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Hair politics

In 2008, the American tabloid In Touch published a story about the Beyonce Knowles wig collection. In history, they estimated that Beyonce’s wig collection was valued at more than $ 1 million. Five years later, she is probably the most famous singer in the world with a much larger collection of wigs, weaves and other fake appendages attached to her scalp, with a much greater social impact. She is frequently criticized by pop culture and sociology experts for buying into the Barbie doll aesthetic and promoting an unrealistic image of black femininity. She has been accused of lightening her skin tone, undergoing rhinoplasty, and generally changing her appearance from that of a beautiful black woman to that of a beautiful white woman. Above all, it is her hair that attracts the most attention. Googling ‘Beyonce hair’ and out of the 105,000,000 hits, a large chunk of them are debates about whether her hair is real, a wig, a weave, and the politics surrounding hair in black culture. The pop culture scion may not uniquely identify as African American (he has stated more than once that he is multi-ethnic – African American, Irish, French, and Cherokee – but the impact of his hair choices resonates through debates about race, ethnicity and feminism.

Hair has never been just something on your head. It’s chopped, braided, dyed, spiked, slicked back, molded, plucked, implanted, and just about anything else you can think of to do to it. In pre-transatlantic West African cultures, hair was central to defining culture, status, and identity, as it remains today throughout the world. The outright horror and personal annihilation that the slave traders inflicted on their human assets would not have been as effective if culture, status, and identity had been allowed to continue after people were kidnapped and shipped across the ocean. . One of the main means of dehumanizing their victims was to shave their hair in an effort to do away with culture and identity. Over time, the know-how and personal hair styling skills, unique to the West African people, were lost to the slave population. Furthermore, the slaves did not have the hair care products that generally suited their hair type, such as palm oil, and they had to rely on other easily affordable products such as bacon grease and wool combs to hair care.

Hair and skin tone became even more politicized when the second and subsequent generations of slaves were born. They were often the result of slave masters raping slave girls and women. Genetics is skin tone, facial features, and hair texture, clearly identifying who was related to the slave owners. Often the children of slaves and slave owners got better living conditions (like living in better houses, better food, etc.) and a better chance of getting over what was a tough existence.

Over time, the politicization of hair had reached new heights. Emancipation did not change much as the more similar it was to the dominant (white) economic culture, the easier it was to move on in life. In fact, it is estimated that hundreds of thousands of African Americans with fair skin tones and straight hair posed as white and completely changed their identities to integrate into white society.

The ‘one drop rule’, enacted in the 1920s, considered that anyone with a little African heritage would be considered legally black and therefore subjected to degrading prejudice in their everyday life, made ‘pass’ as white was an attractive option. for those who could. They did not have to sit in designated seats on buses, they did not have to use separate facilities, they could get better jobs, and they were not abused because of their race. It is difficult to know exactly how many people crossed the “racial line,” but various research projects on ethnicity have found that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of those who identify as white in the United States have some African descent. The same phenomenon has been observed in South Africa and certainly in any other country where one group was repressed to such an extent that it was easier to pretend to be another. Hair, skin tone and features became one of the main identifiers of an ethnic hierarchy that, for better or for worse, made life easier. It may not be that obvious today, but it’s still around and it’s a very social phenomenon.

The legacy of ethnic hierarchies permeates American and pop culture to this day. Eurocentric models sell clothes and products. The Barbie doll aesthetic is ubiquitous in music and movies. Beyonce undoubtedly makes millions from her numerous advertising endorsements in which she is designed to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Having long, shiny blonde hair is critical to this appeal and critical to your bank account. You can define your ethnicity as multi-ethnic and therefore it is not fair to label you as someone who rejects your heritage. However, his visual appearance, at least in his public life, would suggest that he identifies much more with one of his ethnic heritages more than with the others.

The Eurocentric media that have been ubiquitous in America, of course, are changing to accommodate the growing diversity in American society. With more and more people identifying as multi-ethnic and celebrating their diversity, advertisers and pop culture are beginning to represent this. But until such time as all hair types, skin tones, and features are perceived as equally beautiful in pop culture, the melting pot will be nothing more than a misrepresentation of a society that is still obsessed with race.

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