Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper

Author:Brittney Cooper
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

ORCHESTRATED FURY

Respectability politics died the day Michelle Obama showed up to her last official engagement as First Lady with a thrown-together ponytail-bun combination and a facial expression fit for a funeral. She looked flawless as always. She also looked fed up and ready to go. Respectability politics, the belief that Black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment is, first and foremost, performed as a kind of sartorial prerogative. What I mean is that your fashion choices are subject to great scrutiny. Black people are taught to care how they look and how their children look. If you see a little Black girl out in public with her hair unkempt—her parts unintentionally jagged, her edges unsmoothed, her ponytails askew, or her hair ornaments not in their proper place—you can be assured that there is some Black woman somewhere asking, “Who does that baby belong to?”

Black women’s hairstyles are their own cultural vocabulary, which change depending on mood, life circumstance, and who exactly will be seeing us on any given day. Mrs. Obama’s hairstyle was the kind you put together after you’d been up all night packing and it’s time to get your shit, leave the keys on the counter, and go. It’s not public hair. It is not hair given to inaugural pomp and circumstance. It is everyday Black-girl hair. We learn this complex hair vocabulary as we sit perched, often for hours, between the knees of mothers, aunties, and hairstylists, trained and untrained, from babyhood forward.

Every night, my mother painstakingly parted my hair and greased my scalp, and then plaited or rolled my hair for ease of styling in the morning. The next morning, I would sit between her legs while she parted my hair into three or four neat sections, affixed rubber bands to the tops of each section, and then twisted my ponytails. She finished by tying ribbons at the tops and snapping barrettes on the ends. At the end of each day, she would fuss and scold when I came home with those same barrettes missing and ponytails askew and unraveled after “ripping and running and not being careful” at recess. At age twelve, when my mother finally decided it was time for me to get a perm, my hairdresser, Mrs. Earline, asked my mother “Are you sure?” And, later, when Mom came to pick me up with my newly permed, silky tresses, Mrs. Earline said, “I prayed over this baby’s head. When I didn’t see any hair on the comb as I worked it through, I knew the Lord was saying it was going to be alright.” Maintaining my head of long, thick hair was a community project.

At age fifteen, when I accompanied my mother and her three sisters to see the movie premiere of Waiting to Exhale, I knew what it meant, then, when Bernadine, after being newly separated from her cheating husband, went to the hairdresser and asked her stylist to chop off nearly every inch of her beautiful, luxurious mane.

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