When my adoptive daughter was about 4 years old, she took to wearing a bath towel on her head. She would wrap one end around her hair and let the other trail down her back like a ponytail.
We often put her to bed with the towel still dangling from her head.
It took us awhile to figure out why she clung to that towel.
One day, I dropped her off at preschool later than usual. When we walked in, a group of children started chanting: “Baldy, baldy.”
While most of the girls in the class had long braids or straight hair pulled into two ponytails, my daughter’s hair covered her head like a skullcap.
Her short hair was due to her biological mother having used a chemical relaxer — a Jeri curl — on her daughter’s hair. The chemicals caused the young girl’s hair to fall out.
It later grew back — luxuriously — but she endured years of criticism from her peers (and one teacher) over her natural hair that I had twisted into locks.
Every Black woman has a hair tale or two.
In “Hair Tales,” now streaming on Hulu, actress and director Tracee Ellis Ross has captured the joy and the pain of the Black female experience through how we relate to our hair.
From runway weaves to shiny, shaved heads, Black women have been judged by others and have judged each other by the way we wear our hair.
When I decided to stop getting perms in the early 1990s and began the process of locking my hair, my most vocal critics were other Black women.
In 2009, I lost all of my hair due to chemotherapy. By then, the renewed acceptance of natural Black hair was palpable.
Still, it wasn’t until this July that Illinois joined 16 other states and passed the CROWN Act into law. CROWN stands for “Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair” and takes effect in January.
Ross’ ode to Black women’s hair comes at a time when the notion that we can use chemical relaxers for most of our lives without harm to our health is being challenged in court. A Missouri woman named Jenny Mitchell (no relation) is suing L’Oreal and Chicago-based ORS, saying products made by those companies and three others caused her uterine cancer.
Similar lawsuits have been filed on behalf of women in New York and California. Studies have found that as many as “90% of Black women” reported having used hair-straightening products, and there continues to be a high cancer rate among Black women; I expect many more lawsuits will be filed.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump called the continued use of chemical relaxers and straighteners a “public health crisis.”
“I don’t care what America tries to tell you, what’s beautiful and what’s not,” Crump said at a news conference outside the Dirksen Federal Courthouse. “You are beautiful just as you are, and it is not worth your health. It is not worth your ability to have children just to have straight hair.”
Meanwhile, a recent tweet asking “Where are the Hair Box Girls today?” went viral.
The “Hair Box Girls” were young, Black girls featured on at-home hair-relaxer kits that were marketed as “new and improved” and having “no lye.”
In Allure magazine, the writer said that getting a perm was painful.
“The application process was an experience you could never forget: the foul, chemical odor … hearing the phrase, ‘the burning means it’s working,’ as the relaxer pierced through your scalp and tears poured from your cheeks,” Alexis Oatman wrote for Allure.
Looking back, I am appalled that I chose to put myself through that self-torture for many years.
Like my 4-year-old, after I lost my hair, I tried to replace it with wigs and weaves. But no matter how much I spent on these items, they never felt natural.
These days, I’m happy just seeing the tiny strands of my natural hair push through a healthy scalp.
