Writing some of the wrongs we learnt when we were younger. Part II. Read Part I.

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Recently I heard a woman with relaxed hair say that her natural hair was ugly and coarse and thick. The woman near me responded saying “hog hair”. They laughed. She said she’d gotten all the bad things in her family, but another woman gently chided her.

Hair talk? Yeah, I’m definitely going there.

When I was younger I hated combing my hair. The blow dryer scared me and I hated those vicious hair root to hair end tugs that happened all too often.

My mother told me that when I just started school my hair was really short and that she didn’t know what else to do with it except ‘chiney bump’ it. So I wore chiney bumps to school, (that’s what you fancy, modern folk call Bantu Knots), and kids teased me calling me ‘picky picky head gyal’. As juvenile as their taunts really hurt my feelings then.

Growing up nearly every girl I’d ever met that was over a certain age had relaxed hair and without giving it much thought I figured when I grew up I’d have relaxed hair too. After all, my hair was “difficult” and creamed hair was “pretty”.

What was wrong with me? I had bad hair. And to top it all off my hair didn’t even have the decency to be long. Back then it seemed almost all black girls had ‘bad’ hair – it was just our burden to bear.

But it wasn’t just black girls that had bad hair, black boys intrinsically had bad hair too and little black boys and girls owed it to themselves and to others to do somethin’ ’bout that hair. Cut it so short that all that could be seen is lines… or be turned back from school.

Flash forward a few years and almost everyone’s ‘going natural’. While the movement has helped greatly, and a lot of us have come a far way in embracing ourselves and our hair, we still have farther to go.

We need to fully embrace all black hair as not being intrinsically bad – 4c, 4a and all the types. We need to open the floor for real, honest discussion on why certain hairstyles aren’t allowed in school and concede the fact that we are unfortunately soaked in a lot of colonial era biases, then we need to figure out exactly what we should do about it.

Moreover, it’s not just about loving or embracing our kinky coils most of us had been raised to tame or hate or to treat with detached indifference. We also must recognise that though there are often issues of self-loathing, among other things, tangled up in this touchy hair debate not every person who straightens or relaxes or processes their hair in any way struggles with this issue.  And as such wearing a weave isn’t, without more, proof of self-hate or a lack of black pride.