In the Bustle.com article entitled “How Black People Came to Believe 4C Was a ‘Bad Hair’ Texture,” Kayla Greaves writes about how 4C hair went from being held in high esteem and considered attractive to being viewed as “difficult” and in need of taming. One of the people she interviewed was Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka, who is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of the District of Columbia and an expert in African cultural rituals and natural hair. Part of Mbilishaka’s explanation echoes what I referenced earlier in this essay in terms of the opinion and understanding of Black hair changing with colonization. Greaves writes:
Before the forced migration of African people began during the 15th century, the idea that 4C hair was somehow difficult to manage was non-existent. In traditional African societies, communities with 4C hair were equipped with the proper tools and methods to take care of their coils. “We had a lot of rituals connected to hair, that could actually prevent that type of hair texture from breaking,” Mbilishaka explains. These societies would sometimes use ingredients like ochre clay and butter fats to preserve the hair and retain length—much like the methods the Himba people of Namibia still practice today. . . . Ironically enough, Afro-textured strands were also believed to be linked to the heavens, Mbilishaka explains. “4C hair was actually used as more of an art form,” she shares. “Our hair is the highest point on our entire body, and therefore considered most connected to the divine. In some degree our hair was supposed to grow up . . . as a way to connect to the spiritual world.”
Wow. I wish I had known this when I was growing up in the nineties. Hell, I wish I knew this that night in Philadelphia. It would have saved me a lot of mental anguish knowing hair like mine wasn’t always treated like the runt of the litter. Far from it. It was exalted and had meaning. It was art. That’s why it’s so exasperating when I click on the #4CHair or #4CHairstyles tag on social media and I’m bombarded with everything but 4C hair. Because when people from my own community, especially when those people are other Black women, erase you (intentionally or not), the message is: No 4Cs allowed.
That feels personal as fuck. And it hurts like hell. Lemme back up for a second.
While many reading this are more than familiar with hair typing, some may not be, and I don’t want the uninformed to be lost the way I was when I watched Tenet and my clueless behind was searching for context clues like Inspector Clouseau so I could understand what the hell was going on. 4C is a term from Andre Walker’s eponymous hair typing system, which was created in the nineties. After establishing himself as a celebrity hairstylist, Walker branched out with the AWHTS, which is broken down into four categories: straight, wavy, curly, and kinky. For instance, supermodel Kate Moss would probably be deemed 1A aka straight and fine hair whereas actress/playwright Danai Gurira is likely 4C aka kinky with tight coils. This system was then used to market his line of hair-care products. While he has subsequently admitted that this system was designed to push his products, the effects have lingered and in fact expanded over the years. So have his comments about those whose hair falls under the kinky category.
In an interview with Elle, Walker stated that women have to love and care for their hair, then proceeded to say, “Kinky hair can have limited styling options; that’s the only hair type that I suggest altering with professional relaxing.” Uhhhhh, limited according to whom, boo? Black women and girls have a plethora of options for their coily textures—Afro, cornrows, dreadlocks, frohawk, Bantu knots, flat twists, high puff with a head wrap, etc.—so for him to dismiss hairstyles because they’re time-consuming to create or because some don’t have the range to execute them is what’s limiting. And whether he intended it to or not, this messaging reinforces the belief that kinky hair shouldn’t be celebrated for what it is, but dinged for what it isn’t: adhering to Eurocentric ideals. Toni Morrison once stated in an interview about white people and racism, “If you can only be tall because somebody’s on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is, white people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they can do about it. Take me out of it.”
Similarly, leave Black hair out of the definition of what Eurocentric beauty is. If “white hair” is good only because of a false narrative that renders Black hair in all its uniqueness, malleability, and glory as bad, then what is white hair? If Black hair didn’t exist, how would white hair define itself? Furthermore, how would white people define themselves if we didn’t live in a world in which their self-esteem was built, in part, on denigrating Blackness? Many in the natural hair community, myself included, have wondered this, so when someone as revered, talented, and accomplished as Walker (who was Oprah’s hairstylist for over twenty-five years and created Halle Berry’s signature pixie cut, which many of us attempted to imitate only to have our hair end up looking like Julia Roberts’s Tinker Bell wig in Hook) doesn’t outwardly encourage us 4-type queens, it’s disheartening and mind-boggling. I mean, ya had one job, dude! To remind Black women of their dopeness. And when he failed to do that and received backlash, he responded on his blog, but it just made things worse. He said, in short, that it was really a woman’s “personal preference” and that chemical relaxers could actually lead to healthier hair.
To which my response was: Wut? When I used to get my hair chemically straightened, it ended up looking like the remnants of a forest fire in Yellowstone National Park. Just dry and brittle as hell with the ends breaking off. So, hair damaged and stripped of its nutrients is deemed “healthy” because it’s . . . straight and “easier” to style, but arming my baby ’fro with the LCO method (aka liquid or leave-in conditioner, cream, and oil) so as to retain moisture and lock in all the nutrients—which, by the way, is key to achieving strong, healthy hair—isn’t because of my tighter curl pattern? Bruh, come on! 4C-type hair can’t be disrespected like this! I mean, yes, though relaxers have improved since the nineties, I’m sure this man knows that for many Black women, their hair is at its healthiest when it’s not altered from its natural state. At least, that’s certainly the case for me.
I always believed my hair was extremely fragile because when it was permed and I held a section of it in the air, the roots were thin yet somewhat sturdy. However, by the time I got to the ends, they were as see-through as the Chinese lanterns Lara Jean and Peter Kavinsky put their written-down wishes inside of before they sent those lanterns into the sky in To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You. Except in my case, my wish wasn’t for teenage love to stand the test of time, but for something along the lines of “Can my hair thicken up like it’s some roux in a plate of biscuits and gravy?” Seriously, it was demoralizing that society told me a perm is what’s best for my hair when all it did was make it limp and lifeless. Fast-forward to now. My hair has more than rehabilitated itself in its natural state. My curl pattern can be tight or springy depending on the style, my hair now has the same level of thickness from root to tip, and there’s no more breakage. And, of course, this transition from relaxed to natch hair was seamless. No hiccups. I looked like a Jet magazine “Beauty of the Week” model from the seventies every single day since I turned eighteen. Lies!
Without my mom doing my hair or getting a relaxer from a professional, ya girl STRUGGLED. I’m talking like if Helena Bonham Carter and her messy bird’s nest of hair saw me, she’d be like, “Girl, I’m white as fuck. Hell, I’m practically translucent, and even I know you shouldn’t be going out looking like that. Want me to call one of the three Black Brits I know to come fix this?” Point is, because for the first eighteen years of my life someone else did my hair, I never learned how to do it. And you can imagine how it went when I gave it the ol’ college try.
Y’all, in my late teens and twenties, sometimes if I couldn’t replicate a hairstyle, I cried like Good Will Hunting’s Matt Damon after Robin Williams told him it’s not his fault. Other times, I gave up and had a barber cut my hair into a baby ’fro or shave it all off, so I wouldn’t hav
e to deal with my hair at all. And at my lowest, I’d look at pictures of biracial celebrities and models and think, If only my hair looked like that, then my life would be easier. Eventually, I sought help, and over the next several years, I bounced around various salons, getting all sorts of braided styles, faux locks, and Erykah Badu–esque massive Afro lewks done. I hoped that getting a knockoff version of these celebrities’ hairstyles would magically cause me to feel positive about my hair, but usually, I just felt like an impostor—that is, when I wasn’t distracted by a much bigger problem: I was broke as hell, and as a result, the quality of these hairdos depended on the kind of hair and services I could afford. Sometimes, getting my hair done on the cheap worked out in my favor, and other times . . .
You know how Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final book, Where Do We Go from Here, was an essay collection about the status of the Civil Rights Movement and how it could move forward? That title can also apply to those moments when, halfway through getting my hair done, I realize the hairstylist is going to have me out here looking like a gahtdamn fool and all I can think is, Do I have sex for the next month with the lights off? Do I skip town and go live in a doomsday bunker? Do I become a performance artist and pretend this bullshit was intentional? Truly, where the fuck do we go from here? Lol, Bernice and the rest of the King children are like, “Please do not mention my dad’s work when writing about the ignorant moments in your life.” Copy!
Anyway, the point is you can find pictures of my hair looking like a hot-ass mess. No one ever said anything, not even my friends and family, which I’m kind of annoyed about, but also appreciative of because their silence saved me the embarrassment of having to admit I was living paycheck to paycheck even though the evidence was there in plain sight. That’s why I believe you can tell a lot about a Black woman’s financial status by how her hair looks. Meaning if my locks are hella moisturized and shiny, you best believe I’m so flush with cash that I’m putting avocado on everything: toast, salads, face masks, whatever! Conversely, if it looks like David Attenborough is about to narrate a gaggle of squirrels playing slapbox on top of my head, then you already know I was chilling with Dante in the eighth circle of Hell: overdraft fees. Thankfully, as my career advanced, I got out of debt and was on camera more frequently, and I needed to elevate my hair game. Enter: Sabrina.
Having her around to help me get camera ready and indulge me and my chameleon ways when it comes to hairstyle and color was a lot of fun since she’s a true artist. But, if I’m being honest, I mostly felt relief when we started working together. Deep down, I loved having Sabs do my hair because that meant I didn’t have to “deal” with it. Ooof. After all that time to get in a better space mentally with my hair, I still treated it the way Seinfeld did his neighbor, with a contemptible “Hello, Newman.” My hair was a nuisance that I begrudgingly had to address. And when I didn’t want to, I’d have Sabs put it in a protective style or underneath a wig so I could ignore it. While I didn’t hate my hair like I used to, I merely coexisted with it. That was progress, for sure, but it also made me sad. So, as per usual, I turned to the one thing that would lift me out of the doldrums: the natural hair community. But results were mixed.
Before I go any further, you must know how much I love the natural hair community. It was there for me when I grew dreadlocks for the first time, when I buzzed my head and was bald for a year, when I needed guidance on what products to avoid or incorporate into my routine, and when I needed hair inspo for season two of my HBO series, 2 Dope Queens. But above all, the natural hair community is a place of refuge from a world that steals, ignores, or looks down on Black hair, and I don’t know where I would be without it. However, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that this same group has, at times, exacerbated my insecurity about my hair and made me question some of the things going on in the community. I’m not the only one.
Popular author, TV personality, and licensed psychotherapist Nikki Walton aka Curly Nikki expressed similar concerns on her eponymous blog in a post entitled “Has the Natural Hair Community Created a Hierarchy for Curl Types? #TheNewGoodHair”:
There are fewer successful bloggers with 4C type hair. There are few products marketed toward [B]lack women with natural hair that has a kinkily coiled hair texture. Instagram accounts that celebrate 4C type hair have significantly fewer followers compared to the accounts that highlight “all” curl patterns and sparsely feature women with kinky hair, unless it is a celebrity or a high fashion photo.
I noticed this when I first dipped my toe in the community during the early aughts, which is why it is slightly distressing that many of these same problems (lack of 4C representation) still exist but in new formats (used to be websites and now it’s social media). So despite the fact we’re in a new iteration of the natural hair movement, products and techniques have advanced, and there is, undoubtedly, a wider acceptance of hair types than there was in the early aughts, the truth is the natural hair community is not inclusive enough. There’s still far too much low- and high-key anti-4C behavior happening.
In addition to what Curly Nikki mentioned, it is still acceptable to mock 4C hair, to view Black women with 4C hair as less attractive or less capable in the workplace, and to appreciate kinkier textures only if they are on a light-skinned woman and/or if the hair is blown out so as to display its length. Many blogs, YouTube vids, and social media platforms place so much emphasis on getting kinkier texture to grow and visibly look longer that it’s hard not to get suckered in to the point that you end up thinking this obsession with length came from within. Sometimes this avalanche of messaging makes me wonder if this is how men must feel when they see ads for penis pumps and other things that can cause self-doubt. Please note this will be the only time I empathize with #PeenProbs because men and their penises are usually the root of many #CoochieConundrums.*
Anyway, back to anti-4C behavior within the natural hair community. In that same blog post from Curly Nikki, she explains that Black women with hair-care lines are “some of the fastest growing and successful entrepreneurs in the business sector” to the point that conventional (read: white) hair and beauty brands are witnessing a double-digit dip in profit for the first time in decades. Sound like a happy story? Well, it isn’t, because it turns out that texture discrimination is part of what’s driving sales. As Ebony.com’s Trudy Susan writes in her article “The Sad Truth About Natural Hair Discrimination”:
Curly and wavy girls dominate the branding in products mass marketed to natural hair. So while the recent rebirth and modern day celebration of natural hair has provided some balance for Black women looking to escape the media induced pressure to yearn for European imitated straight, long hair, now there is a new pressure for natural women to yearn for a specific type of natural hair. . . . Tight, coily and kinky hair naturals are underrepresented and by far under-celebrated, given their hair does not conform to the hair images being glamorized and glorified by many popular natural hair brands.
What about Lupita Nyong’o or Teyonah Parris, some might ask? Yes, they are in the limelight, but for every dark-skinned 4Cer, there is a litany of natural hair girls who have bigger, looser, softer curls being pushed to the forefront. They are the ones who get the most likes on social media, get the sponsorship deals, get booked for modeling gigs, become the face of brands.
It’s no wonder why, at times, it can feel as though mixed women have hijacked the natural hair movement. Actually, “hijacked” isn’t the correct word because it’s not their fault that their hair type is the preferred visual representation of Black hair that we see in the media. While they should absolutely be represented and have space and commune, what about us 4C girls and women? Where do we go? Who is going to cheerlead us? Nurture our self-esteem? Be in the trenches with us? That’s why I get irritated by non-4Cers encroaching on #4CHair and #4CHairstyles. Maybe it’s a point of pride and ego in that I’ve earned my stripes, so to speak, by living with coily locks. Or maybe they want to
be associated with the struggle without having to experience the struggle, because to be associated with the struggle also means being associated with its beauty.
Deeply textured, tightly coiled hair is staggeringly, stop-you-in-your-tracks beautiful. Only a fool wouldn’t want to be synonymous with gobsmacking gorgeousness. But perhaps it’s as simple as the fact that non-4C queens have had their own battles with how they are perceived because of their hair, and they feel a sense of kinship with us kinky folks. I accept that, but they also need to accept that our experiences and how we move through the world are different because our hair is different, and it’s not divisive to call that out, but necessary. I’ve been made to feel that I am not enough, not worthy, not viable and valuable because of my hair. I’ve had it drilled in me that not being mixed or ambiguously Black and lacking the “aspirational” proximity to whiteness is a defect that can never be fixed. And I have been doing the painstaking work every single day to unlearn everything that I’ve been taught is wrong about me and my hair. So I can’t pretend that every Black woman is in the same trenches when it comes to hair. We aren’t, and that’s okay because, frankly, none of us should be in there at all. We should be carefree and joyful about our Blackness and our kinky coils. At least, that is what I realized that afternoon on the couch, watching Living Single, when I was happy, proud, and grateful to have the privilege of working my fingers through my 4C hair.
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