Strange

Nappy Hair is Beautiful

by Actual News Geezer | April 10, 2007 at 01:32 pm

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I was fretting about how to do this story - I kept remembering those days in the '60's when the slogan, "Black is beautiful" was both a statement of defiance and point of pride. But how do you deal with the invective "nappy-headed ho's" that spewed from the mouth of Don Imus?

The HuffPo version was a nice little headline, In Praise of Nappy Hair.

Comedian/writer Elayne Boosler deftly takes a clip from a NY Times story back in 1998 about a teacher who was suspended for using a book in her class called "Nappy Hair".

A well-intentioned third-grade teacher, who happens to be white, gave her mostly black and Hispanic students a critically praised book (winner of a Parenting Reading Magic Award)
about a black girl with kinky hair. "Nappy Hair" is about a young heroine who celebrates that which makes her special.

So I am wondering: for those of us who grew up with nappy hair (I was called Brillo Pad" in my elementary school back in Grand Junction, Colorado in the 1950's), how do we process this latest hirsutical insult?

My nappy hair was not beautiful and black, but brown and very Jewish.

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nappyco

at 05:40 on April 12th, 2007

Nappy is not an insult.

We have to lovingly rescue nappy from negative imagery. It is a term that should mean fuzzy or tightly curled, like when you think of the nap of a soft fuzzy sweater. People prefer to use kinky, which sounds more technically problematic rather than physically descriptive.

Nappy has negative imagery because in the 1800's Europeans used the term to compare black hair to that of sheep or animals. And thus, proof that blacks were less than human because of their animal hair.

So I think that when someone cringes when they here the word Nappy, they are thinking of the negative fantasy created by a racist society, rather than the actual definition that offers a physical description.

So what we are doing now is saving Nappy and defining our beauty through our own eyes, something much closer to reality.

bicyclette

at 08:59 on April 12th, 2007

I agree. It's not the "nappy", it's the "ho"s, that burns me up.

Jordan Yerman

at 10:27 on April 22nd, 2007

We should celebrate our kinks! ... You know what I mean. A friend of mine in school had extremely kinked-out hair, and he was white. He wore it big to the point of having trouble getting his shirts on, and called it his "Jew-fro" or his "Isro". I actually got quite jealous, because my own hair is straight and flat; during my long-hair days I looked like a wet otter. During my forays into Durban's nightlife, I saw some stunning celebrations of big hair: you simply have not lived until you witness a six-foot Zulu queen in a vinyl miniskirt with a huge head of hair! I'm not saying that from some weird post-colonial mindset, but just that I thought it was really, really beautiful.

Karen Hatter

at 10:39 on April 22nd, 2007

Thank you for the posts! It wasn't the adjective, 'nappy headed', but the noun, 'hos', that was offensive in the comment made! I've got over 100 three foot long locks flowing down my back. You can't get anymore nappy headed than that and I'm not offended being called nappy headed!