When I was a young girl, my mother straightened my hair with a pressing comb she heated on the electric stove. It was the way things were. It was what she did every two weeks, shampooed her daughters’ hair, plaited it, and then once it dried, she straightened it with a pressing comb. Black girls all over America went through the same, or a similar ritual. We modeled, as our parents before us did, America’s definition of beauty. It was straight hair and lighter skin.
It was during the Freedom of Choice years, which was the start of integration in the south that I came face to face with the negativity white folks associated with black hair. Until then I hadn’t been around white people. I hadn’t had to face the real reasons that my mother straightened my hair until then.
It was 1967, the beginning of my eight grade year that my two best friends and I decided to go to the predominately white elementary school in my home town. There were four blacks in my class that year, my two best friends and I and a black girl who had been there the year before. On the first day of school, for some reason, my friends and I were the last kids to enter our class. All of the white students and the one other black student were already seated when we arrived. When my friends and I entered our class, all of the white students on the front rows stood up and moved back. They didn’t want to be near us.
Until that day, I had lived, gone to school, church, and grown up in my small black community. To say we faced prejudice is too simple. We were demoralized. They treated us like they hated us for being what we were born to be and could not change. They talked about our kinky hair, our big lips, and our dark skin. One white girl even made a joke one day about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when she put Martin Luther King Jr. and one of my friend’s names in a valentine on the black board. When my friend responded by putting our black janitor’s name and the white girl’s name together in a valentine on the black board hell broke loose, but my friend stood her ground. That was one of many turning points for us. It was the day we began to fight back.
Eventually, a few years later, the white, black, and American Indian high schools in my home town integrated. By then I guess you can say I was completely white washed. I had bought in totally to their definition of beauty and other majority societal norms. It was a way to survive.
I had been the first black cheerleader for the school when I was in ninth grade. By tenth grade, my two best friends were also cheerleaders and the rest of the cheerleaders were white. There were probably twelve cheerleaders in all. I think it was around 1969 when Afros were popular that we decided to wear Afros for a Friday night football game for the first time. To our fellow cheerleaders this was a defiant act and a political statement. So much so that the captain of the squad reported us to the teacher squad leader who promptly called us to her office on Monday morning. She asked us why we had worn Afros to the game. We told her that if the white cheerleaders can wear their hair naturally, why can’t we? That must have made sense to her because she had no come back.
Attending a predominately black college after high school in 1971 was a time for me to discover my blackness. It was about more than getting a degree; it was about discovering and celebrating my blackness. It was the best medicine for the white-wash disease I had contracted and a way to start sifting through my life to begin the process of embracing my self.
