Some good hair links
Apr 29, 2005 Adoption, Feminism/Politics
I’m putting these in two blog categories — “adoption” for those who read my archives because they are thinking of adopting cross-culturally and “feminism” because the personal is always political. I’m hoping this shows that this is an ongoing discussion within the Black community. What’s important to realize is that while there is a variety of opinions about hair, it’s clear that hair really does matter.
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Someone with better info will have to help here
Apr 29, 2005 Adoption
Purpleeaster wrote:
Can I side with your liberal white friends here (a little bit)? I think where you’re going a bit wrong is the assumption that there’s a monolithic Black view. There can’t be. I’m Indian, and I know there isn’t a monolithic Indian view (though there are views whose mean is different from the mean White view). You’re white, and you certainly know there’s no monlothic White view.I’m actually often irritated by self-conscious liberal whites who want to be oh so culturally sensitive about my beliefs (and more specifically, when they are culturally sensitive about the beliefs they assume I have, rather than the ones I really have).
This was actually a frustration I had with the book that inspired my posts about Maddie’s hair. (Inside Transracial Adoption) There’s a lot of this: “Black people do things this way. Asian Americans do things that way.” Aren’t these stereotypes? How do we white people understand how to be discerning about the information we get about our non-white children’s birth cultures?
And how much of that birth culture can we take on before we become ridiculous? (I’m thinking of a white classmate of mine in college who liked rap a lot so he started using Black slang and wearing a kente cloth hat.) How do we share it with her and still be respectful?
I don’t know. But I included that last paragraph specifically because I’m asking for input from other people of color.
And I really need someone from the African American community who is willing to comment either here or on their blog (and leave a trackback or their url) to explain a little bit why hair is important or else take me to task for getting it wrong.
(By the way, someone said in a comment that they felt the people who admonished my friend for doing her daughter’s hair incorrectly were being rude. Let me be more clear about that: They did not march up to her and rudely tell her that her daughter’s hair was a mess. They took her aside and told her it was something that she had to learn because it was important. My impression — from when my friend told me this when we were first thinking of adopting — was that these women were concerned for her daughter and were trying to lovingly share information they felt my friend did not yet have.)
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Tags: Erica, transracial
We are all a little cranky
Apr 28, 2005 The Story of My Life
On Tuesday, we had our cabinets delivered. Tuesday was not a good day for it so we decided to reschedule but it turns out that when the big box home improvement store told us we could choose the day of delivery, this is only true if the day you choose happens to be the day they want to deliver it and so when we called to reschedule they pretty much laughed at us.
Tuesday the boxes arrived and the particularly big one they had to leave outside under a tarp because we don’t have a garage and they couldn’t get it in the door we left open for them (since we couldn’t be here). Brett put it in the back of the van instead. Wednesday the contractors came to count the boxes and make sure everything was in good shape (all but the corner unit since that was in the van and Brett takes the van to work).
As they were leaving they said, “So we’ll be here tomorrow to put it all in!”
“Ha ha,” I said. “You guys are pretty funny.”
“We are funny,” they answered. “But we’re totally serious. Think you could squeeze us in? Or else we could come back in a week.”
I know my husband and I knew he’d say yes but I told them I would have him call and when he did call, he of course said yes. My husband, he’s insane. You’ll see why in a minute.
To save money, Brett committed to tearing out our old kitchen — cabinets and countertops — so he had to do that and we were supposed to have two major appliances that we didn’t yet have. What this meant is that last night he went back to the big box home improvement store, bought the two appliances, moved everything out of the cabinets to the basement, tore out the cabinets, tore out the countertops (that was really noisy), yanked out the sink, pulled up the flooring where the cabinets would go (the original laminate from 1961), moved the debris out, moved the enormous corner unit from the van to the demolished kitchen, and moved the two appliances in (one of which clearly stated, “Do Not Move Alone — Serious Back or Other Injury Could Result”).
I sat on the floor in the hallway (since he also took apart and removed the kitchen table) typing up a book review, cleaning up some work messes and listening in case all of the banging, cursing and chaos woke either child.
I slept rather well, by the way, but Brett was too jazzed up to come to bed until sometime after 4am; he has to be at work by 8am this week.
The guys showed up after 9am but we weren’t here to greet them. I decided that we’d have to hustle out the door and give them room to work. I had the cell phone with me in case they had questions only I don’t actually know how to work this new cell phone so when they called, I juggled the phone around, pushing a lot of buttons and missed the call. Oh and I don’t know how to check voicemail. So back home we came (a little after noon) for some minor question to which I guessed the answer seeing as how I’m not the one who’s going to put the flooring in (ambitious Brett is going to do that, too, as well as the painting and changing out the ceiling fan). Then I took the kids back to the big bedroom where we scarfed down some barely nutritious lunch and I checked my email in case some other work mess was building while the baby pulled all of the clean laundry out of the dresser as is her wont.
Luckily work was fine however Noah was not because Peanut was in her crate and whining to come out and harass the seven men in our very small kitchen. Noah began to cry and told me he felt he was not being a good owner to her and that the whole thing made him feel guilty and depressed so I gathered him and Madison up and we went to the park, stopping on the way so he could buy some licorice.
(We stopped at one of the two convenience stores by us. They are little better than a Kwik-e-Mart except that neither are franchises. Noah came out smiling and said, “That’s the kind of place where everybody knows your name!” Apparently the guy behind the counter was very nice.)
Lots of other inconvenient but not major things happened, too, and more questions to which I guessed the answers. (”I don’t know,” I finally said. “But you probably know because you’re the professionals so why don’t you tell me what you want to do and why I should want you to do it.”) But now the cabinets are in and it’s a vast improvement. The problem is, however, that I pretty much hate change to my environment even when the change is positive. That’s just how I am. Brett knows this is how I am. I know this is how I am. But neither of us is ever quite prepared for how easily I come unglued when we make major change happen. For example, I have twice the cupboard space now. And twice the counter space. This remodel is a good thing. But I sat in the middle of the floor and cried because I felt homesick for my old, awful, ugly kitchen with too little space because at least then I knew where everything went and I didn’t have to think about it.
It will take 2 to 4 weeks to get counter tops so Brett will put plywood up top until we get that. We also have to get hardware for the cabinets. The sink isn’t back in yet and the dishwasher isn’t hooked up. Brett said maybe tomorrow night when he’s feeling better. We still have to pick out flooring and we can’t think of a color for the walls that we like. And there’s that fan that needs replacing.
I’m sure it will all be worth it when it’s over if I don’t go nuts by then.
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This is why I’m jealous of Becca
Apr 28, 2005 Read/heard/seen
Not Quite Sure: Cranky Mom and Reading Girl
Not the cranky part — I have that covered. But M. is just one of my favorite small people to get into a nice discussion about books. Even though our last talk exposed my incorrect belief that Noel Streatfield was a man (Noel can be a man’s name, she adds defensively). I don’t know why I thought this but I was sure. I can’t even blame it on being young because I discovered those books in my twenties.
By the way, Becca, have M. click that link: Noel wrote a lot of shoes books!!
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Tags: Becca
Speaking of hair
Apr 27, 2005 Adoption, Parenting, Race
I wanted to talk more about the argument I got in a couple of months ago with a couple of liberal white friends about Madison’s hair. Now this my side of things so take it with a grain of salt. I could be sorely misrepresenting my friends’ points; bear that in mind.
It was after a potluck at my house and I was saying that it is my understanding that you do not cut a little Black girl’s hair, that this is just Not Done. And I was saying this because we were talking about the care and maintenance of Black hair and one of my friend’s said, “Well, you can always cut it short.” And I said that no, that wasn’t really a solution because I didn’t want Madison to have to deal with people’s reactions to that.
So then we were talking about the friend I mentioned in the entry below who is Brazilian/Venezuelan and who has a Black daughter by birth. It took awhile for my friend to figure out how to do her daughter’s hair and while they were learning, Black women at the mall would frequently come up and admonish her.
My friends felt this was rude. I said they were doing my friend a favor because she (my friend) didn’t know how important proper hair care was in the Black community and she needed to know this.
I don’t think that any white person (including me, obviously) can really appreciate how important hair is in the Black community. We can kinda learn it, kinda parrot back what we hear but we cannot know the depth of feeling around hair. We just can’t. If a Black person tells me that I’m doing Madison’s hair wrong, I’m going to believe them, period.
This is when things got dicey. My friends (good liberals, seriously, they fight the good fight) said that first off, Madison was going to get a pass from people because I am white. (Bullshit.) And that also, Madison is half-white, too, and so why do I have to kowtow to the Black community. (Because she is African American even with her light skin and currently soft curls.)
Here is why (I have been told by a woman I used to work with and by J) you don’t cut little Black girl’s hair: By cutting her hair, you’re telling the world that she’s not worth the trouble it would take to do her hair.
Now I’m not talking about a child who is old enough to make up her mind about her hair — that’s different. If Madison is old enough that she is understanding the importance of hair, which she will likely really understand later than a child growing up in a black family, and she wants short hair then we’ll put that on the table. But I’m talking about when Madison is so little that I’m making the decisions. My friends brought up a story about an African American friend of ours who stood up to a Black woman about not cutting his own hair. She had said to him, “You need to represent us better than that.” He said, “I expect people to respect me for who I am and not for the way my hair looks.” But this is a grown man who has made that decision. I’m talking about a little girl who needs people to smile at her as she runs through the aisles at the grocery store or looks at picture books at the library.
Also, I think it’s totally different (obviously) when an African American parent makes a choice that goes against cultural assumptions about hair. I’m going blind here and I’d rather err on the side of caution.
I’m not sure why my friends didn’t get it; maybe I didn’t explain it well. (I was getting choked up at the end because, you know, failing my daughter is something that scares me an awful lot.) They said it’s the same thing as a (white) person who lets their child dye their hair blue with Manic Panic (something that would not turn heads in our crunchy granola world but might turn heads out of it). But it’s totally different. A white child is growing up with white privilege and it may be hard to think about privilege when we’re looking at a powerless child, but trust me, if Noah acted up at the store, he is unlikely to get the same dirty looks that a Black boy his same age would get. Noah has privilege. Madison (and god, I hate writing this) does not have that same privilege. Madison will be held to a higher standard and not just by white people. Understand, however, that Black people will hold her to a higher standard because they understand that their children (that my child) do not have privilege and if those children (if my child) don’t grow up with a grasp of that reality, they could be in danger.
And hair is part of this.
Listen, I love little girls with short hair but as long as I’m making decisions for Madison, I won’t cut it.
Because I’ve heard about the horrors of combing out a tender-headed child’s hair, if Madison’s hair required a lot of care, I’d likely look into locking it. But already we sit down and brush her hair every morning to get her used to sitting in my lap and having her hair lovingly cared for. We do this with a soft brush and we (Noah likes to help) fuss over her prettiness. So far she loves it and I hope by the time her hair is more work, she’ll at least associate that time with our adoration.
