"Why Do Black Women Often Criticize Natural Hair Choices, Are They Hypocrites?"

What was the point of doing the big chop if you never let anyone see your hair in its natural state? Answer quickly

“4C hair is ugly; 4C hair is too difficult to manage; 4C hair could never”. Shut up, shut up, shut uppppp! The self-hate is so loud. Your 4C hair may be ugly but not mine. I fear my people will never be free.

Can someone please tell me what makes type 4 hair ugly? Because I have never seen a justifiable reason for the hatred. Yes, it can be difficult to manage but no hair type is easy to operate, everyone wakes up in the morning and has to do something to their hair to look presentable before they leave their house. Maybe your hair might not be the longest in the world, but short hair doesn’t equate ugliness and long hair isn’t the pinnacle of beauty. 

Type 4 hair is viewed as ugly because it’s the furthest away from being white. That’s why you can handle type 3 hair in the black community but cry and scream about type 4 hair. You want to be white so badly and it’s painful to see. You claim to love being black but hate the features that are unique to blackness, type 4 curls being one of them (and don’t you dare say white people can have type 4 hair because it is so very rare, the closest thing you will see is a white person with type 3 curls). When will we stop holding ourselves (black people) to this Eurocentric beauty standard when we were born with Afrocentric features?

Don’t get it twisted, I love protective hairstyles as much as the next person, I am a self-proclaimed box braids warrior but quick question, what are you really protecting, your curls or your proximity to whiteness? Are you wearing that protective style because you’re giving your hair a break or because you’re scared people are going to find you ugly? 

Also, can we stop this conversation that natural hair and braids aren’t classy. You can wear natural hair to the club, you can wear your box braids to a wedding, you can wear the hair that grows from your roots anywhere! So straight hair is classy but afro hair is classless, it’s giving racist. 

As someone who has been natural for 8 years now, I know it can be scary to wear your natural hair out, I also get frustrated when it’s raining and my hair shrinks, and sometimes I feel like everyone is staring at me when I’ve got a big afro on my head, but no one can or will ever convince me that the hair that comes from my roots is ugly. 

My type 4 hair is beautiful not only because it comes from me but because it comes from my mother, and my mother’s mother and my mother’s mother’s mother etc. My hair shows my ancestry. My hair shows where I come from, I don’t need a DNA test to prove that I’m 100% Nigerian, the tight coils I inherited were once used by my ancestors to protect them from the harsh African sun. My hair is unique to me and it belongs to me and so it is beautiful. Even when it’s hard to detangle, and the rain is making it shrink and especially when there are no defined curls. 

And your type 4 hair is beautiful because it comes from you and it is a symbol of black beauty. I know type 4 hair can be ‘difficult’ to style at first, especially as a lot of us were raised using relaxers in our hair and our parents might not have taught us how to style our natural hair, but there are so many great resources on TikTok and YouTube teaching us how to style and grow our natural hair. But if you keep hiding from your hair, you will never learn how to ‘manage’ it. 

( printed in colour team)

This harmful rhetoric that natural hair is ugly is so dangerous that we’re starting to see an increase in the use of relaxers and black women promoting the use of relaxers. In case you didn't know relaxers can result in fertility issues, breast cancer and hormone imbalance just to name a few harmful side effects. Not only that, we’re seeing the younger generation (who are unfortunately online at such a young age) begin to develop self-hatred for their hair. It just breaks my heart to see that a lot of us only view ourselves as beautiful with straight European-like hair.

Learning to love your hair is the first step to decentring this ideology that straight hair or looser curls are more attractive than kinkier curls. It’s the first step to removing this idea that Europeans are the pinnacle of beauty. Have pride in your black hair and your black features, it is a beautiful thing to look unambiguously black, embrace it and appreciate it. Thank you, goodbye.

Printed by Joan