Hair Archives

It’s a Friday in June. My homeboy told me about this one shop in the basement of an apartment building in Alexandria VA that’s supposed to be pretty good. It’s assumed that the only reason a woman, a black woman at that, cuts her hair is because of sickness or sorrow. I am squarely in Read More

Last week, Jamelle, Ta-Nehisi Coates and Channing Kennedy of ColorLines got into a provocative exchange (across several blogs) about the evolving ways Americans think about themselves in relation to racial categories. (The initial post by Jamelle was sparked by a New York Times article that cited a growing number of young Americans eschewing starkly delineated Read More

Below is a video made by a young woman who is not at all pleased with her natural hair experience. Some quick thoughts: -I think there’s a conversation to be had here about the way that natural hair product lines (particularly high priced ones) market their products.  How often do you see (this is an Read More

Balloon Juice points to ellaesther, who finally got a chance to peep Chris Rock‘s documentary Good Hair, and left the experience pretty disheartened. It was like watching beautiful women talk about their lifetime of dieting, their tricks for dressing to look thinner, their methods for cutting calories during the holidays, smiling broadly over their successes Read More

Latoya goes in on the second (yes, second) absurd Allison Samuels piece in Newsweek complaining about Zahara Jolie-Pitt’s “wild and unstyled, uncombed and dry” hair. In her pieces, Samuels argues that the “bonding” experience black girls have with their mothers while getting their scalps greased and hair braided is invaluable, and that having their hair Read More

Slb’s analysis of the natural hair discussion being a “constantly warmed over narrative” might actually be on point. Chris Rock does a movie on black women’s hair, and suddenly we have to read about the politics of it in the New York Times: Although legions of black women in America straighten their hair (including Michelle Read More

Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair, is set to open in limited release this September, but buzz has been high since the film debuted at Sundance in January. Good Hair promises a candid look at African Americans’ self-perception, particularly as it relates to our age-old preoccupation with hair texture. Black hair has been examined, ad nauseum, Read More

Because of technical difficulties and an unusually busy work day, this almost became Your Tuesday Random-Ass Roundup. Sorry I’m late again. Your PostBourgie-approved weekend reading material: First things first, Stacia, one of our co-bloggers, is writing a novel and posting a chapter a day at her personal blog. What is this space for, if not Read More

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