‎I believe that our hair fear has been ingrained in us, unintentionally, for generations. It is something that is very difficult to talk about mostly because people don’t want to hear it! We have a hair inferiority complex. Bombarded day and night by straight haired Europeans who have the standard of beauty locked up, while our hair and natural features are vilified not only by those of European descent, but by our own. We began to straighten our hair NOT because it was “easier to manage” – we had worn our hair natural for thousands of years. The skills involved in hair styling, braiding, weaving, decoration were passed down from generation to generation – Africans only began to brutally straighten and destroy their hair on a wide scale after European colonization - to emulate those who were deemed to be “better” than they were - their captors; people who had control over them and their lives and who dictated to them what is acceptable and what was not. They were taught that they were completely inferior, their culture, their minds, their features, their stature, their hair, their skin.

So now we, the descendents of those people use dangerous and burning chemicals and searing metal to continually straighten our hair at any cost, then cover it up with wigs or weave once it’s burnt out of our heads. And the cycle continues, helped along by a $billion dollar Black hair product and image industry profiting off and enabling our inferiority complex and encouraging ignorance.

This is the history, we can’t change that – but the first step to a better future is to admit the truth and not sugarcoat it with the “manageability” and “professionalism” excuses I hear so often.

Finally, hairdressers who don’t even know their own natural hair have no standing to comment on what is “manageable” and what isn’t “manageable” for their clients’ natural hair. How can they give informed advice without knowledge and experience? We should encourage our stylists to at least be open to learning the truth about their own natural hair before pushing straighteners on us.