Along with skin, hair is a physical marker, visually apparent, allowing for the distinction of human beings in different genetic categories. In this series of three articles, we will focus on the most unique of all: kinky hair, which, contrary to other types of hair, defies gravity and looks towards the stars like the foliage of a tree. This series is not an umpteenth one on kinky hair. It will focus on what makes so particular this type of hair that grows on the head of the majority of melanodermas.
AFRICAN AND AFRO-DESCENDING PEOPLE’S HAIR
What kinky hair means to African and Afro-descending people and its difficult recent history
Melanodermic hair, also called kinky hair, has been despised, misunderstood, mocked, hidden, altered and even fought against throughout recent modern history. It has even been associated to something diabolical, because certain people saw in it a resemblance with pubic hair, considered impure by puritan Protestants.
An important social indicator in African societies according to the way it was styled, worn and looked after, kinky hair was the first thing removed from enslaved Africans upon their arrival in the Americas. Systematic hair shaving was the first traumatic experience of a series of cruel and degrading treatments aiming to take away from these captured and enslaved Africans their personality, their identity and their former life. And thus cut every single link with what they once had been, to prepare them for what they were now.
After the emancipation of enslaved people, men and women – women, mostly – started reclaiming this capillary heritage that had been taken away from them in the plantations. The extraordinary hairstyles they created attracted too much attention, in such a way that laws, like the Tignon law of 1785, were implemented in the South of the United States to force Black women to cover their hair and thus deny, once again, their identity and their heritage. In the West Indies, sumptuary laws prevented non-white women to wear a hat. It pushed them to make madras hairdresses of various shapes that carried messages[i]. This was imposed on many African countries during colonization, which resulted in the creation and the wearing of magnificent and very elaborate headscarves.
This law gave room to capillary racism towards kinky and frizzy hair, to discrimination towards people wearing this type of hair and to the labeling of kinky and frizzy hair as being dirty, for savages, poor people. It had to be straightened (through a heating comb or a straightener) for Black people who wanted to be considered as “civilized” or to climb the social ladder.
The return to grace of kinky hair and the Crown Act
Even if this capillary discrimination against Black people is more and more denounced, it still forces some of them to use dangerous products, carcinogenic ones or products containing endocrine disruptors to straighten their hair. They can make painful damage as well as cause chronic health problems, linked directly or not to hair care routine, among Black people: whether it be hair loss, repeated scalp burns or an increase in the predisposition to diabetes, fibromyalgia, cystitis, and heart malformations in embryos and newborns.
Other than the health dangers caused by these capillary habits, society is more and more aware about the capillary discrimination that prevents many Black people from accessing employment. Despite the fact that American regulations as far as African hairstyles are concerned are incomplete –as four years ago, a federal court had judged it legal for employers to dismiss employees or to refuse candidates simply because they were using African and African-American techniques to style their hair[ii] – mentalities and laws are changing little by little. Maybe too slowly, but still changing.
The CROWN Act, or Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act, was born as a bill following incidents in which, for example, children were facing disciplinary measures in schools or employees were dismissed because they were wearing Afro hairdos, dreadlocks or braids. This bill was initiated by Californian Senator Holly Mitchell and became law in 2019[iii]. This law is today implemented in more than a third of American federal states.
In Europe, even if there never was any legal trace of capillary discrimination of kinky and frizzy hair, this phenomenon is in fact present in society, and the efforts made to end this discrimination, although more subtle and more diffuse, start to bear fruit, especially among young generations.
In Africa, where some African hairstyles, like dreadlocks, are frowned upon in the public space of many countries, mentalities are changing as well.
[i]Le cheveu crépu au fil du temps : sublimation, rejet et réhabilitation, Chef d’œuvre CAP coiffure 2019/2021, Lycée professionnel Raymond Néris, Le Marin, Martinique, p.9 https://site.ac-martinique.fr/lyc-raymondneris/wp-content/uploads/sites/40/2021/06/le-projet-en-image.pdf
[ii]Céline Peschard, Pour lutter contre la discrimination envers les cheveux afro, des États américains s’engagent, Au Féminin, 02/07/2020 https://www.aufeminin.com/news-societe/the-crown-act-vers-la-fin-du-racisme-capillaire-s4014184.html
[iii]Ibid