I'm Black and I'm Grieving - No, I Will Not "Turn On Video"
Image via Unsplash
Originally published to LinkedIn on July 16th, 2020
I've been thinking about this for ages (even pre-COVID) but, the other day, I came across a post about racial hair trauma that got me wondering about why this irked me so much in general. That, in turn, got me thinking about growing up Black and being a Black professional.
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Image via Ogor Chukwuu
Whether you realize it or not, racial hair trauma runs deep within the Black community. We inherit it before we're even born. The texture and length of our hair is picked at (and on) the minute it starts to grow. It's an inescapable conversation of spoken and unspoken words, looks, judgment, and policies with everyone we come across, everywhere we go. To the point that, when we look in the mirror, we don't just see hair: we see a symbol that ultimately represents our family, our identity, our history, our upbringing, and our station in life all at once.
First, My Hair Journey...
I was born into a family that took pride in having "good hair"; long, silky, and not too coarse. But mine was tightly coiled and that just wasn't good enough for my mother who began hot-combing and chemically straightening my hair at an impossibly young age to make it as bone straight as possible. This continued for the next 20-odd years.
And, make no mistake, having "white" hair texture was absolutely the goal.
Why? Because, for generations, the vast majority of Black people are taught (whether implicitly or explicitly) that "white" is "right". When we talk about white privilege and how much representation matters, this is just one of many examples. Growing up, I genuinely began to think of white as the "default" - everything and everyone else, including me, was the "other". Because everywhere I turned and everything I consumed mirrored that fact: I was often the only or one of very few Black kids in class; all the media I consumed was white or white-centered; I didn't even see, let alone own a Black doll until I was about eight years old.
It was the difference between being beautiful, accepted, and desired or "ghetto", "ratchet", and "unkempt". I learned this through how I was treated by others, conversations with peers, and things I was told (or overheard) by grown-ups, including my own family. To clarify, the latter was never a case of being abused into having low self-esteem. To my immigrant family members, this was simply "how things were" and the sooner I understood this, the more prepared and protected I would be.
At the age of 16, I finally took charge of my own hair. Fed up with trying to manipulate it into looking as close as possible to that of my peers (I didn't care how popular it was, I refused to go through an emo phase, okay?), I started developing my own sense of style. As luck would have it, my style idol at the time was Rihanna. So when her Good Girl Gone Bad album came out, I ABSOLUTELY wanted to chop my hair off into an asymmetrical bob (like so many others).
My mom cried. Real tears of loss, fear, and sadness. To her, the one thing that was sure to make me stand out and push me forward into success (besides my intelligence... but at the time I was pursuing Fashion Design as opposed to Law or Medicine like most immigrant parents aspire for their children) was my chest-length, bone-straight hair. Like many other parents, fearing for their kids in a white-supremacist world, features like that represented some secret key into higher society or a better life than they ever had. To her, my hair, my smarts, my non-AAVE English (and the very fact that I even spoke fluent English amongst a family of Francophones) were all going to drive me to the top, despite my Blackness.
While she battled with that, I was coming to terms with how much this world really wasn't built for people who looked like me.
This haircut was the first one I booked on my own. And, in my need to fully take charge, I booked it at a fancy, downtown salon as opposed to the Black-run neighborhood salons my mom would take me to.
I'll never forget that experience for as long as I live but, not for the reasons you think.
After being called upon to finally meet my stylist in person, she took one look at me and realized that the voice heard on the other line during the booking process didn't match what the staff had probably imagined. Her face said it all: her mouth was literally agape (I'm not kidding). Who knows how long she'd been doing hair but, one thing was for sure, she wasn't prepared to do mine.
Thus came my first lesson learned in Black haircare: when calling a popular salon, always mention you're Black. It could save you a ton of grief.
Luckily for me, another (white) stylist swooped in to take her place and I got the cut of my dreams. It dawned on me that this was likely made much easier by the fact that my hair was chemically straightened and therefore mimicked the type of texture they were used to handling but I digress. Lesson #2: you're lucky if you see a single Black stylist at most popular salons so expecting them to know what to do with your natural hair is a stretch. Further proof that these entire businesses are opened without you in mind.
I continued to fight with my hair for 10 more years.
By my mid-20s, the jig was up. My hair was dying from a lifetime of overprocessing and heat-styling. But I was also much more self-assured and comfortable in my skin and my Blackness. I left the looks-obsessed Fashion industry and began working in Tech, in a much more casual office environment. One where I didn't have to worry about being called "unkempt" for wearing my natural hair or "unnatural" for wearing a protective style. At least, not to the same level that I had to before.
Image via Ogor Chukwuu
Anyways, Back to Zoom Meetings...
I've only been embracing my natural hair for the past four years and it's definitely something I still struggle with in terms of styling it for the office. Understanding natural 4C hair is a major challenge and the truth of the matter is, some days I just don't have the time or energy (hence the back-to-back protective braid styles). But being told, practically from birth, that the way my hair grows out of my head leaves much to be desired has an impact that is still felt to this day.
Before the pandemic, if I was sporting an afro, I would spend an hour trying to make it the best-looking afro possible. Knowing I'm being watched and judged (good or bad) from all angles was immense pressure. I worried that it would look unintentionally like that oh-so-triggering word, "unkempt".
Because that's the thing: with natural Black hair, there's no such thing as an "effortlessly messy 'do".
Non-Black hair can run the gamut between "Beach Waves", "Messy Buns", and "Bedhead". Frizz is seen as a cute little annoyance that can be solved with the right spray. But the average person has been conditioned to read natural (untouched) Black hair as "nappy" or "wild" (problematic! We're not zoo animals) unless it positively shines. Defined curls, sweeping architecture, and all.
We see this in the media we consume (no natural hair representation beyond Type 3). We feel it at work and in school. It's everywhere, it's never-ending, and it's something most non-Black people never have to contend with or even recognize.
It takes me three hours to wash and dry my hair. There's no such thing as a "get up and go" style that doesn't come with any prep time at all. So, when I'm hardly eating or leaving my house due to COVID-related anxiety, my chronic depression is at an all-time high because yet another person who looks like me has been senselessly murdered, and I'm barely keeping it together overall - no, I cannot turn on my video for this Zoom meeting (that could've been a Slack conversation, let's be real).
On top of everything else, I can't bear the microaggressions that come with it. "Whoa, your hair is crazy today, I love it," is not the compliment you think it is. If you're a woman reading this, you know the similar struggle of moving through a patriarchal world with no makeup on. I don't feel like having to explain or deflect why I look the way I do.
If you're an employer wondering how you can better support your Black employees (or all of them, really) during these times, not requiring video to be on during Zoom meetings is just one small thing you can do (luckily this is already the case at my current workplace). But it has to come from the top-down - no individual managers demanding we all be on video calls!
Because the societal pressure for us to compartmentalize our collective Black trauma and grief just to show up every day and do our job (and do it excellently because, much like our hair, our work is so overly scrutinized, it's never allowed to be mediocre) is enough. The microaggressions we deal with on a daily basis are enough. The code-switching we have to do in order to be taken seriously is enough. It's all too much and enough is enough.
If my hair is to be a reflection of who I am, and I'm only ever allowed to show up as my best self (especially at work), she just doesn't exist right now. So no, I'm sorry but I won't be turning on video during this call.
-D.