This is not to say that I was lying when I wrote about my hair journey in 2016. I wasn’t. I believed I had healed myself. Coupled with that naïve optimism, I’m a writer. I live for the hero’s journey of overcoming an obstacle once and for all, and in this case, learning to have an unwavering love of my hair was the neat and tidy ending I wanted. But this isn’t a two-hour movie or a three-hundred-page novel. Life is messy and complicated, so why was I prematurely celebrating like a HBCU marching band during halftime in a Grambling State vs. Louisiana-Monroe football game? Just mentally high-stepping, blowing a whistle rhythmically while doing a Matrix backbend and wearing a highly coordinated uniform. I blame nineties / early aughts talk shows that I watched growing up for my presumptuous “mission accomplished” attitude.
I may have been a preteen/teenager when many of these shows—Ricki Lake, The Phil Donahue Show (I watched reruns), The Montel Williams Show, The Jenny Jones Show, Sally Jessy Raphael, Oprah—were at their height, but I gobbled them up as much as if not more than the stay-at-home mom demographic these shows were tailor-made for. I loved watching them so much that I even checked out lesser fare such as The Geraldo Rivera Show,* The Jerry Springer Show, and of course, The Steve Wilkos Show, which was a spin-off show for Jerry’s . . . bodyguard. Riiiiiight. And folks have the nerve to be mad at Black people wanting reparations when white mediocrity is routinely rewarded? Like someone in the Robinson clan probably knew somebody who knew someone who was definitely Harriet Tubman’s work wife, and I can’t get a weekly check for $49.95 in perpetuity as the U.S. government’s way of saying “my bad for slavery,” but Steve got a talk show (that’s been on the air for FOURTEEN YEARS, by the way) while wearing stonewashed jeans and having the personality of a slice of Pepperidge Farm brand bread? Lol. Okay, society, you have some ’splaining to do.
Moving on! The point is that if you were an adult who held a note card and microphone while standing in front of a studio audience, I was tuning in, especially if the episodes centered around guests who discussed how they overcame a hardship or sought the help of a Dr. Phil type who’d provide easy and snackable advice in five-to-seven-minute segments. The audience applauded, the person sometimes agreed to take the advice, cut to commercial, and we all carried on with the illusion that all problems can be neatly resolved. If we were lucky, months later, these talk shows would treat us to follow-up conversations in which the in-studio audience (as well as us viewers at home) would pass final judgments on the guests’ progress or lack thereof with cheers or groans. This sort of pass/fail way of grading people is not limited to just TV. It’s ingrained in society.
We live in a world that loves an act three resolution: hero saves the day, woman figures out the key thing that’s missing in her life, a person gives one grand speech that undoes all the damage from their toxic behavior. Therefore, the takeaway is, no matter how big or small an issue is, a person can magically fix it after a couple of tries. Meanwhile, life is routinely ding dong ditching us, so that when we open the door, our same ol’ problems are like [in Killmonger’s voice], “Hey, auntie,” because old habits and mentalities die hard. I learned this sobering truth in my early thirties last week, which raises the question, “Why?”
Why don’t we discuss what growth and change actually are until we’re older and perhaps a bit disillusioned? Furthermore, why do we not openly share this information so others can avoid a similar fate? And why aren’t we explaining to kids that working on one’s self is a continual and daily recommitment to behaving differently than before? As we know, young people are capable of handling more than we think they can, therefore, a little heads-up is only fair. Because, it seems, real life not resembling the fantasy is where many of us get into trouble. We end up frustrated or self-flagellating when we revert to bad habits (as we’ll inevitably do). This pattern of unmanaged expectations leading to disappointment could be prevented if we were taught early on that nothing’s wrong with us if we don’t magically undo decades of learned behavior in one try. Young people can handle hearing that, and the fact that we’re too scared to give it to ’em straight probably says more about our PTSD from life not 100 percent aligning with our dreams, wants, and desires than it does about the fragility of youth. Look, I’m not asking for anything super in-depth or cruel. A simple, “Much like a raggedy Chase Bank in downtown Manhattan that’s covered in scaffolding, you are a work in progress. Forever. Get used to it and do the best you can.” Not the most inspiring message, but at least it’s honest. Anyway, I write all of this to say that when it comes to my somewhat fraught relationship with my hair, I assumed that I had, at last, by the writing of my first book, resolved my issues.
While that assumption was wrong, it doesn’t mean I hadn’t made progress along the way. To, at eighteen years old, 1) realize and admit to myself that I was getting relaxers not because I was experimenting with my hair, but because I was trying to fit within Eurocentric beauty standards, and 2) decide to go against the grain when the majority of Black women in the public eye and in professional settings were sporting chemically altered, bone-straight hair and/or weaves in the nineties / early aughts was a BIG deal and a much-needed step in my journey of self-acceptance. So I don’t want to trivialize that; however, as I now look back on that evening with Miche, I can see old insecurities were bubbling to the surface once again.
Even though I had the privilege of interviewing Michelle on the final episode of the 2 Dope Queens podcast, that conversation took place in the intimacy of her D.C. office. It felt slightly lower stakes because my cohost, Jessica Williams, and I divvied up the questions, and we had a limited amount of time with Michelle. Less time with her meant less chance of me screwing up. But her book tour? There was no way around it. It was going to be a big night: ninety minutes of one-on-one conversation with Michelle in front of twenty thousand people with a film crew filming everything for her soon-to-be-released Netflix documentary about her tour. And since I expected my appearance in the doc to be the equivalent of that rogue elbow we’ve all seen in a person’s cropped profile picture on a dating app, I was gonna make sure my elbow was the most glistening and moisturized elbow that has ever been captured on 4K Ultra HD. Hence why my trusted glam team of Delina Medhin (makeup) and Sabrina Rowe (hair), as well as my number two, Mai, joined me in Philly. I can best describe Delina as Alicia Keys’s Eritrean doppelgänger whose specialty is #RelatableGlam aka if you’re trying to bag yourself an indie filmmaker auteur or want to serve an “I deserve this promotion” beat during an employee review. As for Sabs, she’s a ball of lovable, positive energy who can execute almost any hairstyle and wears the cutest, most fashionable platform clogs. I stan a woman who values arch support! So there the four of us were, a multi-culti bundle of nerves and excitement.
A little over halfway through glam, I was told Michelle wanted me to swing by her greenroom so we could hang before the show. I panicked. My makeup was half done and I was wearing a jumpsuit that was less Elvis in Vegas and more Pep Boys “I’m about to upcharge you for a brand-new carburetor and there’s nothing you can do about it” auto mechanic. But both my unfinished makeup and underdressed outfit took a back seat to my biggest concern: my hair. Sabs hadn’t finished my cornrows or doing final tweaks to my wig. Aaah! There was no way I could chill with Michelle Obama until my hair was perfect. A completely normal thought, right? Except what most people mean by “perfect”—effortlessly fabulous, camera ready—isn’t what I had in mind.
By “perfect,” I was concerned with my hair not living up to the standard that Black women are held to. Anything less than magazine cover ready is generally unacceptable and opens BW up to ridicule. “Untamed” curls, edges not laid, and lacking a flawless sheen oft seen on a silk press are all crimes to be avoided, especially in public. Sure, in this instance, public wasn’t really “public.” I was backstage and would simply be walking from my greenroom past Wells Fargo Center employees, who most likely weren’t paying attention to me, to Miche
lle’s greenroom. Still, since none of those employees nor Michelle are confidantes, it felt too risky to reveal myself to them.
So there I was: a thirty-four-year-old accomplished woman with hopes and dreams and magical love in my life, both romantic and platonic, who was awash in shame and embarrassment that my natural Black hair wasn’t “good enough.” Sadly, those feelings are nothing new to the average Black woman and girl in America. We’ve been trained to despise our beauty and our hair, to make it look like anything except for how it does naturally, and to, at all costs, make sure our hair never betrays us. And the most fail-proof way of doing that is usually by manipulating our beautiful kinks and coils into something more in line with what’s societally acceptable. If we can successfully do that, we can somehow hide our Otherness in plain sight.
As a Black woman, I’m deeply aware of how precarious my reputation and humanity are in the eyes of non-Black people. All it takes is one misstep for everything about me to be discredited, disregarded, and denied if my hair screams “I’m the culmination of America’s wildest fears about Black people.” So, even though I was no longer consumed by the myopic intention of fitting in with Eurocentric standards the way I was in my twenties, I was still keenly aware that the stakes are high, which is why I behave like an always-on-duty public DA, ready at the jump to defend my existence with my hair serving as number one character witness. Hence me not wanting those Wells Fargo employees to take one look at my hair and decide I’m not worth respecting and being treated like a human being. And double hence* me not wanting to let Michelle Obama down by my hair looking imperfect.
But this Miche, you say. She’s from Chicago. She ain’t siddity. She’s down-to-earth. And most important, she’s a Black woman. You are correct. She is all those things, so if I had popped by her room with my hair less than impeccable, I doubt she’d have even batted an eyelash, let alone looked down on me. But, y’all, let’s be real, sometimes when it comes to Black on Black judgment, we can be nothing but a bunch of Simon Cowells minus the bad taste in jeans and ankie b’s aka ankle boots. We hold each other to extremely high standards because we know that each of us individually is expected by society to represent our whole entire race. Therefore, we’re deeply invested in each other’s lives because we know just how much is on the line. That’s why when Serena Williams won the gold medal at the 2012 Olympics, we felt like we all won and Crip walked alongside her. Or when a crime is reported on the news, we’re collectively clenching our butt cheeks until we find out it wasn’t committed by a Black person and then we do a small fist pump to ourselves, respectfully of course, relieved that we’re living another day without having to pay for the sins of another. And, sadly, we’re often first in line to tear down or uplift each other, especially when it comes to Black women and their hair.
Black women get dragged for poorly executed baby hairs, teased for their ends looking dry, chastised for dyeing their hair blond, made to feel inferior if their hair doesn’t naturally grow down to their butts. My favorite loudmouths, however, are the boo-boo-ass, wannabe woke Black dudes who think it’s their job to “save” Black women by turning on India.Arie’s “Brown Skin” and reminding BW that they could love themselves if only they stopped relaxing their hair. Listen, heauxes: 1) Quit acting like you’re doing the Lord’s work when you’re actually just being condescending because you think you know what’s best for Black women, 2) Don’t willy-nilly start playing songs on Spotify because it fucks up the algorithm, and 3) Finally, no one was asking for your opinion on how Black women should wear their hair. Just because some of them rock chemically straightened or flat-ironed styles doesn’t mean they’re an army of Samuel L. Jacksons from Django Unchained. Maybe they want to switch up their hair or it’s easier for them to handle when it’s permed, or they just simply like the way their hair looks in an altered state. Whatever the case may be, it’s really no one’s business how a Black woman wears her hair unless she acts as though wearing it a certain way makes her better than other Black people.
Clearly, I’m #TeamMindYourDamnBusinessWhenItComesToBlackWomensHair for every BW, it seems, except for me. Try as I might, I’m not impervious to negative feedback about my hair, which is why I worried that the former First Lady would take one look at my less-than-flawless hair and think, How could you walk around looking like that in front of people who aren’t kinfolk? I was afraid of letting her down in some way. Of course, I didn’t have this level of clarity that night in Philadelphia as I do now. When I got the invitation to see Michelle, I practically Bruce Banner’ed and blacked the hell out from excitement, so I was purely acting on emotional muscle memory, which explains the immediate panic about my hair. I had Sabrina finish the last bit of my cornrows and plop on that wig so that Michelle wouldn’t see my natural Black lady hair, which now, I’m aware of how absurd that is. Like, hello?!?! She’s Black! She has Black woman hair! If I had to conjecture, she probably has 4C hair just like me, so she probably knew very well what my real hair looked like! And yet. I put on the “perfect” hair, so I could have the perfect greenroom experience with her.
Once the evening was over, I filed it away until two years later, when that night randomly popped into my mind. What jumped out at me was not how much fun I had with MO or the fact that the event was a major career and personal achievement, but my anxiety and belief that my natural hair was a liability. And as I sat on my living room couch, remembering that evening in Philadelphia, I wasn’t saddened because I was still insecure about my hair, although I had every right to be. It would’ve been so easy to feel like a failure because I found out I wasn’t “cured.” Instead, I couldn’t help but marvel at the genuine progress I had made since the Becoming tour. How I had felt about me and my hair two years ago was in stark contrast to the newfound feelings, the surprising ones of happiness and joy related to my hair, that I was experiencing during Covid.
It was a Saturday during the summer of 2020. British Baekoff and I were watching Living Single while I was styling my hair into mini two-strand twists. When the theme song kicked in, signaling a new episode, I was rapping alongside Queen Latifah. My eyes were closed and my fingers were on autopilot, patiently working the moisturizing cream into my freshly washed and deeply conditioned coils before twisting two small strands together. Even though my arms and hands were a little achy, I was beaming with joy because this painstaking routine transported me back to my childhood, when I would sit on a stack of telephone books between my mom’s legs as she did my hair while we watched Living Single. Mentally going back in time allowed me to transcend beyond my usual playlist of negative self-talk and connect with the love my mom put into my hair each and every Sunday night in preparation for the following school week in a way I never had before. I wondered why I had spent all these decades undervaluing and discounting that meaningful love while readily accepting all the lies society sold me. And as I was recalling this special time with my mom and who little Phoebe was before she had internalized any destructive thoughts about her hair, I must have been grinning like a fool because I opened my eyes and Baekoff was filming me with his iPhone. He captured the happiness I’d spent most of my life hoping and wishing I would feel about my hair, but was convinced would forever be elusive because I have 4C hair.
* * *
4C hair. Where to begin . . . ooh! I know! If I see one more trifling bitch who clearly has a looser curl pattern using the hashtags #4CHair or #4CHairstyles or demonstrating an “easy wash and go” style, twist outs, a flexi-rod set, etc., I will commit identity fraud on all these women, open a bunch of credit cards in their names, max out the cards with purchases of hair products from Sally’s Beauty Supply, Carol’s Daughter, and Jane Carter Solution, and ruin their FICO scores. Yes, that is an elaborate scheme that will most likely backfire and end with me in pris—#Callback—but I. Don’t. Care. I’ve had enough of these phonies selling pipe dreams. They know doggone well that for the average 4C woman, re-creating many of these looks requires a
team of scientists including Dr. Fauci, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the ghost of George Washington Carver, a marathon of Whoopi Goldberg movies queued up, their therapist on speed-dial for when the style goes disastrously wrong, and a long weekend where Monday is a federal holiday, because trust, she will need the extra day off from work to get this mess together. Jokes aside, all many of these non-4Cers are doing is reinforcing the mindset that because our hair is not mirroring back what we just watched in the tutorial, our hair must be “bad.” Now, before I continue discussing the ways in which the natural hair community, while well-intentioned and often a place of refuge, continues to perpetuate harmful attitudes when it comes to Black women’s hair (especially those who fall under the 4C category), I must confess to something.
Full disclosh: I have 4A/B hair in the front third of my head while the rest is 4C, and those mofos ain’t trying to work together. They’re two mismatched classmates paired together for a science project. One student struggles to build the volcano alone while the other student shows up the day of the presentaysh and goes, “Lemme know when you need me to pour the baking soda in!” And they didn’t even bring Arm & Hammer baking soda; it’s the generic kind that just reads “baking soda” on the box in plain cursive lettering. Despite the friction between the two, they take first place at the science fair. That’s kind of what it’s like with my hair. Having combination curl patterns can sometimes be tumultuous, but in the end, they all come together to create something beautiful. There’s just one problem: 4C is not seen as beautiful and aspirational like the looser curls of lighter-skinned or mixed Black women; therefore 4C hair is typically underrepresented inside and outside the natural hair community, which is irritating considering the fact that 4C hair is supposed to be one of if not the most important cruxes of the natural hair movement. Instead, 4C is seen as an unfortunate starting place that, with hard work and determination, can be transformed temporarily into something better, more palatable, and ultimately, good.
Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes Page 25
