This video:
Is disturbing to say the least. I had wild and out there hair like the little girl. My mom knew very little about a little girl's hair, and I was born with a lot of it. With the technology improving from strict lye-based straighteners to non-lye-based to hot combs to ceramics what makes this video disturbing is the mother knew little of it, while her older child filmed and ridiculed the baby for her hair.
What is even worse is we think we have advanced with securing ourselves and finding beauty. But the images of beautiful Black women remain unchanged in the last 40 years. Long bone straight hair or good hair not happy to be nappy kinks reflective of our true heritage.
It is the take of The Ariafya Universe that this oppression of the image of the Black woman is demeaning and that Youtube removes this video as objectionable content. It is NOT only painful because the baby girl is crying while getting her hair combed--in fact is done incorrectly--it is wrong because this little girl's self-image is obliterated because she does not have hair similar to that of Barbie's or other women who have straight hair. She will visualize herself as "ugly" because her hair is nappy or has kinks. And she will spend millions of dollars to have hair pleasurable to an oppressive society to diverse woman's beauty.
How come she cannot have braids or loqs? How come she cannot be allowed to have her hair nappy until she is old enough to get her hair done? Because, people judge these children as unkempt, nasty, impoverished and sickly. If the department of health and social services saw this video, the children would be removed. But if they saw the children with ungroomed hair, they will STILL remove the children. While I do not think the mother intentionally hurt the child and probably waited a long time before she got her children together because of their behavior, the baby still was in pain for how her hair was handled. She used a brush rack, rather than a pick or comb. The mother used some kind of water-based relax solution, rather than a gel or cream on the scalp. There are ways to comb thick hair like that little girl's hair, and what we see was NOT it.
Is our image of ourselves so poor that we have resorted to torturing ourselves and our children to reach beauty standard not made by us, not formed by us? Has technology truly reached us since Madame CJ Walker's straightening comb that uses heat to sear the hair's outer core, cortex and medulla? Our sebaceous cells that form our hair to make it kinky are short and wide. Is there not something we could take, without losing our hair that would straighten it over time, like "Rogaine" products. And only Redken's products make changes to our hair, healthy? Not glamours like the Pantene ProV hair commercials with color--products, not make for African American women...
I discuss these concepts with some of my stylists quite a bit. But, alas, there is nothing I can do to change concepts from the scientific end, because those concepts are rooted deep into racist beliefs, and how psychologically, an African American can still be a slave to its environment. 150 years has not changed a perception that pervaded in North American, particular the United States for over 500 years. Until then, the image of the Black woman and mental health politics will lose lives.
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