![]() And we’ve come far since the divisive early days of the #revolution. Sometimes you have to go way left to pull folks to the center. The mood in Brooklyn was heavy-handed, sure. It’s gifting them armor.ĭuring the movie, I reflected on the parts of the late-nineties, early-aughts natural-hair revolution that felt a bit rigid to me, back when the Nappily Ever After novel debuted. ![]() Telling little black girls repeatedly that their hair and skin is glorious (and teaching your black sons to adore it) isn’t modeling vanity. They need to believe this truth before they get out in the world, because media, fashion, and schoolmates will teach them otherwise. And black mothers need to approach the beauty conversation with intention-drilling it into their heads that their natural hair is beautiful. Mothers are the prototype of womanhood for daughters. I know that I have everything to do with shaping Lina’s too. In Nappily, the mom had everything to do with Violet’s relationship to hair. Lina, with her poufy side pony, and me, with my curls. Suddenly curls were dope! When she came home with a self-portrait of herself with a massively poufy side-ponytail, I burst into tears on the spot. Beyond the excitement of discovering my own curls (and loving them-so early Whitney!), it changed my daughter’s mind about her own hair. But how could I teach her to love her springy spirals if I was flattening the hell out of mine? After the second time she announced that "curls weren’t pwetty," I never touched a relaxer again. I refused to raise a daughter who wasn’t proud of her looks. Lina is a black Dominican girl with a riot of thick, endless ringlets, but she wanted the long, silken strands of Disney princesses-and her mom. In any event, like Violet, I had a relaxer forever, until my daughter was three, in 2011. That novel and film didn’t explain themselves to non-Asian America, and we’re no longer explaining ourselves to non-black America. And if you didn’t get them-well, they weren't meant for you. I saw this in Crazy Rich Asians, which peppered in gloriously authentic, unexplained cultural inside jokes. What black audiences know is that she’s operating from inherited trauma, but I loved that the film didn’t feel the need to provide context for this. She ruled over her daughter with hot combs and relaxers, creating a woman terrified of rain and pools, who wakes up hours before her ( fine, did I mention?) boyfriend, to smooth out her blowout. In Nappily Ever After, Violet’s straight-hair-obsessed mother is the villain. How could I teach my daughter to love her springy spirals if I was flattening the hell out of mine? She was a busy working mom with an insane to-do list, and wrestling with three heads of tangled curls (a generation before the rise of texture-loving hair care and vlogger tutorials) was not on it. She wasn’t doing it to help us avoid getting spat on at school. And yet my two little sisters and I all had relaxers by fifth grade. Black power, black love, exclusively black dolls, all of it. As generations passed, the original reasons we did this were buried, and it just became what black women did. Greasing your scalp on the porch, pressing your bangs before church, gossiping in the salon while hot combs smoked the air-this was rich cultural stuff, a bonding experience. Wash days (usually Sundays) were a special time with your female elders. Straightening our hair was born from shame and oppression, but because we’re cultural magicians, we turned hair-straightening rituals into something beautiful. In a colonized society that terrorized you for looking like yourself, emulating your oppressors made practical sense. It wasn’t simply a beauty and fashion choice for our ancestors. Straight, smooth, controlled, subdued, “tamed” hair could mean a better job, the ability to fly a bit more under the radar, maybe getting a loan, access to social status. Good hair meant you were closer to white beauty ideals, which in America meant you had a slightly easier time of it. Our great-greats, grandmas, aunties, and mamas beat their kinks and coils into submission with harsh lye relaxers and burn-inducing hot combs because “good hair” was paramount.
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