Swivel chair. Mirrors. Wads of my hair landing on the wooden floor thunderously, like the sound of an urban demolition. Or at least that’s how it sounded to me.

“When’s the last time you’ve been to the beauty shop?” asked the hairdresser, scissors in hand, disturbed expression on face.

I couldn’t recall. When was the last time I sat on one of those chairs? When was the last time the back of my head had been tossed in a sink then stuck under a helmet stove, then forged by the iron torch?

“I don’t remember. Maybe eleven years ago?” I finally responded as quietly as I could.

She paused mid-snip and looked at my face in the mirror. My eyebrows slanted upward as I released a contrived chuckle.

She shook her head and continued snipping away.

The beauty shop is the site of rites-of-passage for young African-American girls. You’re taught values while listening to women philosophize about relationships, love, family and especially the latest African-American celebrity on the scene. You don’t say much. You just listen. Feminist, poet and professor bell hooks wrote about the experience as she remembered it in a 1988 Z Magazine essay called “Straightening Our Hair”:

“The beauty parlor was a space of consciousness raising, a space where black women shared life stories—hardships, trials, gossip; a place where one could be comforted and one’s spirit renewed. It was for some women a place of rest, where one did not need to meet the demands of children or men. It was the one hour some folk would spend “off their feet,” a soothing, restful time of meditation and silence.”

Women in the African-American community put a premium on hair. In any grocery store in a predominately African-American community, you are likely to find Black Hair Magazine at the check out. There are roughly 600,000 people living in Washington DC proper, 57 percent of whom are black, and there are 623 Yellow Pages entries for DC hair salons. In Orange County, my hometown, there are nearly 3 million residents. Only 1.9 percent of those people are black, and there are only 595 beauty shops.

I have always taken great joy in the diversity of hair-styles embraced by the African-American community, especially in Orange County, where, truth is, you’re given more style freedom because you’re kind of working in a vacuum: you can wear totally creative or even unkempt styles because there are such few African-Americans to pass judgment. Fact is, I was a hardcore tomboyish athlete kind of kid anyway so I found that time spent in the beauty parlor was time spent in vain. Eventually, around middle school, I just stopped going altogether. I would either brush my hair up in a ponytail or my mom and I would spend twenty hours every few months braiding it.

As I emerged from “tomboyhood,” when I was about seventeen, I started to notice boys. Noticing them translated to a heightened awareness of what they might think looked pleasing. By the time I entered college, I received so much attention with “my” long silky synthetic locks that for all four years I forsook any exhibition of my real hair. Never would I have imagined walking out the door without the faux volumes trailing from from my head. I had never before received so much attention from guys, especially being a tomboy in Orange County.

I developed a Sampson-complex, sure that any and all of my beauty power lay entirely in the length of my hair. So I focused on the styles of hip-hop video vixens and celebrities like Janet Jackson and Tyra Banks to determine my next do—after all, those women were the material of male fantasy! There was also the fact that I felt I had to make up for having such dark skin.

I’ll never forget the experience in fifth grade when I crushed on a white boy named John and the other girls laughed when they found out. “Don’t be silly, Vanessa. He can’t like you because you have black skin.” I agreed. Even in hip-hop videos, the love interests always have the fairest skin. It was the hair that got me one step closer to—to what, exactly? I wasn’t sure. I let the thought sit undisturbed back there, somewhere in my head, piled under all my synthetic hair.

From that beauty parlor chair, I watched my real hair peek out at me, the veil of store-bought tresses falling all around me. It wasn’t the shortening of my hair that made me nervous. No. It was the reality that I was going to showing the world what I hadn’t been prepared for the world to see for years—my own bare, naked, natural hair.

Why did I feel so uncomfortable? I was used to style change. I’ve worn many different hairdos. What was it about the long silky weave that made me feel so empowered and about the natural short stiffness that made me feel so insecure?

bell hooks continued in that essay:

Within white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the social and political context in which the custom of black folks straightening our hair emerges, it represents an imitation of the dominant white group’s appearance and often indicates internalized racism, self-hatred, and/or low-self-esteem. During the 1960s black people who actively worked to critique, challenge, and change white racism pointed to the way in which black people’s obsession with straight hair reflected a colonized mentality. It was at this time that the natural hairdo, the “afro,” became fashionable as a sign of cultural resistance to racist oppression and as a celebration of blackness. Naturals were equated with political militancy. Many young black folks found just how much political value was placed on straightened hair as a sign of respectability and conformity to societal expectations when they ceased to straighten their hair. When black liberation struggles did not lead to revolutionary change in society, the focus on the political relationship between appearance and complicity with white racism ceased and folks who had once sported afros began to straighten their hair.

Before I went to the beauty shop that day, I sat in class, shrouded by my synthetic mane. I became steely with conviction when my provocative creative writing professor said: “You can tell a lot about a black woman by the way she wears her hair.” Apparently the natural look was a sign of confidence, pride and intelligence, and long weaves indicated insecurity, superficiality and simple-mindedness.

That’s superficial! I thought. That’s simpleminded! After all, India.Arie sang it best in her hit single “I am not my hair”:

“I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am not your expectation, no
I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am a soul that lives within…
If I want to shave it close
Or I want to rock locks
That don’t take a bit away from the soul that I got.”

And yet, I kept thinking about the connection between hair and identity. So I did what I believe every African-American woman—women across racial lines, and even men—should do. I took a journey into my heart and asked why I do what I do with my hair. In my case there was something about my hair that tied directly to my worldview. Crazy but true.

There are many ways that we arrive at identity. Famed early-twentieth-century American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley argued that we effectively see ourselves as others see us, that we form our habits and identities by looking at ourselves through the prism of other people and by extension through the wider culture.

How do African-Americans appear through that prism? It ain’t pretty. In the sixties, the black power movement articulated the need for African-Americans to fight to redefine black as beautiful. No other ethnic group in American history has had to legitimize their beautifulness the way we have had to do. In 1966 Ossie Davis gave an influential speech entitled “The English Language Is Not My Friend” in which he noted that the word whiteness has 134 synonyms and that forty-four of those synonyms are favorable and pleasing to contemplate, words like purity, cleanliness, etc. The word blackness has nearly as many synonyms, 120, but sixty of those are distinctly unfavorable and none of them mildly positive. Black synonyms include, for example, the words sinister, evil, dirty—not to mention twenty words tied directly to race, such as negro, negress, etc.

For the monumental 1954 supreme court case Brown v. Board of Education, psychologist Kenneth Clark presented research where more than half of African-American schoolchildren preferred to play with white dolls, thinking that the white doll was “nice” whereas the black doll was “bad.” Half a century later, for her Oprah-acclaimed short documentary “A Girl Like Me,” African-American teenager Kiri Davis replayed the doll experiment at a grammar school in New York. She found that fifteen of twenty-one black kids preferred to play with a white doll.

Within the context of Cooley’s claim, everyone deals with the struggle to form a positive identity but especially individuals for whom the societal mirror doesn’t reflect an overall positive—African-Americans, homosexuals, blonds, heavy people, illegal immigrants, and so on.

It seems an obvious thing to say but it’s a slippery thing and I only came to this understanding, more than that, to this feeling, through a conscious process: that those things that we inherent genetically do not have any inherent bearing on our soul. Having green eyes or cotton-textured hair doesn’t make one a good or a bad person. It’s only when your cognition expands to include the meaning that the broader culture has attached to possessing those green eyes or cotton-textured hair, only then does the Cooley-effect take place, when you internalize it, giving yourself over in effect into the hands of the culture, letting yourself go…

As African-Americans, as women, as Americans, as people, we have to open that door to our heart, the one we walk by every day, the one we have boarded up for whatever reason. We have to gain the courage to peek in, put our hands on the cold door handles and push. Because when you open it up and search around, you’d be surprised at what you find, the way things are arranged, the clutter or maybe even the emptiness.

Freud found that enlightenment could be achieved through investigating and mastering the unconscious rather than through denying or repressing it.

Perhaps you will be enlightened, as I was, by peering into the workroom of your identity. Maybe you’ll come to understand more about the why—why you cut it, why you curled it, why you dyed it.

For me, that room that I consciously walked by every day for eleven years, it was manifested that day in the beauty shop. Walking in, sitting in that chair, looking in the mirror, watching the hair fall, feeling the heat of the blood under my skin, it was a Joseph Conrad-style journey to a heart of darkness. On the other side, when I exited with my 1-inch-long, tiny, tight, organic curls fully exposed, I smiled because I had discovered another me.

——
Vanessa Mizell is a former staff writer. She lives in Washington DC.