Nappy or Straight -- Does It Really Matter, Part 2

Black education in this Western society more about denying our natural hair than focusing on why the creator gave us this hair. No one will ever know for sure why we have this kind of spirally, springy hair, but let's consider the question.

First of all, let me admit that I cut off my permanent, chemically treated hair in 1990 and I haven't looked back. I love my nature hair, especially running my hands through it. One of the books that really helped me to appreciate my hair was Good Hair: For Colored Girls Who've Considered Weaves When the Chemicals Became Too Ruff by Brittenum Bonner. If you are on the brink of deciding to go natural, this book will help you to erase your fears.

Okay, enough said.

One day, before I locked my hair, I had it braided -- just small braids hanging down. I had had it that way for about a month and was considering redoing it when, one braid passed by my eye and I saw the sunlight pass through the braid. Immediately, the shape of the braid reminded me of the shape of DNA.

I said to myself, "Whoa!" So I stared at the braid again through the sunlight. There was no mistake. Our natural hair has the spiral and shape of DNA. Not only this. The original form of DNA is in, you guessed it knots. Our nappy hair, especially the kitchen, is a fully blown representation of DNA. All right, all right. I get to thinking, black people are the only people on the planet to have this hair. Thanks to paleontologist, Louis B. Leakey, revealing what lost history has always known, we can say for sure that black people were the first humans. Get it? Our hated hair is a signature from the creator that we are the seed race. Slavery taught us to hate this hair and to believe that the creator made a mistake in giving it to us.

Nappy or Straight -- Does It Really Matter? Part 1

This post falls under the category of re-Africanizing black education. What does black education have to do with hair? Quite simply, we need to study our hair. Your hair is a major part of your identity. It makes all sorts of statements about how you feel about yourself. Because so much can be said about this, looking at it from so many different angles, let's just look at the nappy or straight issue.



The first thing we need to look at is why nappy or straight is an issue. The answer to this question can be summed up in one word -- Slavery. Slave holders had to ensure that black people would not organize rebellion among themselves. The best way to do this was through divide and conquer -- pitting slave against slave. Through massive rapes of black women, the resulting children were lighter in skin color with finer textured hair and aryan features. Those who looked closer to being white were valued more and treated a little better, especially if they were willing to cooperate with the plantation system.

There are many scholars who talk about the systematic destruction of black unity. One of the best descriptions of this is in The Willie Lynch Letter And The Making of A Slave. When you read this very short, but poignant book, you will nod your head in agreement with what you know to be true of the black community today. It will help you to connect the hidden dots that link together the legacies of slavery with your present reality.

During slavery, in general, the darker you were, the more kinky your hair, the more African features you had, the worse you were treated. For women, the humiliations were unbearable -- the rapes, the forced breeding, the name calling, the dehumanizing tasks they were forced to do. You saw some of these things in movies from the seventies like A Woman Called Moses.

There is a scene in this movie when Harriet is talking to her husband. He's scared and feeling desperate thinking he will not be able to get his freedom papers renewed and he takes it out on her, attempting to humiliate her. Cicely Tyson, who plays Harriet Tubman makes this incredibly expressive movement. I've seen this among black women often. She does this shrug and adjusts her ragged clothes. Her hair is tied with another rag. The movement says, "I know how I look, but this is the best that I can do. Yeah, your words hurt, but I am not going to let them kill me." It's a movement that preserves dignity.

Black women have suffered so much humiliation and African hair was a major target for creating shame in black women. Jiggaboo, nappy-headed, Aunt Jemima -- you know the names. Perhaps the worst of it all was the pervasive, ubiquitous images of black women smiling, skinnin' and grinnin' as if they liked it. These were masks that our ancestors had to wear just to save their lives, the lives or family members, or save someone from being sold off.

When you start connecting those dots, you may find that black women are still wearing the mask and for similar reasons -- survival. It's called, "Playing the game." To earn a living, you straighten your hair and you adopt European standards of beauty. I guess a lot of Sistahs who go natural feel like they are removing that mask and the gross humiliations that lie beneath it.

The controversy starts when we judge one another -- nappy or straight. This judgment only serves to keep us divided, much to the benefit of the dominant society. Don't you think that this time and energy could be better spent on trying to figure out how we can keep our children from killing one another?

Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: Miss Lou leaves us the full loaf

Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: Miss Lou leaves us the full loaf is a wonderful post. Miss Lou reminds me of Zora Neale Hurston and Mama Africa-Miriam Makeba. These women identified the same pattern of war against our identity and the need to be proud of who we are, especially without apology. This is what I love most about these women. They were who they were and that is what they celebrated.





I remember playing games at home and on the school playgrounds like the games you see the little girls in the videos playing on the Lifelines link above. We played Old Mary Mack where we had to slap hands together correctly, going faster and faster while we sang the song.

My parents here in Shreveport would tell me to speak correctly like you hear Miss Lou saying in the video. In America and in Jamaica and in Africa, the languages we speak have been under attack since slavery and colonialism. When we force our children to learn that the way they speak is incorrect, we perpetuate racism. By who's standards are we judging our own languages? Certainly not our own. We've been trained to assist white people in their racism against us. When will we stop?

I had an older white communications professor who was from a very poor place in South Carolina. Her people were uneducated and they spoke a dialect of English that made the professor ashamed during her days as a college student. She shared with us a lesson that took her many years to learn. She accentuated the difference between her original dialect and what she called the "power language"--English.

This helped me a little to be able to explain the difference between Ebonics and standard English, but it isn't enough. There are too many black people speaking European languages in the same African rhythms to allow Europeans to get away with calling their minority languages "power languages".

Our ancestors were geniuses to hide African rhythms and speech patterns in the European languages that were forced upon them. These rhythms can be identified easily among blacks across the world if we just look for the patterns they left us. Miss Lou, Zora Neale Hurston, and Mama Africa were heroes for preserving the languages and stories and songs for us to go back to. Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

Yvonne McCalla Sober, thank you for posting Lifelines - African proverbs for daily living: Miss Lou leaves us the full loaf.

Geneva Smitherman was a great scholar of Ebonics in America. If you want to learn more, you might try these books: Black Talk: Words and Phrases from the Hood to the Amen Corner and Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America (Waynebook, 51).