Viva au Natural REVOLUTION!

I am almost positive that when “The Little Rock Nine” became the first students to integrate a segregated high school in Arkansas, they didn’t know they would shape history and the future of the civil rights movement. Neither did four college students who sat at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensborough, North Carolina believe that their act of civil disobedience would make a huge contribution to the generations after them who can now eat peacefully at a restaurant despite the dark hue of their skin. Although the decision to go natural may seem like a personal one for many, I believe that a revolution has begun.

In a world where men glorify women with fair skin and long straight hair and women so deep in their insecurity that they respond to these unattainable beauty standards with long blonde weaves, blue colored contacts and bleached skin, its almost like a breath of fresh air when I see a woman walking up and down the streets looking like a young Angela Davis or Pam Grier in “Foxy Brown.” Now don’t get me wrong, I love weaves and I appreciate them with all my heart but the natural hair community of beautiful brown sistahs are taking a stand. A revolution of some sorts where naturals are not conforming to the standards of beauty predisposed to them when it comes to their hair. As a black girl, our views on hair are pretty much all the same: we yearn for straight and long hair (with the exception of a few girls of course). Yet we are all born with beautiful kinky/curly hair. After watching television, movies and flipping through the pages of magazines we see white women having the luxury of straight hair. Even going to school and admiring the brown-faced girl with the long permed hair, we become dissatisfied with our own kinks and desperately yearn for straight.

I remember being in first grade when this desire for straight hair hit me. I begged my mother for a perm because of this one girl in my class got her first perm and came back to school with hair that was so long and beautiful. I figured if her hair could grow down to her back over the span of a weekend then I wanted a perm so mines could too. Of course my mom said “NO” but she definitely said “Yes” to pressing my hair which meant countless Saturday mornings in the kitchen as she straightened my kinks and burned my ear to pieces, a routine that almost all African American girls can relate to. After a while our mothers get tired and give in. Perms become the answer but for some women the wrong answer.

Fast-forward to 2009, when “Good Hair,” a Chris Rock documentary made its debut. I guess I’m going to be frank when I say Good Hair is a film that I absolutely hate. The title automatically fragments our race by who has what society deems good hair and who doesn’t. I don’t know where my detest for this documentary comes from because I typically love documentaries but there’s a possibility that I hate it because I watched this film in a African American studies class in which the class make-up was predominately white (more on the ironies of Penn State classes later). The Caucasian majority couldn’t and would never understand the struggles of exactly what it meant to be an African American and to be a female. They also didn’t understand the pressures that black women face that would lead them to sew a weave or to perm their natural texture. Most of all I hated Chris Rock who happen to be a brother, our brother for exposing black women dirty little secret consisting of the extra mile we must go through to be seen as beautiful in the eyes of society. Still, what I do respect from this film is that after its premiere, a number of women decided to embrace their natural roots.

I personally never understood the choice to go natural until recently. I used to look at India Arie, Jill Scott and Erykah Badu with respect but in the same token like foreign aliens because shaving your hair bald or wearing a afro was so subversive and not the norm. Now as I am older, wiser and more enlightened, I know that these ladies were brave women. They were brave enough to embrace who they were despite the judgment they may have faced from the world. They were brave enough to see their natural beauty on the inside before the outside, in a world where skin color and “good hair”are elements of acceptance in society.

We may not know it now but the Natural Hair revolution is in full force. More and more black women are on the streets rocking fro hawks, afros, and twist-outs. Black women are shedding their weaves and their perms and telling the world “IDGAF ABOUT WHAT YOU THINK OF ME BECAUSE I KNOW I AM BEAUTIFUL.” They are shedding the stereotype of black hair being unable to grow and showing us all that natural hair can be long and healthy without the perm. Naturals are walking into corporate America with their braid-outs, while other naturals in their TWA phase are standing tall, with their bright make up and huge earrings demanding their own beauty to be seen. The Afro in the 70s was a fad; it came and it went but for some reason I think black women today are starting their own movement. We are tired of having to meet Eurocentric standards of beauty. We are tired of being told we are not pretty enough or our hair isn’t good enough; we are tired of succumbing to the creamy crack or endless hours in the salon chair as we hide our own hair to sew in someone else’s. We want healthy hair and we want it NOW! Thus a revolution has commenced and this time it will last longer than a decade.

VIVA Au Natural Revolution!