The Politics of Black Women's Hair Symposium - Morning Session

... spare mic on, be sure the mic works [crosstalk 00: 00: 02].

Camille Charles: Good morning everyone.

Room:   Morning.

Camille Charles: So nice. My name's Camille Charles, I'm Professor of Sociology, Africana Studies in Education. I am also Director of the Center for Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Africana Studies here at the University of Pennsylvania. I'd like to welcome and thank all of you for coming to our one day symposium, the Politics of Black Women's Hair. Before we begin I'd also like to ask that you keep in mind that our event is being webcast live online so we ask that you please silence your cell phones and PDAs and I want to thank you for that.

It's my great pleasure to open this day long symposium to discuss the political, social and business aspects surrounding black women's hair. I'm pleased to present our academic panelists for today's first panel and know that their full bios can be read in our program booklet. The one other thing I'd like to do before we get started is to thank a few people without whom we wouldn't have gotten all of this together and made it here today.

I'd like to thank the staff in the Center for Africana Studies, Teya Campbell, Michelle Houston, Gail Garrison and Carol Davis, who took care of all of the logistics and dealt with the faculty here who have crazy schedules and all of our panelists and made sure that everything ran smoothly. Also, thank you. I'd also like to thank Professor Anthea Butler who is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Africana Studies who came to me with this idea and really did make sure that everything got pulled together and that we got here today.

Our first panelist is Dr. Noliwe Rooks. She's an Associate Professor in Africana Studies and Feminist, Gender, Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She's an award winning author and editor of several books including Hair Raising:  Beauty, Culture and African American Women, and Paris Connections:  African American Artists in Paris, 1920 to 1975.

Dr. Tiffany M. Gill is an Associate Professor in the Department of Black American Studies in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Dr. Gill is the author of Beauty Shop Politics:  African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry which was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Dr. Tanisha Ford is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Dr. Ford is an award winning writer, intellectual, teacher and activist. She's currently writing a book titled Liberated Threads:  Black Women and the Politics of Adornment.

Finally, I'm honored to present our moderator for this panel, Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, host of MSNBC's The Melissa Harris-Perry Show and Professor of Political Science at Tulane University and Founding Director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race and Politics in the South. By the way, Professor Harris-Perry and the Center are cosponsors for this event so I'd like to thank you for that as well. Dr. Harris-Perry is the author of the well received book Sister Citizen:  Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America and the award winning Barbershops, Bibles and BET:  Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought.

Before I turn the panel over to Dr. Harris-Perry, on behalf of the Center for Africana Studies again I would like to thank my friend and colleague Dr. Anthea Butler for her vision and conceptualizing the idea for today's symposium. Please join me in welcoming all of our panelists and our moderator.

Melissa H.P.: I'm going to steal that mic.

Camille Charles: Yes.

Melissa H.P.: Morning.

Room: Good morning.

Melissa H.P.: I feel like I am in some sort of, I don't know, maybe I did something right at some point in my life because I have had an opportunity in the past week to speak at Spelman and then to be here. I just never find myself in rooms that look like this and so to twice in the course of a week find myself in rooms that look like this is pretty wonderful. I just first want to acknowledge that and that it's really quite lovely to be in that circumstance. Yet I know that being in a room that looks like this doesn't even begin to come close to the idea that we are all in agreement about even the most basic questions of politics, society, economics, any of that, and so part of what's exciting here is that we can take this space and use it for conversation.

I'm just going to set up a couple of things and then I'm mostly here to moderate and try to put a few issues on the table that I think will become relevant over the course of the day and have an opportunity to start to engage not just here on the panel but also with folks in the audience who I just for some reason believe you all might have some opinions about these things.

I want to just start with where I typically started undergraduate classes on race whether they are political science courses or feminist politics courses. It's always with that initial need to talk to 18 year olds about the fact that race is a social construction. This has been particularly interesting for me now that I am teaching in the Deep South although they're all from New Jersey. It's like there's some kind of weird exodus from New Jersey to the South so they're not necessarily Southerners but kids who decide even to go to college in the Deep South, as soon as we do the "race is a social construction" it's always difficult for students to get past their assertion that race is a biological reality.

To the extent that I can push them a little bit on the idea that race is historically contingent, that it is based on a set of laws and social practices, self understandings and that one body can take on a different racial identity in the same day if that body flies to another part of the world, right, and therefore you know that it can't be genetic if it takes on a new meaning in a different place on the same day, or that the same kinds of bodies, the same kinds of characteristics can take on different meanings across time. Certainly in New Orleans again, that's a place where we're still constructing race all the time. I live in the 7th Ward where there's a whole of people who understand themselves as Creole and that is a designation that doesn't make a lot of sense in Philadelphia for example but is a critically important space in Louisiana.

I say all of that to say as much as I assert regularly the critical importance of understanding the social construction of race, when it's time to do your hair it feels like race is a biological reality. It is the constant reifying, returning moment I think in ways that is perhaps even more powerful than complexion or nose shape or behind or thighs or any of the other things that we start to think about as constructed around black women's physical identities, that when it's time to either make a choice about whether you're going to perm your little girl's hair or braid it, whether or not you're going to wear the extensions or just your own hair, whether or not you've decided that you love your hair or you don't, all of that feels like race is a biological reality, like it is not socially constructed, like it's not just given meaning but instead as though race were real and the realness of it is sprouting from our heads.

Part of what I want to do is have this panel to do some of the deconstruction of the idea that our hair is exclusively some sort of biological reality or genetic issue that has to be dealt with, that has to be addressed, and instead to try to think about the cultural, economic, social and political meanings.

I'm going to start with my dear friend and former colleague Noliwe Rooks whose book I think is probably one of the first ones that I read in terms of fundamentally engaging the question of African American women's hair. For that I am incredibly grateful for your work and we are contemporaries so I don't know how it's possible that you wrote a book that somehow changed my whole life, but it did so there you go. Start by giving me a sense of what first motivated your initial work on it and what continues to motivate your work on black women's hair.

Nowile Rooks: So gracious. I have a cold so I'm having my Demi Moore moment. I don't think that I'm catching because I've been on antibiotics for a few days. This was my students yesterday, kind of going, "Please God!"

Where I [inaudible 00: 09: 05], it's funny. This morning we were running in here at the very last minute because in part we had a very deep, intellectually stimulating conversation about the Life is but a Dream, Beyonce's video which of course Beyonce is nothing if not all about her hair. This segued from Beyonce somehow into the encyclopedic knowledge here on this panel about black women on reality TV shows which went through Basketball Wives to Loving Hip Hop to, did we do The Sisterhood? I don't think we got to The Sisterhood but we could have.

Tiffany Gill: No, we didn't. [crosstalk 00: 09: 39].

Tanisha Ford:  If we had 30 more minutes.

Nowile Rooks: The thing that was really interesting to me as I was thinking about coming here was all of this conversation we weren't talking about hair and these women. We were talking about being, this is a Beyonce fan here but she has a critique and what it means for black women to, a stalker fan of Beyonce, what it means for these kinds of images to be circulating, but it's really true that hair is actually deeply important to all those representations I think in ways that we don't often talk about.

While looking around this room for example, we could very easily say, "Look how hair can be any and everything, it can do any and everything." You all have fabulous hairstyles and much like Melissa it is always gratifying for me when I am in spaces like this, I went to Spelman, right, not so much natural hair when I was at Spelman. Now there is. It's still wonderful to see all of this and yet when we think about black women's bodies and our constructions in the public sphere, specifically on those reality TV shows that for better or worse are some of the highest rated on network television amongst black women from 18 to 39, taken as a whole more than Olivia Pope and Scandal. We are into these reality shows and yet you do see a narrative about hair. It's not self conscious, it's not politicized, it's not critiqued but it's very much present.

As black women are aggressively entering this kind of public space, this mediated public space, there is a, for all of the fabulous intellectual work that many of us do in our spaces, there's a narrative about our bodies that enter as well. That's not me saying that I think everybody's hair needs to look like y'all's hair on reality TV. I do think, though, that the fact that there's so few options around hairstyles means something. I'm still grappling with exactly what.

Very specifically and very quick because I went on a whole what we were talking about eating for breakfast today, when I got started I actually had to convince my committee that hair was a topic that I should be allowed to write about. When you write a dissertation I'm sure many of you know you actually have to get buy in, sign off and people have to say this is a valid thing to write about. I was in American Studies which is interdisciplinary and I was literally one day, I kept throwing out topics. I didn't even remember what they were, like I want to write about Toni Morrison, I want to write about, and then people were like, "Yes because no one's ever written about Toni Morrison before. That's what you need to do."

I was walking by a bus stop. At the time I had locks and I had just started to lock and for those of you who either have gone through that process or seen it, there's a period where it's just not cute. You can't make it cute. You can put little bandanas on it, you can wrap it up, but it's just not cute.

I was walking by a bus stop and these two older black women were sitting there and they were like, "Child, is it that bad? You need a comb." I swear to you. In that moment, honestly, it just sort of hit me. I was like, "You know what?" Because I can unpack that. I can unpack that generationally. I can unpack that religiously. I can do a gender read on what they were looking at and as I always tell people I'm kind of color stuck because I spent part of my growing up years in the South and growing up in the South as a dark skinned black women, I see and hear and read color almost unconsciously. I was like, "I can do a color [inaudible 00: 13: 39]."

I tried to convince my professors there was a dissertation to be written if I start at the earliest moment where hair actually, not where it became a thing for black women but where styling your hair, I could trace the social significance of what hair straightening could mean. There was enough there archivally. There was enough there in literature, biographies that I could tell a story.

They all said no. They were all like, "There's nothing there, that's been done, no one wants to hear about that and everybody's got hair, what's the big deal?" I finally ended up talking to a historian, this is the last person I could talk to and I was going to have to move on, named Linda Kerber who's a Woman's Historian. She's also Jewish and has what she describes as a Jewfro.

Melissa H.P.:  Jewfro.

Nowile Rooks: I was telling her and before I could even get it fully out of my mouth she was going, "Yep, yep, mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative)," because she used to go to Harlem, she's from New York, she used to go to Harlem to get her hair done. She not only understood beauty parlors as a black female space in a way but she understood the significance of hair for texture in her community and her culture and what that meant. She was able to convince my committee that there was a story to be told and so that's where I came from.

Melissa H.P.: You said a couple of things there that I was writing down as you were saying them because my favorite moment on Scandal, I do stand for Beyonce but I also have a bit of a Kerry Washington problem, but my favorite moment on Scandal is the moment when she's dating the African American senator and he's explaining to her that he loves her and he's like, "I love you." He says, "I've seen you press your hair."

One, because you realize at that moment that if Shonda Rhimes isn't writing that then that sentence is never said on television, right? That's a kind of insider knowledge moment and you also know that there's a whole group of people for whom that went "foop," right? (Hand flew over the top of her head.) That's kind of enjoyable just to know that you're in on this sort of inside discursive, but it also unfortunately has ruined the series for me now because I now can never love Fitzgerald Grant, the president, because I think, "Oh Olivia, you really do love this man, you must love him because he's seen you press your hair and therefore you all have an intimacy and a friendship that you need to focus on," so anyway.

As you were talking about the vocabulary, the emotion and then even finally connecting with an advisor who starts to get it, Tiffany, I want to come to you on that because that's part of why hair becomes a central entrepreneurial space for black women because in fact there is a vocabulary, there is a set of needs, there's all sorts of, again what feel like biological imperatives around it that allow it to be an economically beneficial space.

Tiffany Gill: Absolutely, and that connects to how I came to my work on African American women and hair and particularly looking at the sight of a beauty shop and a beauty salon. These questions about intimacy and the ways in which for African American women who for the early part of the 20th century or at the dawn of the new century, the new last century, really did not have anyone who cared for them and their beauty needs. We have women like Madam CJ Walker and Annie Malone who come on the scene at this moment where African American women in particular are struggling to figure out what it means to be a modern woman, what it means to be come into your own. They're one generation removed from slavery. They are migrating. They are partaking of this new life, this new urban life, and the way that they wanted to express that was in their deportment and a lot of that had to do with their hair.

We have Madam Walker, we have Madam Malone, who are not only just providing products for African American women to transform their look and I think it's important to note that they never saw themselves as trying to make black women white. That was something that was really important for me in my scholarship, that we move away from these very simplistic notions that styling one's hair in a particular way is a way of denoting that someone is trying to be white or someone is rejecting blackness. These women saw the entrepreneurial opportunities of the beauty industry as a way to celebrate black women, and yes, they did it through things like straightening combs although Madam Walker would never use the word straightening in any of her ads while she was alive because she knew that association with whiteness.

What they did is they provided this rich entrepreneurial space. They provided these intimate ways for black women to care for themselves, to care for others and to make a lot of money in the process. We have Madam Walker becoming this entrepreneurial giant but what's important is not only her own economic success but that she saw as an integral part of her role as providing avenues for African American women, particularly in the beginning of the 20th century, to escape the drudgery of domestic labor. Walker herself was a laundress and so she connected this idea, this desire to feel modern, this desire to feel beautiful with actual economic opportunity.

We have, the way I came to this research is looking at the actual industry. It was an easier battle for me when it was time for me to write my dissertation because of people like Nowile Rooks who had paved the way, that these questions about beauty and hair for African American women were not seen as so taboo, not seen as so frivolous. Part of what I try to do in my work is connect what seems to be very frivolous, to connect these ideas about beauty and adornment and to show that they actually do meet not just a kind of psychological need for black women but also a political need. We see beauty shops for example as being in the forefront of black women's political engagement.

I came to questions and issues of hair through my desire to look for political engagement. I had no idea that that would land me and my research in beauty shops. But really, if any of us have ever been in a beauty shop, it seems like a very logical place because it is a space where black women are gathering almost exclusively, it is a space where we're talking about the things that are most important to us, and no matter what is happening in that space whether it's hair straightening, whether it's all sorts of things that are going on, locking, twisting, we can talk about natural hair salons hopefully later on, it is a space where we're having our intimate needs met. Why not just are hair needs being met but also are political and social needs being met as well? I think it's important in this conversation to keep the entrepreneurial side, to think not just of the hair on our head but also the spaces in which we are engaged in not just conversations about hair but conversations about the things that are most important to us. 

Melissa H.P.: Tiffany, I want to make just one follow up before I move on to Tanisha on that. As you talk about space and the ways in which the beauty salons are operating a space, it seems to me that one of the things that has declined over time, and I'm also going to come to you on this on the question of social movements, one of the things that's declined over time in African American political life has been the diasporic nature, the sense of being international cosmopolitan citizens engaged in world struggle. I just need to ask whether or not you think the international component to, indigenous is the best word, Negros having their hair done by African immigrants, by Caribbean immigrants, by Dominicans, by black women defined as black as from around the world might operate as a way to start moving us towards a more diaspoic worldview.

Tiffany Gill: Almost as if one nation under the hood of the beauty shop cap or something like that, like one nation under an Afro. I do think it's very interesting to think about the ways in which blackness get constructed through hair. I think this gets back to your earlier point, that hair becomes this marker of racial difference and historically it was part of what was used to discriminate against African Americans. You're not only being vilified for your dark skin but you're also vilified for your wooly hair. In the converse, it can also be a unification factor, it also can be a way in which African Americans and black people of the diaspora can come together in these conversations.

I think the Internet has played a really crucial role particularly with natural hair care in that women who are often in spaces where there aren't many people of the diaspora, people living in parts of Europe and other places, can now go online and connect with an actual online hair community of women from all across the globe, African descendant women from all across the globe, that are having conversations about their hair, talking about their struggles, talking about their triumphs. I do think there is a potential for these products, for this community that's happening not just in beauty shops locally but also the ways in which online communities are even expanding our notion of community across the globe through these different spaces.

I think there's also potential harm as well because as we're talking about this kind of globalization, some of the people who are paying attention to the global dynamics of black beauty culture are multinational corporations like L'Oreal. They've been paying attention for a long time, right, that they're also capitalizing on this globalized black beauty culture. There are ways in which beauty culture as a global phenomena can be both empowering as well as ways in which people can co-opt into these communities.

Melissa H.P.: Thank you. Tanisha, I want to start there both with the sense of where we are today and the possibilities of internationalism within our politics, but also if you could start to give us a little sense of how, I mean I love this idea that social movements are connected to our hair.

Tanisha Ford:  For me as an intellectual who kind of, my earliest inclinations to study black women's hair and adornment politics really happened at this moment where I decided to have my big chop, to cut my hair off and go natural in graduate school. It was around this time that I was rediscovering the music of Nina Simone and studying black women who were involved in the movement.

It made me think back to my childhood, these moments in which I think of my mother who was a self proclaimed black feminist, who would wear her hair natural and would dress me in black is beautiful t-shirts in the 80s and really teach me this history about her life on college campuses and the African inspired clothing she would wear, and my father who was a black music enthusiast. Every Saturday involved me sitting on his lap and having these conversations about music and analyzing album covers and thinking about soul and jazz.

All these questions are going through my head as I'm entering graduate school. Really, my research is an outgrowth of trying to understand my parents and their generation.

Melissa H.P.: That's true. Every academic is writing about themselves. Some people are just more honest about it.

Tanisha Ford:  Exactly. It was really about trying to understand this Civil Rights, Black Power Movement era in which my parents came of age. When I initially approached the work I had this kind of romanticized notion about the movement, this era where black people were unified and there was a sense of solidarity and a lot of this happened around conversations about adornment, that our Afro was a way that we could unite collectively under the Afro, collectively under the dashiki.

As I began doing this work and digging deeper, I realized though that even in this era there was no universally understood idea about topics like natural hair or what it meant to be natural. We see these early ads in the 1950s and in the early 1960s where black women who have chemically processed hair are making claims to natural, that this is a natural type of beauty, we too can have this beauty. Even within black nationalist communities people were having debates whether black nationalist women have to wear their hair naturally or can we claim hair straightening as also a legacy of precolonial Africa as well.

This began to enrich my ideas about how to study this moment and that really I think oftentimes today we have these conversations and we hold up the Black Power era as this moment of unity and solidarity in ways that makes our engagement with conversations about natural hair and body politics seem like, "Okay, well there was this era where black people had it figured out and that our hair was a symbol that we had." Really what my work has revealed for me is that these were contested conversations.

Even when I look at the Civil Rights Movement, I've interviewed various women who were involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and these women told me stories like, "Yes, we did go natural, oftentimes for practical reasons. We didn't have access to beauty salons, we didn't know where to get our hair done locally, we didn't have the money to do it." It became a sense of pride and community in which they could rally around but that there was this pain at first that we weren't upholding these ideas of respectability through our hair. They use it and they said, "But the movement is important and so therefore we have to learn to adjust to this natural hair."

That for me was a powerful moment where I felt like, wow, this didn't just happen. It wasn't like one day black women woke up and said, "Yes, it's all about the short crop natural!" That there was a political process that they were engaged in. Similarly in the Black Power Movement year there were all these conversations about, "Do you wear the Afro wig, do you not wear the Afro wig? Can your hair kink up enough to make the perfectly round Afro, can it not?" There were all these debates about black authenticity as it related to hair and adornment.

I see some of those similar conversations playing out beyond the boundaries of the United States as well. There's always this kind of cross cultural conversation between black women who are engaged in beauty politics and hair in the United States but also other parts of the African diaspora. For example I came across research in which women in Trinidad are going to the US to learn how to style hair and then coming back to Trinidad and then migrating to places like the UK where they're bringing these hair practices. There is very much this politics around black women's hair that has these global dimensions in the 1950s, 60s and 70s as well.

I think some of the conversations we're seeing today via YouTube take up a lot of these same issues about globalization, about natural hair politics, about what it means for black people across the Atlantic. I agree with Tiffany that the Internet becomes this interesting space that is mediated but also a space in which similar things, like if we're not having the conversation about the hot comb, who's going to have them? YouTube becomes a space where we can have these conversations in the 21st century but I do see all these things as linked and that it is related to this history of contestation, a history of pleasure and politics and where these things meet.

Hopefully over the course of the day these are things that we can see play out, both in this panel but also in hearing from the hair care professionals, how they see this happening on the ground level where they work every day.

Melissa H.P.: Now what I, since you've all had a moment, now what I want to do is just offer a couple of questions and then feel free to jump in however you like. The first is I think a lot of times we frame this around a racial question and particularly black women making choices vis a vis a white power structure or vis a vis white supremacy. Let me ask you about patriarchy within black communities and the question of hair and hair choices for women not so much in the marketplace of employment and the constraints around that but the marketplace of romantic heteronormative love and what that's meant, the sorts of rules and questions that may be associated with African American men and women. We can talk about other aspects but I want to start with the heteronormative patriarchy first.

Tiffany Gill: I think this issue about the choices that women make in how to style their hair are often very much informed about what women may think is attractive, what women will think might be attractive to men. In the film Good Hair, which I have lots of problems with for a host of reasons, to me the most-

Melissa H.P.: We could just do a whole panel.

Tanisha Ford:  We could.

Tiffany Gill: To me one of the more troubling aspects of that already troubling film are the discussions that are happening in barbershops around the ways in which black men are talking about black women's hair and that it became this very much sexualized conversation about what a woman will allow or won't allow a man to do with her hair. There's this way in which that entire film and a lot of these discussions I think unfortunately are often pitched where we're sort of tunnel visioned into thinking about what this means for men, what this means for attractability, attractiveness. I make up words all the time. Attractability's not a word.

Nowile Rooks: That's a good word, though.

Tiffany Gill: It should be, right?

Melissa H.P.: Exactly.

Tanisha Ford:  Yeah.

Tiffany Gill: There's a way in which I think that conversation becomes both, it's a real conversation but it's also a very limiting and narrow one because I think that the ways in which black women have talked about hair and the choices that they've made include issues about attractiveness but are much deeper and much more personal and I honestly think have a lot more to do with the kind of internal dynamics that black women have among ourselves than conversations that either men are having about black women's hair or that even white people are having about black people's hair.

I think, and to go back to Nowile's early example, the example of these older black women vilifying hair, the most commentary I get about hair comes from other black women about the kinds of choices that I make. I think for many men as well as for many whites, there's so much kind of this confusion or, and you know, there is. People just don't understand black people's hair and so I think that sometimes both with men or with whites they don't know, "Is she wearing a weave," what's going on?

I think that sometimes, I think this conversation about patriarchy and the male gaze on women's bodies is important but I think in terms of the kind of social angst over black women's hair often has a lot to do with how we're self policing those boundaries among ourselves. I'll stop with that, but hear what other folks have to say about it.

Nowile Rooks: I'm not, I mean I fully and totally agree with everything that you said but I'm not sure, there's this sort of idea about women's self love and self care that when women are their best self we'll have an Oprah moment, right? When women are their best self, the light shines through and that's when the universe opens the path for, I told you I was from California, the universe opens the path for you and things come in but you have to first have this self love.

I feel like this moment and to some extent in the 60s and 70s was about a black political love in a way. Now it really is about black women saying, "I want to touch my hair, I want to do things with it I haven't done before," or, "It's convenient," or, "I just want options." There's all kinds of reasons for it but it's about choices. I'm not sure that black men are always ready for that. For heterosexual black women who are single and interested in attracting and in having a range of options around black male companionship, that whole idea of just be yourself and if he doesn't like you with your hair like that he wasn't for you, and you're like, "Yes, that is exactly true," and then you got a lot of people who are all by themselves because we are so looks-ist, women and men. We make quick decisions about people's character and suitability and likability based on all this surface stuff.

Tiffany Gill: No, I agree with you.

Nowile Rooks: I think it's true that we have to in this moment where we're changing but I have a 21 year old son who somehow, I don't know, as much as we talk about hair, as much as he's seen me do my hair, I had locks until he was 18, 19, he'd never seen me with anything but natural hair, who didn't understand why my hair. One day he just said to me, "So when you take out your locks," this was the first horrifying thing, "are you going to look like Beyonce?" Not, "Are you going to have hair like Beyonce," which I think is what in fact he meant. However what he said was, "Are you going to look like Beyonce?"

I realized even my son who we have raised to be gender sensitive, I'm hoping that he carries that on and one day be able to claim, "Feminists, I don't know, we did our best," but does not have, his first choice for a hairstyle despite who he grew up with is not my hair. My hair today is a little better for him but my hair in other states is not. I think that's real.

Tiffany Gill: Absolutely.

Nowile Rooks: That's a very long way of saying, "Well I wish it weren't, I do think that if you are single and interested in a heterosexual relationship it cannot be not on the table for you."

Tiffany Gill: Right, absolutely, and it's popular culture. Our earlier conversations about Beyonce and reality TV, et cetera, that there are so few examples in the public sphere of black women who are held up as attractive who are wearing natural hair. The conversations when Viola Davis showed up on the red carpet of, I guess it was either the Golden Globes or the Oscars last year, and we have Wendy Williams and others making that conversation but I think part of this issue about attractability, I'm still holding onto that word.

Nowile Rooks: It's a good word, it is, it's a good word.

Tiffany Gill: It works. It is about, thank you, is about the fact that there are so few limited options in terms of what both black men and young black girls can look at and is considered attractive, that there is this limitation when it comes to issues of what men would view as attractive because that's all that the media is framing black women to be, to have not just straightened hair but usually weaves and things like that, that that is the only that black women can be beautiful.

Tanisha Ford:  I'm wondering where does androgyny fit into this conversation? Because I think that we're seeing this again in the contemporary fashion moment that we're in right now, that androgyny somehow is in, this idea of blurring the gender lines, if we think about that as a way to destabilize or at least challenge or push back against patriarchal constructions of hair and romance that frame it in a heterosexual conversation. I see that even in the 1960s and 70s there was this conversation about androgyny, that if we think about ourselves as organizers that can help to destabilize these questions about the gender hierarchy or this gender binary.

I'm wondering how can we use that as a way to think about our contemporary moment that we're in as it relates to hair politics and conversations about beauty and conversations about queerness even? How does this fit into the conversation?

Tiffany Gill: If I remember even the conversations around the Afro in the 1960s, one of the great critiques of it and one of the great anxieties about it was that it was a style that both men and women could wear and so there was all this, a thing about what does it mean to be an attractive women that you're wearing your hair like a man? The women who were of a previous generation, one of their major critiques wasn't so much because of, part of it was this idea of unstraightened hair, but part of that anxiety had to do with the fact that in their opinion women were looking like men and that was a problem. That tension was there even back in the 1960s where we can think about this natural hair moment.

Nowile Rooks: We are in this whole moment where I think androgyny for white people is sort of a thing. On the catwalk, when I say androgyny for white people there's this model who models as both a man and a woman and people all flip out because, "We didn't know you were a women when you were a man modeling, didn't know you were a man when you were a woman modeling." The look is really, I don't know that's that so much too for black people. I'm not saying no black people anywhere, I'm just saying I'm not seeing a moving embrace of actual androgyny. [inaudible 00: 38: 58] concerns about femininity which is what I think the Afro was about, "So how are you going to be feminine if your hair looks like a man's hair," because that's how we define and do femininity.

I don't know that that's a gender anxiety, if we wanted to really start to disentangle those things, but I don't see androgyny so much in mainstream popular culture. I don't know where I would find it. I'm not saying I don't know any androgynous black people but just I don't see it as much.

Melissa H.P.: I love this and in fact it seems to be that part of the androgyny piece is also a standard, particularly among in white popular culture of extremely thin women. Part of the androgyny is that the end up looking like adolescent boys so you end up with the Anne Hathaway version of a sort of Hollywood androgyny that is reminiscent of Breakfast at Tiffany's, that preserves a sense of vulnerability because of the tininess of that person and so there's this feminine vulnerability associated with a physical androgyny but that's very different than the claim you're making about seeing one's self as a worker or as an organizer or as an identity that is not itself crosscut against gender. I think that is a challenging question.

Let me ask, I asked about the patriarchy, was it heteronormative. Let me then ask the question that actually both of you have moved to at one point, both Tiffany and Nowile, which is the intergenerational question. Every time I see older black women who are viewers of the show, they're just the only people who are still honest with me in the world. It's very kind that I meet lots of people who say that they love the show but you got to know there are people walking past you also thinking, "I hate your damn show," but they don't stop and say that to you.

What I love is older black women consistently tell me that I look much fatter on television or they'll ask me questions about, I mean it's really, I just, there is nothing better than a 60 plus black woman because she will tell you the truth, or at least convey to you a kind of a truth that is about a particular version of black womanhood. If we've got a patriarchy piece and particularly around heteronormativity and a particular form of romance, what then also about the question of black women's hair and our intergenerational?

Nowile Rooks: Let me say this. I struggle regularly with the whole coloring my hair thing. For all of the, I have not put a straightening comb or straightening products in my hair since, I don't know, probably college. I'm all about running to the CVS and or the beauty parlor when there is gray showing through at a level that I can't stand. Just like a few months ago I was really, because my husband is all like, "Go gray, you'll look great, age gracefully, I'm here for you!" I'm trying to work with that and be like, "Okay," all that rhetoric is rhetoric that I absolutely embrace. As much as people will tell you you look fabulous, people are also like, "She needs to stop using that dark black on her hair, right? She's 70 years old."

I have the hardest time finding images, this is to take hair in just a little bit different direction but intergenerational, right, find a black woman who will let their hair go gray. The whole couple months ago clearly, clearly I got over the whole, "Let's embrace the gray," and in fact now have highlights. I went and not only got rid of the gray, added some caramel color.

I really was thinking about how is this hair movement that we're in, this embracing natural hair as it's becoming a multimillion dollar business, is not taking love of self and this "natural," I want to put it in quotes because you're still constructing a natural identity, is not at all, at least in black communities that I'm aware of, that I can find, because really even Googling other, Anthea comes up as the model for black women with gray hair.

Tiffany Gill: As she should. Well, she is.

Nowile Rooks: I'm serious. If you start doing Google of black women with gray hair, because I was like, "Okay, I need role models, let me try to find some people," it was really Anthea, Anthea, Anthea. As I talked to people, people are like, "Well if I could look like Anthea I would do it."

Melissa H.P.: Right.

Nowile Rooks: If you don't ever let your hair go gray, how are you ever going to look like Anthea, right? It's a process. You have to actually see some gray to get there. You get to a point and you're just like, "Yeah, no, I'm not trying to do that." I don't know what that means. It just struck me talking about intergenerational, like in moving from one generation from another and what that means and as we talk about hair as a marker of that and what seems to not be on the table.

Tiffany Gill: I think to go back to the moments in the 1950s and the 1960s where more African American women, though certainly not all as Tanisha points out, were beginning to embrace their hair in the non straightened set, without the straightening comb, and the conversations that were happening with older black women have to do with what did, or even does, we can think about, straightened hair represent? For a group of women that had come of age in the 1920s, the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, again straightened hair was not about them being white but to them it represented proper grooming and to them it represented discipline, that to have your hair not straightened was like to be a motherless child.

I remember, this is not about straightening but with my mom, who's probably watching, when we were children I had a school principal who would talk about our mother parts, the ways in which my mom would get in and get that hair parted perfectly and slicked back and shiny and greased up and all that, that was a sign that you were a cared for child. That was a sign that someone loved you enough to sit you between their legs and snatch your hair. That was a sign that you were cared, and so for women of a particular generation, to go natural was to abandon this idea of black bodies as proper, as disciplined, going against all the narratives that were being promoted about black people, that we were unruly.

We can think about whether or not it is fair, and I certainly don't, that natural hair represents those things, but I do think it's important that we think historically about what those things represented and the cost of that. To be an unruly, unkempt, undisciplined black person could often end you up in jail or hanging from a tree or a host of other things so that there were real political consequences to being perceived as a particular kind of way. I think a lot of that tension, and we can think about how that same kind of politics of representation also exists today, but I do think it's important to at least appreciate just how, what a big deal that was for black women to look at women that they thought whose hair was not being presented properly, how they felt that reflected on them as a race. I think that's where most of that intergenerational conflict was coming from.

Tanisha Ford:  Yeah, and to keep it right there in the 1950s, 60s era, again I do a lot of work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a lot of these women that I've interviewed, they talk about this anxiety that some of the older women in the rural communities where they were helping to organize, they had over the hair. I study how they make this transition from Sunday's best attire to denim overalls and jeans and how they do this in part to align themselves with the Southern sharecroppers that they're working alongside.

They said that a lot of the senior women in the communities would say, "Okay, I can deal with the denim, I can get my mind around this, but baby, your hair, do you have to wear your hair in this kind of way?" This short crop natural for a lot of these women. Judy Richardson tells me, "The hair became the cut line." That was what created the generational divide. It was about this hair but the anxiety was not just about the women wearing their hair short and natural, it was also about the black men starting to grow their hair out.

Before we get to this freedom 'fro moment, still men weren't wearing their hair closely shorn anymore and what this was doing was disrupting the performance of a normative femininity or a normative masculinity in a way that was unsettling for a lot of people, even those with left leaning politics a lot of times. We see again this politics related to a disruption of gender normativity that I think is an interesting tangent that we see playing out today.

Darnell Moore has this great piece on the Feminist Wire where he talks about this, where he links his styling of his facial hair and the hair on his head with the fact that he may wear pink shoes and what this means in terms of how people are reading his masculinity and in turn what this means for black women even who are choosing to push against these kind of normative constructions of femininity today. Again, I see this historical link in terms of this gender divide over hair and anxiety as it relates to gender performance that was really critical to this 1960s moment when again part of this quest for full citizenship rights was tied into not only a performance of respectability but the idea that doing that was linked to performing a normative gender, a normative sense of womanhood, a normative sense of manhood and so what does it mean when young folks are disrupting this?

Tiffany Gill: Unless we think that we're enlightened 21st century folks who are not grappling with these kinds of questions and even those who may identify as having natural hair, that we're beyond this performing of the need to be so well groomed, et cetera, I think there's also even within natural hair communities tension over folks who just let a 'fro go loose and folks who are grooming in a particular kind of way.

Tanisha Ford:  Right, salons.

Nowile Rooks: [crosstalk 00: 49: 21] drive me crazy.

Tanisha Ford:  [crosstalk 00: 49: 21].

Tiffany Gill: Right, right, right. Right, so that we're still sort of grappling I think as black people and black women in particular with this idea of how to be perceived. Are we going to come out the house the way our hair looks in the morning? My hair doesn't have a chemical process. The color is henna if anybody would like a recipe later on, but I still did not come out the house with the way my hair looks when I first wake up in the morning, that I'm still engaged in a process of grooming and disciplining my hair. It may not be with a heating implement, it may not be with a chemical but certainly I can assure you that I probably, not even probably, I spend more time on my hair now that it's unchemically processed than I did when it was relaxed.

I think it has to do with these issues of grooming and that even within natural communities that are, we're supposedly engaged in this kind of liberatory self love of ourselves, we still are performing respectability, we still are, some, many of us.

Nowile Rooks: Because we need products.

Tiffany Gill: Right, right. You know, there's a whole [crosstalk 00: 50: 25].

Nowile Rooks: It's the products.

Tanisha Ford:  We're definitely in the age of products [crosstalk 00: 50: 27].

Tiffany Gill: Right, I hope you talk about that, the kind of product junky-ism, the ways in which natural hair has sort of opened up this venue of where you need to find that right, perfect, Holy Grail product.

Nowile Rooks: You have to go through from Kinky-Curly to Miss Jessie's to like, right?

Tiffany Gill: Right, right. Right, right.

Nowile Rooks: You got to have all those.

Tiffany Gill: You have to have all that and now you can get them at Target and Walgreens and all that, which is convenient and it's a very celebratory moment I think that these natural hair products, actually if you look at Black Enterprise this month, the cover of Black Enterprise is Lisa Price, the head of Carol's Daughter. The cover story is the business of natural hair. It's becoming this lucrative business in this quest, I think for even those who have natural hair, to find that Holy Grail, to find that perfect product, to find that product that makes you look a particular kind of way, which how different is that maybe, I'm going to throw questions on you guys because I'm sure you'll have lots to say about it, is that much different than finding the right relaxer or the perfect straightening comb or whatever?

Melissa H.P.: Tiffany, actually since you've started to engage the audience here, we're at an hour, we've been doing this and so what I want to do is in fact to open it up. We're also, our house has gotten more and more full and I also, unfortunately, I have to step out for two minutes. What I'm going to do is take this as opportunity to throw it out to the audience. If you can moderate for one, I just have a quick e-mail thing here, and I will be right back.

Camille Charles:  [inaudible 00: 51: 54] in the middle here.

Melissa H.P.: Oh good.

Camille Charles: [inaudible 00: 51: 56]. Okay. Nobody has any questions? I just don't believe that.

Tiffany Gill: They're moving.

Tanisha Ford:  All right, they're getting to their mics.

Camille Charles: Oh I'm sorry. I just thought people would go over to microphones.

Speaker 8:  Oh, I just don't want to bring my walker. Can you hear me?

Camille Charles: You know, here, here.

Speaker 8:  Good morning everyone. I guess my comment is everything that you're saying I taught for many, many years. Some of my memories of growing up, my brother would not start his breakfast until the hair ritual began when my head was locked between my mother's knees. It really saddens me as a teacher or a former teacher when, if you really want to destroy a young female child in a classroom or even a young man for that fact, the first thing they do is they attack their hair. They really denigrate and then it goes to the skin and it's like you can't separate what's more important, the darker or lighter skin or the hair.

I guess my question is how as a people do we, I see us moving forward and I really think the Black Power Movement that I grew up in opened up the door to this large array of hairstyles that we see here, but how do we stop parents and people within our own culture from making our natural hair or our hair, period, a negative stereotype? Because it is about aesthetics and is about the beauty and the money that these girls spend is just astronomical.

Nowile Rooks: Do you want to collect some questions since there's a lot of people?

Camille Charles: Do you want to respond or do you want me to have more people?

Nowile Rooks: I was saying because there's a lot of people, do you want to collect a couple of questions?

Camille Charles: Yeah, why don't we collect a few? We'll have [inaudible 00: 54: 08] here and then the first lady over here and then I'll have them all respond. I'm sorry, what? Oh, and I do need you to be brief because there are quite a few of you who want to get engaged and we're streaming.

Speaker 9:  I have a two pronged question.

Camille Charles: One question. There are a lot of people.

Speaker 9:  Oh, one question? Okay, then I'll ask the first part. My question is about the social structure here. You guys have talked a lot about how women in the past weren't really interested in looking like white people, they were interested in being respectable and looking respectable, but we're talking about this in a context without this racial hierarchy. We're not really talking about that. I was hoping that you guys could elaborate on that. Also, where's the revolution in all of this? That's all.

Female: That was two questions.

Female: We can ask the first.

Speaker 11:  Hi, I'm one of those generational people with a 96 year old grandmother, 70 year old mother and aunts, and I let my daughter, they say, cut her hair off, was I crazy? Because we have this long crazy wild hair that I love. When I wear my hair out they say, "You look like you don't have a mother," and I need the right answer. I gave my daughter the answer but I need the answer because in their minds I'm an improper mother. I need an answer.

Melissa H.P.: Are you taking multiple questions?

Tiffany Gill: Yeah, they're all connected.

Nowile Rooks: Because there are so many people we were like let's a few people ask questions.

Tiffany Gill: Those three connect [inaudible 00: 55: 42]. Respond? Wow, those are heavy and deep questions and my training as a historian has not fully prepared me to answer those psychological ones. I think part of it is that we're all sort of walking that out, but particularly the first two questions about how do we stop the vilification of black hair, how do we stop that from being an insult, the way in which people wear their hair, and the question about what hasn't perhaps been spoken of enough which is the role of white supremacy in creating a kind of hierarchy of hair and difference?

I think those two things are very much linked, that really the critiques and the vilification of black hair even coming from among black people is very much rooted in these ideas of racial difference and not just ideas of hair being a marker of racial difference but that this then sets up a hierarchy to particular social, political ends, that the idea that black people's hair in its natural state is unkempt, is unruly, et cetera, are all ideas that are rooted in white supremacy.

I guess the answer to the question which is not really an answer but a framing of it is that we have to put hair in a conversation with these other tools of white supremacy. That we have to empower young people to be able to both assert their own sense of beauty and dignity outside of the realm of the oppression of race and also that we as black people need to be involved in that project.

Is that an easy process? Is that a simple one and I can give you an easy answer for that? No, but I think the conversation we're having connecting these ideas to power of the state in terms of enslavement, in terms of segregation, in terms of disenfranchisement, all these things are linked to the ways in which black people are vilified in terms of our personal presentation. Again, not an answer but just what [inaudible 00: 57: 44].

Nowile Rooks: I think too, just to piggyback off that, I think it helps to join those issues. There are real economic consequences for some black people around the ways that they wear their hair. There are companies who will not hire you if you have your hair in braids, in dreadlocks or in natural hairstyles and there are companies who will fire you if you did not come to work looking like that and then get braids. The last one I heard about was, well the last one was the newscaster, right? The black woman who had the eloquent response and they were like, "Thank you, buy a piece." There was also at Six Flags, I think a couple years ago. I know that UPS has a grooming code that specifically mentions no dreadlocks. Their own, say what?

Tanisha Ford:  FedEx.

Nowile Rooks: FedEx does as well. There's sheriff departments, there's deputy mayors who have been fired over the years. It's not an isolated thing, that certain natural hairstyles most often associated and worn by people of natural descent are not allowed in corporate America and the few times that they've actually gone to court that we have rulings, the court has consistently sided with these businesses saying that they have to protect earnings and profits, that if they feel like these styles, very often what they say is that this is going to scare the customers.

If you are at the front desk, y'all are laughing, I'm really serious. If you're working at the front desk of the Marriott and you have braids and white people don't want to see you in braids, then you will frighten them and their profits will be lessened. It's true for airlines and schools. There are black children all over the country who have been sent home from school in the past 10 years or so for wearing certain hairstyles that are all natural hairstyles.

Melissa H.P.: Let's be clear, this is happening in a lot of these charters that particularly are the kind of black male respectability charters where they make the boys all cut their hair into short crop fades.

Nowile Rooks: Men as well.

Melissa H.P.: Not just women but a lot particularly around men and the notion that there's only way to be a respectable black male body and that that does not include long hair.

Nowile Rooks: There are consequences. At Hampton, you can't be in their business school if you have dreadlocks or braids because they're like, "That's not appropriate." We could go on with it. As we talk about just hair as a self love or [inaudible 01: 00: 16], there are real consequences for some people for some of this, making choices about wearing your hair in a straight style, not just for male companionship but also for employment depending on where you might want to work. It's not fair. We think that something else should be true but right now it is true. Hair is still complicated and it's not just a matter of saying, "Love yourself, love your hair," it's not just because you have to teach people, you have to teach kids how to navigate this. To the woman who said what to say to?

Speaker 11:  My grandmother who's 96.

Nowile Rooks: All you can really say is it's complicated. You can't wave a wand, I can't give you a sentence that's going to make it okay, that will take the pain away, that will make hair not complicated, but if she's willing, if people are willing to handle that, if you understand what that means, how you're going to be read, how you're going to be understood and you're willing to walk with that then it may make it better in the future. It's not that it's necessarily easy except in Brooklyn. There are some very specific places where you really can and it's just not that big a deal. Like in academia. No one is going to really tell you, "I need you to straighten your hair right now," in most places.

Melissa H.P.: Quite the opposite.

Tiffany Gill: Quite the opposite, exactly.

Melissa H.P.: I was going to say I think I was the perm wearing black woman in the academy at a certain point.

Tiffany Gill: Right, it's quite the opposite, which is problematic in its own way too.

Tanisha Ford:  I think that it is troubling when these things happen to adults but for me, it really pains me when I see it happening to our children. We've seen this very recently play out in the public sphere with figures like Gabby Douglas and Willow Smith and of course then who gets also attacked with that is the black mother, repathologizing the black mother, this problematic black matriarchal figure.

These young women, these are public figures, but what happens when it's every day in our communities? For me that is particularly troubling especially because, like I opened my remarks with the stories of my mother who had so many hairstyles. This whole shave thing with the woo, I got this from my mom. This is what she was rocking. I've been natural for 10 years now and I watch my mom go through all these things with locks and all these different changes and I can look at my own hair journey from a young girl, from the very first time I cut my hair to wearing a short Toni Braxton in eighth grade to wearing a Beyonce weave in college. This whole journey and so much of that was critical in terms of me finding out who I was as a black woman and learning how to navigate these streets that I had to walk every day of my life.

Part of me wants to say no, the answer isn't to tell them not to do it, not to express themselves through their hair because I think it's so important, but how do we create this safe space for our children where we can have these conversations, tell these hair stories if you will through the various stylings of our hair but still not have to face undue policing of the bodies of nine and 10 year olds? It's sad. I think that for me this is, again hair stands in for this broader conversation about challenges that race, sexism, patriarchy, all these things still raise for us. I can feel where you're living.

Melissa H.P.: I love the point you're making. I just, I'm raising an 11 year old daughter which is why I ran out for a second. Your point about how do we create the safe space and I guess what I would say is it's not safe to be a little black girl in America. It is quite clearly not safe, so not safe that Hadiya Pendleton with her really lovely, beautiful little face and her gorgeous little hair and all was shot and killed. Quvenzhané Wallis who is nine years old and nominated for an Academy Award is called the C word and then people quitting in order to defend the right to call her a C word, right? It is not a safe place to be and our hair becomes part of it.

I mean certainly part of my family's decision to flee Princeton, New Jersey, and there were lots for reasons for it, but part of it was fleeing the horror of being in a space that is, friendly and lovely and nice as everybody was, they were asserting all sorts of things over and against my little black girl's body and particularly over and against her hair. We're like, "Okay, we're going to New Orleans and the blacks and there are going to be the people and," you know, we lived in the 7th Ward, and people are asserting all kinds of things over and against a little black girl's body and against her hair. I guess part of it is not only is it complicated but it's also, it is not safe. It is not safe.

Nowile Rooks: You want to collect some more?

Melissa H.P.: Yeah, let's take [inaudible 01: 05: 20].

Denise Willis:  Hi, this is for Dr. Tanisha Ford, is that you?

Tanisha Ford:  Yes.

Denise Willis:  My name is Miss Denise Willis, Philadelphia branch, NAACP, Mr. Jerome Mondesire, President. Do you have a telephone or e-mail because when you said SNCC, I was curious.

Tanisha Ford:  Do I have a telephone or my own personal?

Denise Willis:  Yes, that I can share with the office.

Tanisha Ford:  Oh yeah, we can definitely talk afterwards.

Denise Willis:  Thank you.

Nowile Rooks: You don't want to livestream?

Tiffany Gill: No, you should have.

Melissa H.P.: Here's my phone number in livestream, right? Yes ma'am?

Doris Thomas: Hello, my name is Doris Thomas. I'm very much interested in learning more about the business of hair and how, I would like to know even the Korean businessmen and women as well as Indians, they all know about the business side of the hair and how billions of dollars have been, our people are spending money. Let's go back to economics, power, if you want to look at us as a collective group, how much money we spend every year on the hair products, on the weaves, so when you want to do a natural do you can do that but when you want to do the weave you can throw that on too. Can we talk about the business side, the economic power that we have collectively as women and then can we talk about how other cultures have, how they are basically making so much money off of us and we're not realizing that we need to develop our own products and create our own business plans and develop our own institutions so that way we do feel empowered and we have that self love, so we don't expect someone else to love us more than ourselves?

Melissa H.P.: This one is big enough that I think maybe we pause right here. I promise I'm going to collect a couple more but this is a big one. Let me pause here and allow some responses.

Tiffany Gill: Black hair is a tremendous business.

Doris Thomas: Multibillion dollar.

Tiffany Gill: Multibillion dollar industry and you're absolutely right that since really the 1950s, that money has not been generated, it's not being generated by African American owned companies.

Doris Thomas: Businesses, right.

Tiffany Gill: It is a very bleak picture. Particularly by the time we get to the 1960s and 1970s, that once L'Oreal and Alberto-Culver and all these industries, these multinational corporations figure out that there's money in black hair, they begin mass producing relaxers and all these products to make that money. What I would say a glimmer of hope in that, and I still think there's definitely challenges with that, particularly with the distribution side, that if you go into most African American communities, that the stores that are, quote unquote, "beauty supply stores," are owned predominantly by Korean immigrants. That's not just a fluke. That is something that they have been able to get into that market and seal that market by producing materials only in Korean, et cetera, and creating a kind of immigrant, ethnic enclave for beauty supply stores which many immigrant communities have done with other industries, but that's what's happening in African American industries.

What the glimmer of hope is I think is among the natural hair community, that we have a lot of women who started just mixing products in their own kitchens, whether it was Kinky-Curly, whether it's Carol's Daughter or, I'm not going to [repress 01: 08: 55] these, or Camille Rose or these other products, is that they created a market through the Internet, through social media, through blogs, through other kinds of things where people got to know about their products and thereby going around the kind of middleman strategy that has kept African Americans from gaining money in the manufacturing side.

They went to a direct sale model which goes back to the early 20th century with Madam CJ Walker and these folks. This is not new. That's how they essentially started, by going directly to where black women are and in this case, it's the Internet, creating their products and now those products are now being mass produced and so many of these women who started out in their kitchens are actually doing quite well.

Again, my fear is that if history is any lesson to us, and it already is happening, that these multinationals are now looking at natural hair as a particular kind of market and are now getting in with what I think are subpar products but they're a lot cheaper. A tub of Kinky-Curly's almost $30 for 16 ounces. That's a lot of money. There are ways in which they're coming in and sort of undercutting costs. I think while there's this glimmer of hope we also need to be cautious of that and that these market demands are being driven by consumers. If there's any kind of, "What do we do to keep-"

Doris Thomas: How do we change the mindset?

Tiffany Gill: Support these products. Support these African American owned ones now that they're having a mass appeal. Because of the Internet, we can bypass many of these companies that are not doing things that are supportive to our communities and support these businesses directly. That's one thing we as consumers can do, we can vote with our dollars.

Tanisha Ford:  I think for all the, I too take issues with a lot of things that were in Good Hair but I think one of the things it did for a lot of black folks was that it really exposed some of this, the business aspect of hair. Certain people, you could see what was happening maybe in your local community when you went to buy your hair for your braids or for your weaves or whatever but to see what happens beyond your community in terms of where this money is really being made, where the hair is coming from, I think that that film did put this issue on the radar for a lot of people in ways that we had never thought about it before.

Now what the next step from that became for most people who then viewed that movie, that's a question that we can ask but I think there's a similar process that goes on in other parts of the world as well. Again as I mentioned earlier, my work is transnational so I do a lot of work in London. I was actually headed to the George Padmore Institute one day to do some research. I'm walking down the street and I started noticing that there were all these black beauty salons and then next to them were beauty supply stores, but it wasn't Koreans who were owning them, it were South Asian folks. Because of different patterns of colonialism and migration, it creates a different grouping of people who are now participating in this market but it was the same thing.

It was so striking that I just started turning around and snapping pictures at this whole strip of this community where there was just all these salons and different hair supply stores and products. I think that there's a similar dynamic, it's not just in the United States but even in other parts of, at least from my knowledge, of the Western world, we see these similar dynamics happening where black women are utilizing these products and they're buying them from sellers who are not part of their community per se.

Again, this is another example of the global dynamic of black hair and that it's marketable not just in the United States but it really is a global structure in place that's making black hair profitable.

Doris Thomas: Even about the Indians-

Melissa H.P.: I'm sorry, I'm going to pull some more. We got a lot of voices. I want to let other folks in. Yes?

Speaker 14:  I identify as a feminist and as pro black in all of these things. I'm wondering what you all think collectively about how it's most responsible to try to navigate these conversations because there have been a couple of situations in which I found myself being, despite the fact that I'm male and despite the fact that I haven't had to deal with these problems myself for the most part, I've a couple of times found myself in a room full of black women or a mixed group of people in which I'm the most liberal, do whatever you want to do with your hair person in the room and I don't want to be that derailer who marginalizes other people who have personal experiences with it but at the same time I feel like I don't want to be irresponsible and have somebody saying something in front of younger relatives of mine, my nieces or my little cousins or something, say something negative about natural hair and have me be in the room and not speak up and speak in defense in some kind of way. How would you recommend that I or we navigate that?

Melissa H.P.: That's one on the table, particularly the male ally question. Okay?

Speaker 15:  As a assistant professor in a predominantly white male discipline, I just wanted to first thank you for having these types of discussions in academia. My question is, or comment, I would really like to hear your thoughts or your reaction to the comments that Gabby Gifford got in terms of her hair.

Melissa H.P.: Gabby Douglas.

Speaker 15:  I'm sorry, yeah.

Melissa H.P.: I know, it's easy to do. It's easy to do.

Speaker 15: Very, very sorry. Yeah, about her hair and the fact that a lot of those comments came from black women.

Melissa H.P.: We've got the male ally question, we've got the Gabby Douglas question.

Speaker 16:  I just was wondering because I came because it says Politics of Black Hair, which is a workshop I do all the time, culture, is that our hair has a whole culture and a whole history, that a lot of the issues that we're talking about could be eliminated if people understood the culture. I mean that it's not about personal style, it's not about academic pursuits, it's about understanding and knowing our culture, that our hair and our hairstyles, et cetera, go back over 35,000 years. I think that a lot of folks don't have that information so therefore they fall victim to the colonization and that when we talk about older women and the proper care, I'm thinking or I'm wondering how much people think that that's related to the oppression, it's related to the colonization, it's related to the media, it's related to all the facts that we don't see images of our hair. That when we were in slavery we didn't have a way to take care of our hair.

I'm wondering, you all up there, about culture because I haven't heard that mentioned.

Melissa H.P.: All right, so I'll take one more. We've got the male ally question, we've got the Gabby Douglas and particularly the attacks from other African American women, we have this question about the length and depth and breadth of our culture and how that's associated with anticolonialism and all of those historical questions and then we'll take a final fourth.

Speaker 17:  My question is what types of conversations are we having in our hair salons and how do those conversations compare to the conversations of our mothers, and do we still have what you would call a neighborhood salon considering who they serve? Are they really serving people in the neighborhood and also considering that women will travel miles to go to their hair, almost like churches, they will pass hair salons to go to a certain hair salon.

Melissa H.P.: Okay, great. We have the geography question, all right. Anyone on any of those?

Tiffany Gill: I'll start with the last one about the conversations that are happening in hair salons, which is really the focus of the work that I did in Beauty Shop Politics, where I looked at since the beginning of the 20th century the ways in which African American women have used the physical space of the beauty shop to engage in political pursuits that are beyond the issues of hair. Yes, there is this process of grooming that's happening there but it is through the beauty shops where we see black political leaders like Bernice Robinson and others who are using their spaces to engage in things like voter registration, et cetera.

There's also a lot of informal conversation which I know the work that Melissa has done in barbershops, the kind of informal political conversations that happen there as well are important. One thing I do want to say is that I have done research and have found that there actually are vibrant political conversations still happening in beauty shops as well as political action. The work that's being done there now has a lot to do with what I think is the civil rights issue for black women, which is the issues around health and health care and health disparities, the fact that African American women in terms of life expectancy and a host of diseases are really stigmatized with that more than anyone else.

What I have found is that beauty shops are actually a wonderful site in which to engage questions about black women's health. We have projects in places like San Diego where beauty shops are allying with health educators to do breast cancer awareness conversations. They're actually having mammograms and things like that happening right inside—