Is Black Beautiful?

Ugly Duckling

“What was that?” Thea’s mother inquired after she finished her speech at the 1989 General Baptist State Convention Oratorical Contest – a contest that gives young Christians the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their intellectual thinking and oral presentation skills following Christian themes. Thea herself didn’t know what had come out of her mouth. She thought she was well prepared for this State competition: she was simply going to repeat the same speech she had been using at all the previous Oratorical Contests – the same one as at the Contest at her First Baptist Church in West Charlotte, where it all began, through the two other contests she won and that led her here to the State competition. But here, in this 10,000-seat arena, she completely blacked out and her mind went blank. She could not remember her speech. After regaining herself somewhat, as if in a trance, she completely improvised a speech.

And her speech rocked. It had a flow and it was infused with countless Bible Quotes that made the Christian audience nod in approval. The judges were mesmerized by this petite girl, who had powerful lungs, a strong voice, a fearless mind, and an unwavering Biblical message! Although her body did not carry the weight to offer a sermon-like intonation of the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr., and although the selection of certain words and her pronunciation made her “sound white”, she won the State competition and a $2,500 scholarship for a black college!

Her knees were shaking from the size of the venue, the thin air that her oratorical speech seemed to have come from, and the delirium of victory - especially since she didn’t believe much of the Bible quotes she was using. But she was not surprised that she won - she loved this competition! She loved having a microphone, she loved challenging thoughts, she loved carrying them over to others. As of a young age, this activity of public speaking empowered her. It took her intellect to places she loved to be.

She was an ambitious teenager. With this title under her belt, she knew she would love to be a TV reporter. But there was one problem: she was ugly. She had a big nose, her skin was too dark and, worst of all, her hair was too nappy. She would never be a TV reporter.

Thea at 18 with Wave Nuveau Perm

Since she could remember, she envied her lighter skinned cousins, the slender noses of her aunts, and especially the curly hair of her own mother. Every morning her mother reminded her that she had “bad hair” after combing – or trying to comb - through it to try to make it look “respectable”, of which the result was usually just a bunch of ripped out hair. Her mother would typically resort to decorating her hair with a dozen plaits, so Thea would at least be identified as a girl. She had the worst type of nappy hair.

The whole family, the entire black community was under pressure to abide by white Western norms of beauty and worked hard every day to make themselves look “respectable”. The black community had to overcome all the stigmas related to once being primitive slaves, they had to overcome any stigmas of – God forbid!- indecencies related to the civil rights movement, they had to overcome all current stigmas of being the lower class smooching off the government or landing in jail. They needed and wanted to show the world their decency. Appearance mattered. Nice clothes, clean smells, and made-up hair mattered. Thea felt the pressure especially hard, because she got the short stick when it came to hair that could be made respectable and play her part in showing the world how decent the black community was.

Her hair curls up into tiny little coils.  In addition, she has lots of hair and the strands are fine. So while others who have thick nappy hair can straighten it with hot irons or chemicals, doing any of those treatments leads her fine hair to fall out and/or her scalp to burn.

Her mother has lighter skin and curly hair, curly hair that is very workable. Her mother’s family descends from slaves and white slave owners. Rape of black female slaves by white male slave owners was common to procreate more slaves at no extra cost– a person born from a female slave and a white slave owner was still just the slave of that white slave owner. Thea’s family in Lincolnton County, North Carolina, is a result of that practice and it can be seen in hair and skin tone.  

Her mother took her to the hair salon at age six for the first time and then regularly for special occasions, such as Christmas and Easter. Thea endured hour-long sessions where they worked on a concoction of straightening out her hair with a hot comb and slobbering pomade on it to avoid it getting nappy again. After those torturous beauty salon treatments, as a young and conscientious six year-old, she would take a shower cap with her everywhere to keep any potential rain from destroying the effort. Also, she was tired of being labeled “tender headed” by her mother and hairdressers, because she whimpered from the pain of all the work on her kinky, bountiful and fine hair –so she did anything to avoid treatments.

Thea at 4 with plaits

Thea knew from an early age on that she had a healthy intellect. She excelled at school, she sought academic competitions, she challenged the church preachings whenever she felt like it. All those empowering and liberating activities, however, were dampened by the constant reminder that she was black, that she looked black and that she could not hide it, especially with her “unrespectable” hair that was so hard “to tame”.

As a teenager, and aware that she was a gifted student, Thea fought to find herself the best education the system could offer. While navigating a complex system all alone as a teenager was a monumental task, maintaining respectable hair was considered the norm, although that actually took a much more monumental effort than navigation schooling options!

Thea at 11 with hot-combed hair

It was considered acceptable by 12 to use heavy duty chemicals on your hair. Starting age twelve, every six weeks, Thea went to a hair salon to have chemical relaxers applied to her hair to take the nappiness out. The chemicals used are as strong as the drain cleaner, Drano, and resulted in bald spots on her scalp that she covered by herself at home with pomades.  In her teens, she also tried fashionable perms – at that time there was the Jheril Curl, which was greasy. That style also broke her hair off.

Thea at 13 with Jheril Curl Perm

From the grooming perspective, during her teens, Thea was caught in an ongoing battle of alternating relaxing her hair with chemicals and getting a greasy perm, which both lead to breaking hair. After each new style, she would have to let her hair grow out “virgin”, which gave her a head of hair with two textures. She would camouflage her virgin hair by having a stylist hot-comb the growing-in hair. Ideally, she would have just cut her hair short, but that would just make her “unrespectable” and possibly a laughing stock…

In college, with no money, a high respectability-curb with academic peers, and declining desire for chemicals and hours of treatment, she decided to buy wigs. She cut her hair short and bought wigs on mail order. It worked well and was easy, so she kept the wig solution as she started her professional life.

Thea at 21 wearing a wig

One day, after she had established herself as a serious professional and had good relationships with her colleagues, she decided to go work without a wig on and just let her hair be natural. It still meant she had to put in a serious amount of hair preparation: twisting and untwisting her hair, and applying products.  It was a big risk, but she felt confident enough to take it. She walked into her office and immediately, a colleague commented that she looked like a “pick a ninny” – an insulting term for “little black child”. She felt humiliated and immediately reverted to wearing wigs.

In her late twenties, she tired of wigs and she went one last time to straighten her hair into a bob. She also briefly tried a bun. Then, after the straightened and bobbed hair broke off, she went for a totally new look and tried microbraids, made from braided natural hair, which took hours to put in, cost a fortune, and if put in tightly to look neat, hurt at the scalp and needed regular tightening to maintain a fresh look. Microbraids, hot combs, chemicals, pomades, burned earlobes, scalps, painful hair roots….. by thirty, she was tired of all this - she made a brave leap to step out into the world with her natural hair.

Thea at 27 with relaxed hair

She was scared! Would people take her seriously? Would she be called names again?  Would they treat her like a thief anytime she entered a store? Could she walk around in jeans and a hoodie with such hair without being stopped by the police? This may seem absurd, but it was a big and real risk for an African American woman. She decided to do it anyways… with the price of working on her hair manually every time before she walked out her door, twisting the small coils until her fingers and arms hurt. 

Thea at 31 with twists

The natural look worked for her and her immediate community seemed alright with it; and best of all, she was somewhat liberated from hair treatment servitude … but then her thin kinky natural twisted hair kept matting….

So, the logical succession was dreadlocks, which worked stupendously with her hair! But soon her dreadlocked hair took over her petite frame – she felt like she was sporting a mane. And then the dreadlocked hair started breaking off….

Thea at 36 with dreadlocks

She resigned to the fact that her hair was a lose-lose situation for her.

Not only that, in the South, no matter how hard she, her family and her black community worked on sounding, acting and looking respectable, they were still “just black”. In her thirties, even as an emancipated and educated professional woman, she experienced not just once being harassed by police officers for no offense whatsoever, for just being a black female. No matter how smart, how professional and how eloquent she was, not matter how many hours she worked on making her hair look less black, being black was still her primary identity. At work, in stores, on the street…

On a whim, in her forties, she left the South and moved to NYC.

She met a man, in fact a white man, who liked her hair – natural, short, slightly greying. He liked her feminine and fun clothes and did not make her feel like she had to constantly prove she was not an angry black nor the clichéd over-sexual African woman white people love to label black women as, but simply a smart, educated and curious woman, who wanted to work, think, debate, play and wear nice clothes like everyone else. She was not the black fetish of a white man. He just liked her -the whole package with her own set of stubborn priorities.

Other steps miraculously fell into place.

She found a hairdresser who convinced her to cut her hair short and keep it short. The hairdresser wasted no time telling her, her natural short and slightly greying hair was just fine and complemented her body perfectly. The hairdresser  - who is white - has perfected a cutting technique that takes 40 minutes every month. And it requires no twisting!

When Nethea went to the dentist for a check up, he asked her to do a TV ad for his office with her “big horse teeth”. At first, she thought this was just another tasteless joke that she was ugly. It was not – her big teeth were healthy, a great asset, and a lucrative advertising tool for him.

When she was downsized from her investment job, on a whim she submitted camera pictures of herself for a TV show that was looking for forty year-old women with a healthy natural look and wellness concerns. No one was more natural than her – although her hair had endured endless trials with products, her skin had not: she grew up in a world where makeup was designed and created for white skin. She had black skin, so she had no “makeup look.” They liked her look, her natural ease with the camera, the intelligence of her appearance, and she was hired for a daily TV show viewed by millions of Americans.

Thea at 44 on stage

Now, the “ugly duckling” does TV advertisements for dentists and TV shows for skin care products, and feels all right and very feminine… with natural tight coily and short hair.

Reflecting on how her looks have lead her on a 180 degree shift in course, she thinks the trigger was her former boyfriend’s authentic reaction of being perplexed that a black woman would think being black is ugly. He was the first person she met who had not bought into the social norm that Eurocentric of Anglicized beauty was superior to black beauty. He did not see her blackness as a fetish, a novelty or a liability. This played a role in liberating her from some racial pressures and taught her to embrace what she has. This is absolutely new territory to her – with less internalized racism, she feels less racial self loathing and doesn’t feel ugly. She has been able to put aside the reflex of having to put white people at ease in front of her black skin and kinky hair.  She is simply a middle aged professional woman ready to tackle the world.

For the first time ever, taking care of her looks is not a battle to be respectable and conforming, but an activity that brings joy, includes a healthy dose of well-deserved vanity and even a career in TV and journalism. If only that teenager who won the Oratorical Competition 25 years ago would have known.

Thea at 39 after cutting off dreadlocks

The “ugly duckling” still does have a hard time believing compliments that she is in fact beautiful. Black and beautiful is still a new concept to many, even the black and beautiful themselves. Even the black, beautiful and brilliant. She still balks when white Manhattan doormen open the door for her, a black woman. But hopefully her new swan-like wingspan will help her fly away from that conflict.