“Gracie wore her natural hair and the white people are losing their minds,” read the caption on a video that went viral over the weekend. In the video there is an African (black) woman surrounded by three white people as they ogled and raked their fingers through her natural hair.
The black woman in the video, Gracie, stood smiling as her hair was being touched — petted like some kind of zoo animal — by two white women and a white man. This is perhaps the first time that Gracie has worn her natural hair to the office and the white people in the video, filled with curiosity, take it upon themselves to get acquainted with her coils.
This caused a social media uproar as many African people expressed frustration, anger and disappointment with the video. And rightfully so! We should be disgusted by the flagrant display of white entitlement, white arrogance and fetishization in the video. Here’s why.
Africans have a historically oppressive relationship with white people
The historical relationship that African people have with white people is violent and oppressive. African people have lived a horrific reality at the hands of white people in every way possible. From the moment we were stolen from Africa and forcibly enslaved on plantations, African people (men and women) were forced by white people (men and women) to have our haircut and shaved at their whims. We no longer had autonomy over the thing that grew out of our heads that often had various social and cultural meanings.
African women were forced to wear headwraps as white women feared that wearing our hair would tempt their white men to cheat on them. White people also imposed anti-African ideas of self hate on us, telling us that our African hair is not beautiful.
The white world has historically controlled African people’s bodies and hair. These ideas have been passed down to the modern world to the extent that even Gracie only recently found the courage to wear the hair that grows naturally out of her scalp to work.
It’s important for us to understand this history and have it guide our views about how we allow white people to interact with our hair. Frankly, white people do not get to touch our hair because of the historical work that the white nation has done to take control over our hair and cause us to hate our hair.
White people are basically the police
White people function as an extension of the oppressive colonial State. Regular white people act as the police when the police aren’t there, even in the workplace. They are given the right by the colonial government to interrogate us on things that have nothing to do with them. They get to deny us entry into our own apartments and assist the police in detaining us.
White people are given the right by the colonial government to police African people’s bodies including our hair. Which is why white teachers can kick an African student out of class for having braids. Or why a white teacher thinks she has the right to cut an African child’s plaits off during class. Or why African women can be fired for wearing their natural hair.
“But white people are just curious”
There are some black people who would excuse white people for petting African people’s hair by saying that they are just “curious.” Yes, white people are curious when they see our hair reaching towards the sky because they are curious about what they never had to see up close before.
It’s important to understand the material basis for thinking that there’s nothing wrong with white people touching our hair. And that material basis is colonialism. African people are colonized to think that being objectified and fetishized by our oppressors is ok.
Even if Gracie gave her coworkers permission to run their more-than-likely unwashed hands through her hair, that consent is rooted in the oppressive history of colonized African women attempting to navigate having natural hair at her job.
The question here is one of power. Did this black woman have the power to say no or even to say no unless you wash your hands?
White people have power over African people and we need to understand this and make a struggle for real black power and black self determination.
White people are subjects of history while African people are objects of history
Given this colonial relationship that we have with white people who have always been subjects of history while we have always been objects of history, white people were able to define reality and the oppressed have never been visible to them.
Colonialism has forced Gracie and many black women to hide our African hair. White people didn’t need to ask why their servants or employees wore bonnets or why they engage in self mutilation by straightening their hair, or why they wear a wig to hide their hair because white people only had to see the oppressed on their terms — as objects to be used.
On the other hand, Africans and other oppressed people have always had an intimate relationship with whiteness, figuratively and literally, where the whims of a white person could mean life or death, eating or not eating, having a job or being unemployed. As a result, whiteness is a subject that Africans and other oppressed people had to study.
Natural hair is form of resistance
With the crisis of imperialism, where oppressed people are rising up and struggling to free ourselves from this colonial relationship to become self-determined subjects of history, we see imperialism on its deathbed. The State has had to open up the status quo as to what is acceptable when it comes to African people in an attempt to save the system.
One form of this resistance is the natural hair movement that has forced Karens and Kyles to deal with us how we are. We saw this in the 60s and 70s with black people rocking afros until counterinsurgency.
White people are being forced to see an African identity born out of resistance. This is why states like California and other jurisidictions around the US now protect Africans from discrimination for wearing our hair in its natural form. This is a concession that imperialism must make to attempt to stop the unraveling of this system, to bring more natural-haired sistas or dreadlocked brothas into the bosom of this oppressive system that historically would have locked them out just for the act of wearing their hair as they liked.
In our fight for self determination, we must rid our hair from oppressive foreign chemicals that distort our Africanness and as a nation we must also rid our communities of the foreign objects that pollute our community and prevent our liberation.