You know there’s so much out there today, it may seem odd that I’m choosing this topic. My reason is personal; a number of my friends in college spent countless hours and God knows how much money to have straight hair.  One friend, for a semester, let her hair grow naturally an it was beautifully kinky and frizzy and wonderful.  The next semester, she had perfectly straight, chemically treated, dry as straw hair.

 Over at Pam’s place, she’s talking about an incident in which human garbage can Don Imus referred to the Rutger’s women’s b-ball team as “nappy-headed hos.”  Pam writes:

. . . this is about Imus and Co. demeaning those women using a common racist denigration of hair texture — nothing more needs to be telegraphed — kinky hair=bad, ugly, animalistic, straight hair=good, attractive.  And to top it off, those nappy-headed gals at Rutgers are therefore ‘hos as well. Nice.

And people wonder why so many black women have a complex about their hair, gooping it up with nasty lye relaxers, frying their scalp with hot combs? The self-loathing is so culturally ingrained, so pathological, and it’s reinforced by the messages like the ones Imus and friends are having a great laugh over. It’s toxic and ignorant.

During graduate school, I worked with Trina – a very self-confident, smart as hell woman who was inbetween jobs as a software designer and was working as a hotel front desk clerk to fill the time (after a while, she got back her job as a software designer and spent two weeks in Europe to celebrate).  Trina was raised in the Deep South and did everything in her power to lose her accent, keep her hair as straight and European looking as possible.  She did everything she could to not look or act like a black woman.  She kept her hair short and once told me it cost $300 a month to keep it straight.

Pam also mentions colorism within the black community – again something I’ve witnessed but protected by my white skin, never had to deal with.  Colorism essentially is the belief that lighter skin is better than darker skin.  It has a long history within the African-American community:

For many years, entrance to special social events operated on the “brown paper bag” principle, which I will explain. Until quite recently, black fraternities and sororities, for example, recruited according to skin tone. Spike Lee’s film School Daze satirizes the problem, and Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple makes it a biting subtext.

Pam talks about black women using every conceivable produce, making sure that they’re hair is straight, not curly.  She writes:

. . . you’d be surprised at how many black women can’t psychologically give up the relaxers — many don’t even know what their natural hair texture is because the minute new growth is there the chemicals are slapped on, but they know that they don’t want to deal with that hair.

The language and dynamic of the various isms – whether racism or heterosexism or sexism – fall easily and readily from people’s lips.  The dynamic appears in all minority groups.  Women can – and often do – viciously attack and socially isolate a woman who is identified as a slut.  Gay men can be unbelievably ruthless toward a man who is gender role non-comforming; the brutality with which gay men deride the more effeminate or less traditionally masculine man has to been seen to be believed.  Such behaviors – no matter the group – serve to distance one’s self from the targeted group and identify with the dominant group.  Transgressing the unspoken social boundaries within one’s group is a dangerous as transgressing the unspoken boundaries between groups.  Such behaviors are the acting out of the various isms in society.

For members of the dominant group, social norms serve to keep persons from identifying too strongly with members of targeted groups.  Heterosexual men, for instance, engage in constant social norming to keep one another from demonstrating female or gay qualities.  Social stigmas - such as being accused of being gay and being distrusted – serve to keep straight men behaving in approrpiately masculine ways.

Such dynamics can often tie groups up in knots.  A few years ago, a school teacher in New York City used a children’s book by an African-American author – the book’s title Nappy Hair – and reaped a reward in controversy.  Some parents objected to the term, others were happy the book sent the message to love one’s self as one is.  Gay men have a complicated relationship with gender roles – on the one hand, most gay men transgress boundaries, but if someone is too effeminate, too swishy, too flamboyant other men subtly (or not) pull away from that person.  The desire to defend the group wars constantly with the desire to fit into the larger society, tugging the individual painfully back and forth in between.  Experienced most keenly by aussenseiters, these pressure afflict insiders as well.  There’s no easy answer, no immediate solution.