“HAIR WE GO AGAIN?” I said. The hair issue at Harrison College was an area of much contention back in the early 1970 when the school was an all-boys institution. Then the issue was the Afro hairstyles worn by some of the black boys, a practice that did not meet the approval of the then headmaster, the late Albert G. Williams.
The matter took on a decidedly racial tone when the black students argued that there were white boys who were also wearing their hair inordinately long. This was true, as the hippy type hair was very much in vogue, particularly among those white students who were followers of the sport of surfing.
I am not sure to what extent a hairstyle of any kind represents a deeper consciousness or is simply a fad with a temporary, youthful fetishishtic appeal. However, in the 1970 for some, in and out of school, the Afro seemed to go beyond the ephemerality of fashion, to genuine concerns about negritude. This, after all, was the age of the civil rights struggle and the search for legitimacy of black identity. It was also a period of self-assertion and youthful rebellion.
How much of the Afro dispute was a reflection of black consciousness or just youthful rebellion is therefore open to debate. I am curious to know how the boys of that time view “the politics of hair” some 40-odd years later.
Interestingly, the same argument advanced then is being advanced now. The contention was that what was important was the tidiness and neatness of the hair, be it African or Caucasian. Questions of that sort raise the issue of taste, of a personal aesthetic, an extremely subjective perception of what looks good or bad. In 1979 the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu published Distinction: A Social Critique Of The Judgment Of Taste, described as “the definitive account of where people’s tastes come from”. The book drew two main conclusions. The first was that what people liked inevitably correlated with their class, and secondly, that people liked what they liked because it helped to establish their position on the social ladder.
The Barbadian taste in physiognomy is unquestionably related to race and social class as part of the values derived from slavery and the plantation system. This culture by and large framed what social critic Bell Hooks terms “a negative racist iconography of blackness” and placed Eurocentric values and tastes at the apex of the culture.
Barbadian society, perhaps more than any other in the region was the purveyor of such values, so that the kinky or natural hair of the Negro, together with black skin and observably Negro features were depreciated. Let’s not fool ourselves, many of my generation grew up in a Barbados where blackness was almost synonymous with a profound, sometimes crippling sense of inadequacy.
Thus the short natural hair of the black girls was often derogatively described as “pickey”. When girls came of age, they were expected to press their hair, even at the risk of burning their scalps at the hands of a less than expert hairdresser. If Bourdieu is right, pressed hair was considered tasteful because it was correlated to higher class taste and social positioning.
Some of the positives of the 1970s “black is beautiful” consciousness have dissipated, much replaced by a self-sabotaging ghetto sensibility. Al Sharpton asked: ‘How did we go from, Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud, to calling ourselves hoes, thugs and niggas?’ However, the 1970s has had a lasting effect in fashioning a more positive construction of blackness. Black children today are less diffident about racial identity and do not carry many of the white biases and conceits of an earlier generation.
The HC issue may be more about a lack of discipline from a few students and indulgent parents than any meaningful positive black assertion. Natural hair does not have to be wild and unkempt. Schools must run on discipline. Student cannot be allowed to comport themselves as they wish. Besides, invariably the children grow up, the fads fade, even though the unsightly tattoos may not. Education in the Caribbean had been the prime agent by which blacks have asserted what Hooks in her book, Rock My Soul: Black People And Self Esteem, calls “a meaningful agency”.
One is amazed at what we Blacks come up with when we legitimately go in quest of identity and redemption. Too often it seems inordinately concerned with externals like hair and dress rather the redemptive imperatives of character and the collective probity of meaningful agencies such as family consolidation and economic ownership.
Education is too important an agency to be undermined by faddish and inconsequential notions of identity. One of the tragedies in current diaspora is how many Blacks are turning their backs on formal schooling, condemning themselves to the generational trap of a permanent underclass, seeking a psychic refuge “in the hood” of victimhood.
Ralph Jemmott is a retired educator and social commentator. Email rajemmott@caribsurf.com
