Notes
3. The Stranger at the Carnival
1. It’s important to note that a black girl’s perm is not the same as a white girl’s. In the black community, a perm and a chemical relaxer are synonymous. The end goal is to make the hair straight, not curly.
2. Dr. Melanye Maclin-Carroll recounted this in Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary, Good Hair.
3. Read Tabora A. Johnson and Teiahsha Bankhead’s “Hair It Is: Examining the Experiences of Black Women with Natural Hair” and Victoria Sherrow’s Encyclopedia of Hair: A Cultural History.
4. Dress codes for girls are generally more restrictive, anyway. According to the Women’s Media Center, in one two-week period in 2014, two hundred students from Tottenville High School in Staten Island were cited for dress code violations. Ninety percent were girls. This is how slut-shaming starts. In 2015, Macy Edgerly, a then-honors student and high school senior at Orangefield High School in Orange County, Texas, was sent home for wearing yoga pants and an oversized shirt. We teach young girls that they can distract male teachers and students with their appearance, and that it is their responsibility to curate their appearance responsibly to avoid inciting the risqué fantasies of passersby. Members of the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls found that self-objectification occurs when girls “learn to think of and treat their own bodies as objects of others’ desire.” When we shame young women for bare midriffs, spaghetti strap tops, or showing their legs, we are inadvertently teaching them that their bodies are more important than their minds, and that their bodies are inherently objectified and sexualized for just taking up space. Repercussions from these rules include poor school performance, low self-esteem, and eating disorders. For black female students, culturally charged ethnic and natural hairstyles further complicate this intersection of appropriateness and modesty with identity and the body. If a black girl wears her hair in dreadlocks, cornrows, afro-puffs, or twists, how is she being a distraction? Who is she distracting? If she is not “presentable,” who decides that?
5. In predominately white films and TV shows, curly, thick hair is often presented as something that needs to be transformed. The character Mia Thermopolis, of The Princess Diaries, has her hair cut and flat-ironed to appear more regal before she assumes her position as princess of Genovia. The characters played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, and Sandra Bullock in Miss Congeniality all straighten their hair to signify a positive aesthetic transformation. In Clueless, Tai Frasier’s curly reddish hair is pressed with a flat iron as part of her makeover. It’s interesting to note that compared to the blonde, straight-haired Cher, Tai is sexually experienced. To become more sexually appealing and daring to Danny, straight-haired goody-two-shoes Sandy, in Grease, curls and buffs out her hair. But for black women, sexuality is not so transmutable. Our sexualization is immutable in the bodies that we inhabit.
5. A Lotus for Michelle
1. Shailagh Murray, “A Family Tree Rooted in American Soil,” Washington Post, October 2, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/10/01/ST2008100103245.html.
6. Black Girl Magic
1. Clover Hope, “Who Gets to Own ‘Black Girl Magic’?,” Jezebel, April 7, 2017, http://jezebel.com/who-gets-to-own-black-girl-magic-1793924053.
2. Women with Disabilities: Essays in Psychology, Culture, and Politics, edited by Michelle Fine and Adrienne Asch.
3. http://academic.udayton.edu/race/03justice/crime09.htm.
4. James Henry Hammond, a South Carolinian slave owner, believed that some of his slaves were conjure practitioners who were vandalizing and stealing on his estate. Much to his chagrin, Hammond was unable to find proof of his suspicion, and his slaves believed that they were supernaturally protected, existing on another metaphysical plane to which Hammond had no access.
5. Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition.
8. Who Will Write Us?
1. Alison Nastasi, “‘Girlhood’ Director Céline Sciamma on Reclaiming Childhood, Casting Her Girl Gang, and How Her Film Mirrors ‘Boyhood,’” Flavorwire, January 30, 2015, http://flavorwire.com/502100/girlhood-director-celine-sciamma-on-reclaiming-childhood-casting-her-girl-gang-and-how-her-film-mirrors-boyhood.
2. William J. Terrill of Monmouth College in his paper “Sacred Groves and the ‘Jungle Whitefolks Planted’: The Dynamic Symbolism of Trees in Beloved.”
3. Bobby Finger, “Here’s How New Texas Public School Textbooks Write about Slavery,” Jezebel, September 1, 2015, http://jezebel.com/heres-how-new-texas-public-school-textbooks-write-about-1726786557.
4. “Whitewashing of Slavery Embarrasses Virginia Governor,” SPLC Intelligence Report, Summer 2010.
5. Meghan Hilbruner, “‘It Ain’t No Cake Walk’: The Influence of African American Music and Dance on the American Cultural Landscape,” Virginia Social Science Journal 50 (March 2015).
6. Glenda Carpio, Laughing Fit to Kill: Black Humor in the Fictions of Slavery.
About the Author
MORGAN JERKINS is a Harlem-based writer and contributing editor for Catapult. She graduated from Princeton University with an AB in comparative literature, specializing in nineteenth-century Russian literature and postwar modern Japanese literature, and she has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Elle, Rolling Stone, The Guardian (London), and BuzzFeed, among many others.
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this will be my undoing. Copyright © 2018 by Morgan Jerkins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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