American Ignorance and the Discourse of Manageability Concerning the Care and Presentation of Black Hair
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American Ignorance and the Discourse of Manageability Concerning the Care and Presentation of Black Hair Amir R. A. Jaima 1 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
A culturally cultivated ignorance with regard to the care and presentation of tightly-curled hair pervades American society. This ignorance masquerades as a discourse of manageability, which supports institutional prohibitions of historically Black American hairstyles. In other words, rather than acknowledging our knowledge deficits, we attribute the medical and aesthetic consequences of our ignorance to the hair itself. The insidious implication is that the display of tightly curled hair is not a matter of taste but indicative of a lack of self-care. I conclude that this trend is racially prejudicial and that laws and education are possible mechanisms of redress. Keywords Black hair . Ignorance . Racism . Education
“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” – Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light” (Lorde 1988) Historically, the academic study and analysis of the hair textures and hairstyles common among Black Americans—namely Black hair and Black hairstyles—has been framed as a political inquiry. While hair texture varies among Black Americans, Black hair generally refers to hair that is tightly curled or “kinky,” in contradistinction to “white,” straight hair. Black hairstyles are those that showcase the unique affordances of tightly curled hair; such styles include afros, cornrows, twists, and locs. Thus, scholars pose some version of the question: what do Black hairstyle choices suggest about the Black political consciousness (Mercer 1987)? For instance, if, as a Black American, I straighten my tightly curled hair, does that mean that I have internalized white, European standards of beauty (Rooks 2000; Banks 2000)? Or, do my (dread)locs justifiably inspire dread or betray me as a dissident (A. Byrd and Tharps 2002, 127; Lorde 2011)? Or, does my shaved head convey an
* Amir R. A. Jaima [email protected]
1
Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA
Journal of Medical Humanities
“investment in hegemonic forms of [B]lack masculinity” (Johnson 2010, 154; Kelley 1995)? Or, does my afro express pride in my Black racial identity (Kelley 1997; Ford 2015)? The problem with questions like these is that unlike complexion, and in spite of its genetically determined characteristics, hair is, as dermatologists Crystal Aguh and Ginette Okoye note, “one of the few physical features that can be easily altered in its shape, color, and length” (Aguh and Okoye 2017, 17). In short, while hair texture is an immutable racial characteristic, hair-styles are “mutable.” This means that even though there are social and institutional pressures to style the hair of Black Americans in some ways rather than others, many of which are arguably proxies for racial discrimination, legally and politically hairstyle discrimination is not obviously racial discrimination; Title VII o
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