leveled towards Blue Ivy’s natural hair – culminating in a petition called Comb Her Hair, with over 6,000 signatures and comments such as; ‘nappy headed child’, 'her hair is out of control’ and ‘look at that crazy hair.’

‘I want show that it’s never “only hair”,' she says. 'It goes so much deeper than that into so much, into the relations between black and white people historically, and where we are today.’

Conversations around colourism and racial prejudice are slowly becoming more common but, Dabiri argues – referring back to research by Ayana Bid and Lori Tharps – that hair texture is another important dimension people use to assess a person’s race. ’If the hair betrayed the tiniest trace of kinkiness, the person – regardless of their complexion – would be unable to pass as white.’

Some of us without straight hair have, whether we like to admit it or not, spent a considerable amount of time trying to conform to a standard of beauty that was never made for us as non-white people. And that’s something Dabiri acknowledges in her book – without judgement, including her own personal experiences –like that time she left a relaxer in too long and her hair fell out the next day, or the hours she spent crying over the texture of her hair as a child.

‘I wept myself to sleep most nights between the ages of eight and ten, desperately imploring the night-time to work its magic and by morning to have transformed my tight, picky coils into the headful of limp, straight hair I rightly deserved.’

Coarse, Kinky, Coily: We Need New Language To Describe Black Hair

As I speak to Dabiri about her book, the research around it and our personal experiences, we both wince when we hear ourselves use words such as ‘coarse’ and ‘kinky’ – the language we use to describe black hair is clumsy at best – and derogatory at worst.

‘The words we use to describe Afro hair do not relate to its texture,’ she writes in the book. ’And, judged by another’s metric, it will always come up lacking. Even the labels on our bloody natural hair products can’t seem to shift out of this mode of thinking. We are assaulted by words like ‘defiant’, ‘wild’, ‘unruly,’ ‘unmanagable’ and ‘coarse.’’

‘We need a new attitude,’ Dabiri tells me. ‘A new attitude and new words. All the words used to describe what is considered beautiful hair, are words that are the antithesis of the qualities of my hair. My hair isn’t glossy, it’s matte.’

‘When I started researching this, I was convinced that in African languages there was no way they’re calling their hair coarse and frizzy, and I was right. Hair that was considered beautiful hair was hair that was braided well, so they’re judging hair by their own standards as opposed to by the standards of a different type of hair.’

‘For the next generation, I would like there to be an entirely different attitude that exists about black hair than the one that we’ve inherited,' says Dabiri. 'I want there to be the language and the scope for us to not be judging our own hair by standards that were never designed to include us anyway. So, seeing our hair, on its own merit and according to its own standards.

‘I would like our hair to be acknowledged for how beautiful it is, and the amount of history and knowledge that it contains. We have lots of hair styles that have been passed down but people don’t know the names and the meanings of them anymore. I’d like young girls to know that princess hair isn’t necessarily long, blonde, Barbie hair, that in Yoruba Culture there is a braided cornrowed style that goes up, which is the royal hairstyle of the kings’ wives.’

The Problem With Kim Kardashian’s Braids

Kim Kardashian has been accused of cultural appropriation on more than one occasion, with her choice of braids seeming to generate the most backlash. I ask Dabiri for her thoughts on the subject.

‘When I see Kim Kardashian wearing braids I do actually feel anger, because with her it’s wholesale. Of course she has braids, of course she has cornrows, of course she has weave, because everything about her presentation is taken from black women.

‘There is something very perverse about that family’s relationship to blackness, the surrogates she uses to have her children are black women,' Dabiri says.

‘There’s often a deep underlying component of it that is desire and jealousy, I think that’s very evident in that family. This desire to consume, almost to consume blackness, and that’s why [the film] Get Out was so brilliant because to me, the reveal was almost the most extreme conclusion of cultural appropriation and that idea of actually consuming black people’s bodies.’

Dating With Black Hair

One of the many strengths of Dabiri’s book is that it is at once global and at the same time deeply personal, including anecdotes from her own life. Part of that experience includes how men have reacted to Dabiri’s hair throughout her life, and while we often hear about having to conform to western beauty standards in the workplace, I was curious to hear more about reactions in private spaces.

‘So, in my personal experience, it’s obviously not all men, but I actually feel like lots of white men can’t even tell the difference. They don’t really know about texture often, they just think it's an afro.'

‘But with a lot of black men, they’re very aware of differences in texture. When I have my hair out in an afro, I will be stopped by so many men and women who are not even trying to get my number – they just say your hair is beautiful and move on, and it’s so genuine.

‘However – and I really have to stress this is not all black men – I have had some strange reactions. I was in South Africa and had my hair treated, blown out and put in bantu knots.

'Something about the climate there meant when it took them out it just really held; my hair looked like it was silky, glossy, curly hair. Men were losing their minds, and because I’m mixed they assumed that that was my hair and I actually had quite disturbing things said to me.

‘One guy said “your hair is so beautiful, that’s the kind of hair that African girls have to pay for” and I replied "I have the kind of hair that African girls have, I’ve had to pay for this too, this took hours! Why are you saying this, expecting me to think this is a compliment?"'

Dabiri even tells a story of the time a man rescinded a marriage proposal because of his disappointment once he discovered the real texture of her hair.

‘I was in Atlanta and I was seeing a guy, and my hair was in box braids. He was really excited about me taking them out and I didn’t even really know about differences in hair texture then. He said "oh I can’t wait to see your hair", and I took them out and he saw my hair and he was so confused, he hadn’t even realised I had extensions.

'He just assumed that, because I was mixed race, my hair was that long. He was very disappointed and, as I write in the book, he rescinded his hypothetical marriage proposal.’

‘Don’t Touch My Hair’ by Emma Dabiri, published by Allen Lane is out now.