This is a topic I've wanted to speak about for a while, but have been hesitant whether to write a blog post on what might seem trivial to some people. However, I felt this was even more of a reason to explain why it has had such a big impact on me. For me and many others with African heritage, hair is not just hair. It’s both part of our cultural identity and a source of racial discrimination.
In 2021 a report by Censuswide showed that 93% of Black people in the UK have faced microaggressions related to their Afro hair. I remember reading about the pencil test which was carried out during the apartheid in South Africa as a way to determine racial identity. This involved sliding a pencil in the hair of a person whose racial group was uncertain. If the pencil fell to the floor, the person "passed" and was considered “white.” If it stuck, the person's hair was considered too curly to be white and the person was classified as “colored.”
I am mixed race or “colored” according to the test above, and have naturally afro-textured hair. Growing up in a white middle-class area there weren’t a lot of people with afro hair in my community. I very quickly started to feel negatively about my hair, and how others perceived it. On the school playground, a well-meaning parent asked my mum how she had found the adoption process. When I’d go to my local hairdresser, I’d watch their facial expressions as they wondered how to cut it. It didn’t take me long to realise straightening my hair was a sure-fire way to blend in with the crowd, as I think many of us long for as children. When I was 16, I got into amateur dramatics, suddenly I didn’t feel the need to fit in. Standing out was actually celebrated! For the first time in years, I felt ready to embrace my natural hair again.
But then I started to hear: “Can I touch it?” The four words most people with afro hair are familiar with. I hoped after a while the comments would stop, but it felt so much easier to go back to my old habits of straightening which is how I have styled my hair pretty consistently for the last 10 years.
Recently afro hair has become a bigger topic of conversation in mainstream media. In 2022 Fina approved a swimming cap designed for athletes with natural afro hair, a year after it was banned from the Olympic Games. More celebrities have also started embracing natural texture which has helped me to finally start wearing my hair naturally again after so many years. I've had a mixture of good and bad experiences since then. Two years ago at my previous job, a colleague I was friendly with asked if she could touch my hair. I didn’t have it in me to tell her no, but inside I felt a deep sadness. Later, we had a difficult but constructive conversation around why it wasn’t okay to ask that. I also received comments from well-meaning and curious people: “But how do you get it like that?” “Why don’t you wear it like that more?” “What do you do when you go on holiday?” These questions themselves aren’t negative, and often come from a lack of awareness, but provided a further reminder of feeling “other.”
I’m still very much on a journey with my hair, but more representation over the last few years has made such a difference, as well as inspiring content around Black History Month. Last month the World Afro Day (WAD) campaign wrote an open letter to MPs, encouraging them to make afro hair a protected characteristic.
Wearing my hair naturally has allowed me to connect with my heritage in new ways, and it’s always really special for me to be recognised for my identity after years of most people guessing I'm Māori, Columbian, Egyptian, or Arabic (to name a few). I’m actually a mix of English, Chinese and Nigerian heritage, but with my hair straight people tend not to guess I have African roots.