Good hair?

I heard about Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair,  several weeks back and have been looking forward to its release on October 9.  Besides being funny as hell, it provides women (not just black women) another opportunity to have the “hair discussion.”

Check out the trailer:

I spent most of my life fighting with my hair.  Early on, the message was clear that  a black girl’s hair in it’s natural state was “bad.”  I remember many a weekend sitting in the kitchen having my hair straightened by a metal comb that my mother heated up on the gas stove.  And many black women can tell you stories of burned ears, necks or foreheads.  I think putting a hot comb near a child would be considered abuse if we were thinking straight.

But we are not.  We only want GOOD HAIR.

“Good” hair means STRAIGHT hair.  Hair that we can flip like the white girls.  And we will pay lots of money and endure hours of discomfort to “fit in and be “acceptable.”

I could share lots of hair horror stories.  But I won’t.  See, I made the decision in 2004 to go “natural.”  After starting coaching school, I realized that if I were going to teach others about leading a more authentic life, I’d better take a closer look at the places I wasn’t.

I already knew that I was out of alignment with my job.  I planned on quitting after my 40th birthday in 2005 because I couldn’t imagine spending the 2nd half of my life in such misery.

But the hair thing surprised me.  I know now that straightening my hair represented a rejection of some part of me.  I was conditioned to believe it was unacceptable because it wasn’t like “theirs”.  Even with a beautiful braided style, I was once pulled aside at work by a white female manager who told me it was “unprofessional because it was too ethnic.”  (Think angry black woman with fist pumping in the air.  That’s what she saw.)

Hmmm…

Yes, even white folks are more comfortable when your hair is straight and more like theirs.  Fascinating.

But the time had come for me to accept it, so I went to work one morning with relaxed, shoulder-length hair and came back from lunch with a teenie-weenie afro.  I had about 1 inch of hair left on my head.

Talk about drastic.

Thinking about the looks I got still makes me laugh.  Some people were supportive, but most freaked out.  Oh, they tried to be “cool” but you could tell they were clearly uncomfortable.

You wanna know what was really cool to me?

The more uncomfortable people were, the more I knew I had done the right thing.  That felt GREAT.

As time went on, however, I would become increasingly dissatisfied with my hair.  Not because it was natural, but because my natural hair has 3 different textures and makes styling it more of a challenge.  I have done some really fun stuff with it, but for the most part, it’s been more work than I thought it would be.

So, I’m going to make a change.

I don’t know if I going to relax it again or go back to my teenie-weenie afro.  But what I do know is that I’m lazy and simply don’t want hair that I have to do much work for.  I am crystal clear that whatever I do, I am doing for ME.

Not for some man.

Not to make white people more comfortable.

Not to make black people more comfortable.

And not so I can feel better about myself because I “fixed” my so-called nappy hair.

At the end of the day, as my girl, India.Arie sings, “I am NOT my hair” ,”good” or otherwise…

And knowing that is absolutely priceless.

It feels good to be me.