On Misogyny and Black Women’s Hair

For many Black women, the pressure to straighten their hair is not just an aesthetic choice, nor only a necessity for survival in professional spaces, but a burden imposed by colonial and patriarchal standards of beauty.

Though vague, I catch glimpses of a fleeting memory—the first time someone referred to my hair as ‘good hair.’ It was a random man from the salon I often visited when I was young. He had no hair of his own but somehow deemed himself an expert at determining the classification of others. He would call mine, chemically relaxed and straight at the time, ’good’ in contrast to the girl whose hair he described as ‘strong and untidy.’ She frowned when he said this. I thought his comment was a compliment at the time. I did not see how wrong it was of him to demean a young girl, to analyze her natural texture, to carry bias for a specific type of hair, the one that originally grows from our head.

Growing up, I unconsciously nurtured this praise and began internalizing a similar bias toward straighter hair. During my secondary school days, a group of boys from Class 3 would call out to a few girls with remarks like ‘dirty, ugly hair.’ They screamed at them, ‘Just because you’re forming church girls doesn’t mean you should not wear earrings and come to school with dirty, ugly hair.’ Even then, I knew that to say Afro-textured hair was dirty and ugly was a lie because J.E., one of the girls they had called out, had hair I secretly envied. Her hair was thick, black and luscious, with coily and curly tips, and her baby hairs had soft, perfect curls too.

I had once spent a great deal of time wondering if she used a particular cream to achieve those curls and if my hair could not produce similar results because of years of relaxers. But I’m thankful that I eventually unlearned the lies that had brewed a quiet hatred for my identity as an African woman...