Hair as a Race Metaphor

Ifemelu realizes that naturally kinky hair is a subject worth blogging about. She notices that Michelle Obama and Beyoncé never appear in public with natural hair. Why not? “Because, you see, it’s not professional, sophisticated, whatever, it’s just not damn normal” (299). Read the blog post “A Michelle Obama Shout-Out Plus Hair as Race Metaphor” (299–300), and discuss why hair is a useful way of examining race and culture.

Hair is oftentimes an important identifying feature about someone, as it is the frame to the face. How it is styled can stand as testament to a person’s personality or style. However, Ifemelu realizes throughout the course of Americana by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie that the hairstyles of many prominent black women in popular culture areas ranging from politics to music have been suffocated to resemble the tame, smooth hair of a “beautiful” white woman as closely as possible. It seems that beauty can be a promoter of success and achievement in many cultures, including Nigeria. On page 483, Aunty Onenu tells Ifemelu, “‘You are a pretty girl’… as though being pretty were needed for the job” (Adichie). Beauty standards differ by culture though. For successful black women in America, it may feel like a requirement to assimilate to the looks of a white person in America to be accepted and promoted.

The issue of natural hair being unaccepted speaks to a larger issue of race and assimilation within the US and other Westernized countries. The ideas projected in Western media as “beautiful” showcase a very limited spectrum of skin colors, hair types and racial backgrounds. Ifemelu discusses this problem with Curt on pages 364-366, noting that out of “maybe two thousand pages of women’s magazines… Not one of [the models] is dark” (Adichie). None of the beauty products for hair or makeup cater to her color or hair type, so Ifemelu explains that specifically black magazines like Essence are necessary for black women to have any applicable beauty cues at all.

When the media only caters to whites in America and those with light skin, it reflects the racist and condescending attitudes towards blacks. The magazines send signals on how women can work with the looks they have to enhance them to become more beautiful. However, this poses ultimatum for blacks and other people outside the pale scale of beauty depicted: conform or remain an outsider. Seeing naturally kinky hair as “not damn normal” (Adichie, 367) may seem absurd if the same standard were applied to a white woman with any type of hair – thin, voluminous, curly or straight. Ifemelu faces this issue on page 252 when applying for a job. She explains to Curt, after showing him the injuries caused by the relaxer, “Professional means straight is best but if it’s going to be curly then it has to be the white kind of curly, loose curls or, at worst, spiral curls but never kinky” (Adichie). She is then recommended to visit HappilyKinkyNappy.com and finds inspiration from other women proudly wearing their naturally kinky hair (Adichie, 259). For those with kinky hair, natural photos are oftentimes associated with ugliness and alienate black women from conventional beauty standards. However, when Ifemelu takes the stand to wear her hair naturally and sees other women doing it too, it parallels her ending the American accent or joining ASA: she reclaims her identity and stands up against the forces suppressing her natural beauty.