Jamal Frederick is originally from San Francisco, California. He and his wife have a home in the Bay Area and have a beautiful three-year-old girl. Jamal loves to write, loves music, good food, wine and conversation and spending time with his family. He is a regular contributor for the online hip hop magazine, abovegroundmag.com and has also been featured on mybrownbaby.com.
To read his touching post click the jump...
Let Her Be...
Children are the vessels of wonder, excitement, and innocence. They are clean slates to be whatever they want, to express themselves how they naturally feel and one of the worst things a parent or adult can do, and what we many times end up doing, is taint them with our issues, over-religion, politics, prejudices and problems in our perception. In this we must include self image i.e. Hair. Hair and self-image/self esteem are highly connected especially in the African America community. Given that our hair is so unique we often associate hair, skin color, body/facial features with our “Blackness” and also with how we define beauty. Now, this isn’t about my preferences in Black women’s hair and this isn’t about when adult Black women alter the texture of their hair with either chemical, heat or use artificial hair for whatever personal reasons/preferences they may have. My issue is when children are subjected to the extremely painful, dangerous, possibly permanently altering, and potentially self-image/esteem distorting methods used by their parents because they have been told this is what it takes to be beautiful, and a woman.
I remember watching Chris Rock’s “Good Hair” and seeing a girl around the age of seven getting a relaxer. I felt disgusted and horrified. The chemicals that comprise relaxer are known and proven to be extremely harmful to the hair, scalp, skin, eyes and even lungs from inhaling the fumes. One doctor said that parents have asked about given children relaxers at ages as young as three-years-old. A chemical mixture that has the potential to burn through the skin if left in too long applied to an infant’s head?!?!?! I’d like to quickly raise the question of why we don’t look at this as a form of child abuse. But, we’ll leave that for another discussion.
I’ve also noticed that there is a notion among young girls that straightening your hair signifies becoming a woman. Like, it is some sort of coming of age ritual. I’ve heard little girls say “My Auntie straightened her hair when she was 13.” and so on and so forth, so engrained in our subconscious and modern culture that we often times don’t think twice about it. It seemed to me like the hair progression went from parted afro puffs, pony tails with knockers and barrettes or braids as a child, to once you were old enough it was straightened to be given the ‘hair of a woman’.
We live in the land of Barbie and Ken, Eurocentric standards of beauty, self-hate, auto-colonialism, poor proper Black representation in the media and an arsenal of other bullets aimed at our self-image and self worth. This makes it that much more important to surround our children and ourselves with beautiful positive Black images at home. I wish some mothers wouldn’t deem this process necessary for their daughters and instead let them be truly free to express themselves if even it’s not the mother’s preference. But, what if the mother thinks natural hair is ugly or doesn’t prefer it, what are they to do with the child? And, even then if they didn’t, would that change anything? Probably not considering young Black girls still have everything around them telling them their skin color, features and hair aren’t beautiful. I’ve heard cases of families strong in cultures and being natural, have girls that ask for their hair to be straightened because they just feel it’s what they are supposed to do. It’s a bit disheartening to realize that what many Black girls, and Black people in general, consider natural…is unnatural. It’s extremely hard to be your natural self when you have everything around you telling you you shouldn’t be.
Maybe letting a daughter keep their hair natural for a while will help a mother realize the beauty in hers. Maybe if we saw more people that looked like us, naturally, in the media, then we’d feel more comfortable and proud or at least feel more like there was an option. Maybe if there were then more of a mix, choice and option, then people wouldn’t feel like they held all of their “Blackness” in their hair. Maybe then wrongful negative and positive stigma wouldn’t be ascribed to straight hair and natural hair. Maybe then there would no longer be such thing as “good hair” and “bad hair” and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Maybe…
Jamal Frederick
