Career Fair and Black Girl Hair

Every semester the night before career fair, I wash my hair.

Those of you who know me in person know that my hair and I have a love/hate relationship. I love it because it’s thick and a decent length and looks purdy when it’s all done up, but I also hate it because it’s thick and a decent length and takes at least an hour for me to blow dry (or close to 12 hours to air dry) and 2 hours to flat iron if I do it properly. As a result, I look a hot, disheveled mess unless I pay someone to do it for me or my sister’s in town and I can whine until she takes pity on me.

I’m also way too lazy to spend 3+ hours doing my hair. Way too lazy. So a few years ago, I started braiding my hair while it was wet and letting it dry overnight/into the morning and-or afternoon so that it’d be all wavy and curly and low maintenance. It lasts 3-5 days, and in the meantime I don’t have to touch a comb. It’s awesome. And great for weeks when I need a new relaxer/have a lot going on and can’t be worried about doing hair every day.

My mom suggested that I do that for career fair. “Just do some knots and let it dry,” she said. “It’ll be pretty.” And it would have been. I considered this, but eventually just blew it dry.

And then I got to career fair, and I ran into one of my sorors. We talked, inevitably got onto the hair conversation because it was raining and my once straight hair had poofed and I looked like a sheepdog, but the important/terrifying/horrible thing is that we had both come to same conclusion regarding our hair and job hunting.

We didn’t want to show up looking too ethnic.

I hate the word ethnic. To be frank, I think it’s a word that white people came up with to mean “things not pertaining to white people.” Don’t make that face at me. Visit the ethnic food section in your grocery store/Wal-Mart and see that it’s tamales and lo mein, not bratwurst. Go into the ethnic hair care section and see if you can find a curly perm kit. Aren’t all those pretty fabrics that are so popular in fashion right now collectively called “ethnic prints?” Go on. Look. I’ll wait.

That’s what I thought.

But this isn’t about whether or not I like the word ethnic. It’s about the fact that two 20something, college educated women that hadn’t spoken to one another since August ran into each other in September and in general conversation realized that we had come to the same conclusion.

If we were to stand any chance of landing an interview that day, we had to show up looking “less Black” or get dismissed by recruiters, and since we can’t change our skin or our faces we had to change our hair.

The War on Our Hair is one of the greatest and most well-known of all Black Girl Problems. It’s right up there with the War on Our Bodies, the War on Our Femininity, and the War on Our Virtue. We’ll probably end up talking about the other assaults on Black Womanhood later. Right now, we’re just going to focus on the fact that we are constantly told that the way our hair grows out of our head is wrong and damn near immoral. The word “nappy” comes to mind. Afro wigs exist as costume, non-Black people who have no business entering the Black hair conversation go out of their way to tell us that flat irons were invented so we didn’t have to look like runaway slaves, we’ve come up with this ridiculous, divisive system of ranking our own natural curl patterns (don’t get me started on that mess), and every Black girl that’s gone through school has had at least one ig’nant white girl put her hands in her hair (usually without asking) and exclaim, “Oh my God, it feels like mine!” or, “Ewww, now my fingers are greasy!” What the hell was it supposed to feel like? Concrete slab? It’s HAIR, and if you hadn’t stuck your fingers in it in the first place they wouldn’t have oil on them. Back. Up. Off. Me. Trick.

And all that is BEFORE you start working. I mean, look at us. Two 20something young women, still in college, have already learned how to make our hair work for us in the politics of professionalism. But why should we have to? Does my hair—even the looser curl that a braid out would give me—make you that uncomfortable? Why?

I am not Medusa. No one’s getting turned to stone. Calm down.