Oprah Hair, Self Love, and Self Annihilation

We all know we love us some Oprah. I, like most all black women on the planet, we love us some Oprah even if we’re not saying it. I’m not here to hate on her. This isn’t that.

I am here to transmute the self hatred that seems to grow out of a culture that condemnations the individual as she takes her first breath. Because to varying degrees, we are all taught by this culture to not like ourselves. We consume products instead of to-the-bone self love. And I am here to transmute self hatred because the more iterations we are away from the cultural ideal of whiteness and maleness, the more pointed this condemnation is.

I listened to Oprah on YouTube, I can’t find the link now, and she mentioned in passing that she likes the freedom of choice she has because of her wealth. Just as an aside, I’m sure this observation popped out for me because I wish I were wealthy. I do. I am not going to lie and say I’m too spiritual to want out of poverty, or some bullshit that’s just not true for me. And I say this as I continually choose autonomy over belonging or being liked.

So, as I want to be wealthy, I don’t know what to do about my reaction to Oprah, of the most powerful women on the planet who constantly straightens her sub-Saharan African hair. I wonder if the act of straightening her kinks makes her hate her hair and hate the people who hate it.

I’m just articulating what straightening my hair has done me.

Why am I telling you this? Because I sit here and grow frustrated as powerful black women still straighten their hair. The first time I saw Star Trek as a kid, I thought, they got it wrong. Black women aren’t going to be straightening their hair two hundred years from now. Because, I thought, the moment there is no more anti-blackness, no black woman will straighten her hair. We won’t need to annihilate our African traits to make white people feel better. They will love our hair as much as they love jazz.

OK. So I guess I answered my powerful black women incongruity question.

I guess I have nothing to lose because by wearing my hair kinky, or no reason to make white people feel better as I choose my nappy hair. Yes. I’ve chosen to be ‘othered’ by yet another degree by wearing my hair the way it grows out of my head. I cannot say that my way of dealing with this is a grand, all encompassing solution as I look through the window of the basement from where I’m writing this and see the windows of a van that I have been sleeping in nights.

Not that straightening my hair would put me in a nice house. I’m just saying that I wish I didn’t have to stop and contemplate any negative consequences to my financial well-being when I embrace self love.

Guess what happened to me during my childhood when my mother started straightening my hair? I hated my hair and myself. I fantasized about some magic happening to have it not be that way. My mother told me to wear a swimming cap and to not to get my hair wet when I went swimming. She told me not to lie on my back so that the water would not seep in under the cap and ruin my heat-straightened hair. So, the first thing I did when I got into the pool was to lie on my back and listen to the water seeping in under the cap so that I could relax and feel free to lie on my back, relax, and savor my embodiment.

I was considered an unusual little black girl in my little black girl circle, to choose freedom because I didn’t care if my hair was “jacked up.”

I ascribe to Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s notion that unless all of us are free, none of us are free. He said in a letter from a Birmingham Jail:

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.

If you believe in non-duality, you have to conclude that hatred of self, hatred of the other is the muck in which we all must swim until we don’t.

A curious thing happened as I rebelled against my mother in seventh grade and decided that I would never get my hair straightened again. Once I got over the feeling of strangeness (how sad is that commentary) at wearing my hair the way it grows out of my head… the Afro, the corn rows, the twists or braids… the self hatred diminished and my pride increased. My self-hood no longer felt quite so extinguished.