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The Search for Good Hair: Styling Black Womanhood in America
| Article
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21233 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
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2 / 2001 |
3,085 Words |
| Author
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Rachel Buchman
Rachel Buchman is a Culture editor at The World & I. |
Many Americans see blacks and whites as genetically, or naturally, different, but race is a constructed identity. Feminist author Judith Butler feels that gender is "a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief." Applied to race, this means that being black is a matter of acting black, that culture, rather than genetics, distinguishes black from white.
If race is a constructed identity, it is important to identify who constructs it for whom. In America, whites negatively identified blacks for so long that an institutionalized racism emerged and still impacts our society. In Black Looks, bell hooks poses the idea that race, culture, and identity are active, ways of "becoming" as well as "being." One way blacks have constructed blackness for themselves and others is through hair.
Historic hair
In their article about slave hair culture, Shane and Graham White present "the idea that the hair of one's head is a medium through which social messages can be conveyed and aesthetic standards of the dominant culture contested." The authors document the historical process through which slaves fought to keep their African sensibilities of style and aesthetic values. The personal became political as slave children were taught by their white masters to refer to their hair as wool, women were punished by being forced to shave their heads, and Sunday became the only day slaves had enough time to attend to their hair.
The Whites discuss
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