Last night we watched Good Hair, a 2009 documentary by Chris Rock about the culture, industry, and day-to-day being of hair for African-American women (and some men, á la Prince and Al Sharpton). Going into it, I didn’t understand the depths of my ignorance about Type 3 and 4 hair, as a white woman with straight, limp, long if I wanted it to be hair that couldn’t be nappy if I tried (and yes, in college, I did make an ill-fated attempt to grow dreadlocks, which was like trying to weave silk into a wool sweater.)
According to the movie, black women have two options if they want “good hair” — relaxers that contain damaging chemicals able to eat through a soda can in 4 hours, or time-consuming and inordinately expensive weaves. What a choice, right? On the one hand, weaves won’t make your scalp scabby and bald, but they cost upwards of $1000 and render one’s hair untouchable. One black man in a rowdy barbershop said he hasn’t touched a black woman’s hair since 1986 and proceeded to proclaim that he preferred white women for this reason, which nearly incited a riot among the clientele. (“I can’t remember the last time you ran your fingers through my hair,” I commented to Mr. P, waving my mousy hair in his face.)
The movie doesn’t focus much on black women who choose to go natural, except to say that relaxed black hair relaxes white people — meaning that afros make white people tense. I internally examined this assumption and found I couldn’t really affirm or deny because I can’t remember the last time I saw a black woman with a full-fledged ‘fro who didn’t come from high fashion. Indeed, the movie has a montage of famous black women, and every one of them either had relaxed hair or an obvious weave, a fact that was lost on me until now. Apparently the most relaxed thing about Condoleezza Rice is her hair.
Chris Rock maintains a playfully inquisitive demeanor throughout the film, which spends an inordinate amount of time at the Bronner Brothers hair show in Atlanta, a black-hair products extravaganza replete with competitive choreographed hair-cutting stage shows. Even when the film touches on potentially explosive topics like the takeover of black hair care by multinational corporations, how most weaves come from the sheering of Indian women during a religious ceremony, or the use of chemical relaxers on 2-year girls (which, really, should be banned), the overall tone stays light. It is just hair, after all, even though every woman can tell you that it’s never just hair.
