Hair length has been considered a status symbol in the black community for years. This is an undeniable truth that we cannot shake, no matter how hard we try.
The videos circulating in the scene about length checks and hair growth hacks for relaxed and natural hair are just a few of many digital reminders that black women, like in many other cultures and communities, have been conditioned to equate hair length with femininity and beauty.
For some reason, people inside and outside of our community seem to feel compelled to reinforce the narrative that we black women have a unique obsession with the length of our hair.
This is evident in the replies to Sexyy Red’s questionable post about her natural hair or in completely unrelated Twitter discourse. Not even Beyoncé and mom Tina are exempt from the dialogue surrounding this perceived “obsession” with length.
Not only is this line of thinking factually incorrect, it’s harmful. By creating the impression that Black women developed an unhealthy obsession with length out of nowhere, it suggests that we are inherently vain and ignore years of systemic racism that has valued proximity to whiteness above all else.
Black hair types have more curl and curl, which affects how oil flows through our hair shaft, making us more prone to dryness and breakage. So rather than just being a physical indicator, as it is with other races, hair length also indicates some continuity to whiteness.
Long hair is not a “white” trait, but nothing exists in a vacuum, and we cannot pretend that this does not impact beauty standards within the black community.
By pretending that it is black women who enforce and uphold these standards, we suppress any real progress toward a productive dialogue that could help us shed the suffocating skin of Western beauty ideals.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to have healthy, thick or long hair, and there is nothing wrong with exploring what internalized behaviors lead us to ascribe to certain beauty ideals.
The problem arises when we make false equations and act as if all our things exist in isolation.
These ideals of beauty did not fall from the sky and our ideals undoubtedly exist in the context of everything we live and what came before us.
