Good Hair and the Bio-economic Health of Black America

My book club does like mixing up our reading with other information and entertainment media, like Movies, Documentaries, Theater and Band performances and other forms of literary art. This past week, we settled on Chris Rock’s documentary ‘Good Hair’, which explores the African American storied interest in Hair. It was at once a satire, comedy, economic rebuke and a commentary on self-identity and internalized ‘foreign’ normative value programmed in the consumers of hair-image products. No wonder there was a bit of controversy that the documentary generated in some quarters. As light-hearted as Mr. Rock attempted to make the documentary, it successfully peeled off a veneer, which made some accuse him of exposing the secret that should best, be kept within the black community. The secret was essentially the notion that the black hair in its natural state is coarse and therefore considered ugly, and should not be seen in public without being dressed up. Nobody would argue that basic hygiene requires everyone to wash, comb or neatly keep their hair to look presentable in public like any other part of our normally exposed body. This cuts across all racial groups and all societies. Bad hair day is a bad hair day irrespective of race, phenotype or culture. The problem though arises not from having a neat well coiffed hair but chemically altering the hair not necessarily to aid in being neat but in imitating some other genetic other that is considered the norm for how a beautiful or acceptable persons should be. Some professional black women featured in the documentary horrifyingly said that if they were on an interview panel, they would not be inclined to hire a black woman candidate that does not chemically alter her hair. The reasoning for this was that nobody will take her seriously in professional company as her hairstyle will distract others from discussing the weighty issues at hand. Sadly, this is not an isolated thought and indeed I am aware of black women that have had issues in their workplace because their hairstyle choice does not fit the “normative” style that is expected of black women. The chemical damage inflicted on the body, as shown in the documentary when a scientist demonstrated the corrosive damage the chemical used in relaxing hair did to a metal beverage can was no less matched by the psychosocial import of not significantly altering ones hair to fit in. The brunt of this social conditioning is overwhelmingly born by black women. The documentary had hair salon proprietors confirming that the age of their female clientele has steadily declined to the point that they now have girls as young as 3 come in for perms and other chemical work to straighten their hair. Indeed, a 6-year-old girl featured as she was having her hair done considered the procedure normal and routine for a girl. Perhaps a less biologically harmful but perhaps more expensive alternative now is the weave and other hair extension. In its infancy, it was the extension of the natural hair with synthetic hair-like strands to give a longer and fuller body of hair to accentuate the beauty of the woman. However, that has now been taken further to using actual human hair. Demonstrating the new industry the preference for human hair has created, the documentary moved to India to show case a Hindu temple where women devotees as a symbol of piety and sacrifice shave off their very long nurtured hair at the temple. The temple officials gather the shaved off hair and sell them in bales to a businessman that created a cottage industry to ‘clean’ up the hair and package them for shipment to America and perhaps other overseas destinations. Another set of industry insiders on the US end buy the bales and bundles of hair to re-sell to Hair Salon proprietors and other hair marketing shops. In the end, the Indian hair find home on several black women’s heads. Creepy as it sounds, it evokes all kinds of emotion when you hear one of the salon beauticians pointing out the women in her salon and telling how much each of their hair costs, which all ranged from $1,000 to $3,500. With this multimillion-dollar industry in the black community, you would think that a majority of the fortune made in hair and hair care products would circulate a while in the black community before migrating elsewhere. Nope, the wealth goes straight into the hands of the Korean and Chinese businessmen and women that have cornered the lucrative market, as any hardworking businessperson should. Ironically when Mr. Rock gathered black hair from black barbershops and satirically went around to market the hair to the Asian hair care shops that carry “black hair” extensions and products, they did not just dismiss him out of hand but made sure they pointed out how ugly black hair was and how undesirable it was even to black people. That was quite telling. The extravagant production of the semi-annual Bronner Brothers convention, the largest hair convention, I dare say in the world, with hundreds of vendors has just a handful of black vendors in such a world gathering on Black Hair. Some of the black men featured in the documentary now make dating and relationship decisions about black women based on whether they could afford the care and maintenance of the hair-do their potential lover spots. A father bemoaned that he did not only have to care for his wife, but also for his daughter, leaving him with little to no pocket change. Of course majority of the women care for their hair themselves and do not need any support but even those women attest to the inordinate amount their hair products and styles consume of their budget that they would rather spend on other things if they had a choice. At the end of the day, this is not an either/or type of argument. While some people see a problem in the biological, psychosocial and economic burden inflicted on women based on an internalized formative value that may have been foreign to them, others see it as a matter of choice and the cardinal pillar of living in a free society where we can all legitimately move in and out of cultures, permeate barriers and indeed, create our own sense of identity that is uniquely ours with or without antecedent history. Both appear to be right.