My Hair Experience: Intertwining Braids with Identity
- Girl Up Edmonton
- Sep 30, 2023
- 3 min read
“Hair brings one’s self-image into focus; it is vanity’s proving ground. Hair is terribly personal, a tangle of mysterious prejudices.” ― Shana Alexander
Written by Kaitlyn de Boda
It’s not uncommon to hear hair referred to as your ‘natural crown’ within the Black community.
I’ve lived with this understanding since I was a young girl getting my hair styled by my mother. (This was a ritualized occurrence in my house of three daughters, where my Jamaican mother was implicitly assigned the role of hair keeping in lieu of my Caucasian father.)
To many Black women, their hair may represent concepts from femininity and creativity, to resistance and survival. These rich and highly complex connotations haven’t gone past me either; I see my hair as a major component to my identity.
Ask any of my acquaintances to provide a description of me and I guarantee my hair will be one of the first characteristics to come up. My biraciality has privileged me to have puffy, curly hair (3a/3b curl type for you connoisseurs), which I admittedly take great pride in. Despite once wishing I had straight hair that I could run my fingers through, I now see my natural hair as symbolic of my growing femininity and unique ancestry.
All of which made the seemingly simple task of altering my hairstyle amount to an identity-crisis when I decided to get braids.
I’ve been secretly wanting to get braided (Fulani) extensions going on 6 years but continuously held off due to my own insecurities. I was getting tired of my current look (and more so the maintenance), however I quickly began overthinking the change in aesthetic. Worries I had include: am I Black enough to wear my hair like this? What if it makes me look masculine, or worse, ugly? What will people think of me when they see my braids?
While all aforementioned anxieties deserve scrutiny, I’d like to focus on the concern of how others would perceive me; after all if I identify with the appearance of my hair, who would I be once it’s changed?
As much as we’d like to claim appearances don’t matter, reality rudely shatters this illusion. In practice, women are judged more than men for their appearance in various spheres of life,* which I believe has the potential to drastically alter their circumstances. And as expected, appearance-based judgments are intensified when referring to women of colour. I recommend Dr. Janice Gassam Asare’s article in Harvard Business Review, titled “How Hair Discrimination Affects Black Women at Work '' that elaborates on this.**
Immersed in this logic, I was justifiably worried about what those around me would think. The first time I got my hair braided in cornrows as a teenager, a close Caucasian relative joked that I looked like ‘a gangster’. If someone I trusted said that, I wondered what would customers think of me at my front-facing job? Would my boss make a similar comment about my change in appearance? Would I be the butt of the joke during my shift, with my naive coworkers quipping about “the ghetto” or how I’ve “turned completely Black”?
Retroactively I’m happy to say that all my worries were speculative. While I have
no way of knowing what passerbyers thought of me (if they even cared at all), all the interactions I received with my braids were positive. At work, people were complimentary. I even had a tough-looking biker approach me at a pit stop on the QE2 who respectfully asked me how long the braiding process took. In hindsight I chide myself over the irony of it all; I had a preconception that others were going to respond to my braids with prejudice, only to find my own speculations to be unfounded.
Though I only kept my braids in for a month, I’m glad that I eventually overcame the weight of hair politics. From inquiring about a good local braider, to buying the extensions, and meeting my hairstylist, this experience has allowed me to take part in a loving community that goes unrecognized by Canadian society. I suppose the virtue of having your identity challenged is that you emerge from the situation reassured of how you perceive yourself.
* From Cultural concepts of gender and age and the attitudes of women and men towards their health and appearance (2017) by Ewa Malinowska et al. https://scienceinpoland.pl/en/news/news%2C28321%2Csociologist-women-judged-more-their-looks-various-spheres-life.html
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