Sidebar germane to this convo: I was the reseach assistant for Dr. Noliwe Rooks in...96? who's now Associate Director forthe Center for African American Studies at Princeton, and wrote "Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women" among other things.

I did a lot of research for her for "Ladies' Pages: African American Women's Magazines and the Culture That Made Them" 2004.

Fascinating summer. She was cool as hell to work for. I remember getting high with her one evening at her place, after bringing some articles over, and chatting race, privilege and art. It was, as they say, way cool. (She had the first porch I'd ever seen that had a ceiling fan, and that also made an impression.)

Made a snickerdoodle cake with brown sugar icing for my mom's birthday dinner, and it was a huge hit and addictively yummy. Go me.

Are you reasonably sure that you can open a phonebook, pick a salon, and they will be able to cut your hair?

It sounds stupid, I know, and incredibly privileged, but whenever I've thought in the past about fostering a black child, especially a girl, one of my first thoughts was always, "Crap, I'll have no idea how to care for her hair." Which, you know, wouldn't stop me if we were seriously going to foster, but I always imagine this poor kid having to explain that her dumb foster mom is the reason her hair is all messed up.

"Good hair" in white privilege checklists annoys me, since it's something that's been such a source of tension and stress and everything within my white family.

Any privilege list isn't supposed to present a complete and irrefutable checklist of everything that's perfect in any privileged person's life. It's a guideline, and I suspect that amongst Americans/Canadians/etc the stats bear out that amount of grief your average black chick suffers with her hair from a very young age is greater than your average white chick, as well as that few white chicks have it worse than many black women.

It would be silly to take it off the list because not all white women love their hair, or because some white women have an absolutely miserable time of it. I know there's no way for me to understand what your hair experience was like growing up, but I was raised in a natural-hair-positive family, and I still underwent shitloads of grief. It can be pretty overwhelming.

Yeah, I get that. I think it's that, for pretty much everything that's on those lists, I can say either, "Yeah, that's something that I've benefited from," or "That issue hasn't affected me one way or the other, but I can see how it's benefited many white people." That's the only one that's something that's been something distinctly negative for me. I'm not saying it should be taken off the lists, just that it strikes me the wrong way.

I'm just happy I have hair.

That's the only one that's something that's been something distinctly negative for me

Makes you fairly lucky, I'd think. Not all white people can say that.

I think I'm a little too post-Mockingjay flaily to be able to talk about something as emotionally charged as hair right now, so I'm backing out of this, at least for a little while.

There's a wonderful piece on Snap Judgement on this topic: [link] (link to audio, but you have to hit play.) The politics and emotions that revolve around hair for black women are the subject of many a Y locker room conversations, not to mention some of the women at work. It really is just so much more complicated.

I'll have to bookmark that to listen to later, sarameg. Thanks.

It's a personal story, but it covers so much of what I hear.

eta: and damn, it makes me cry every time I hear it.