Black Hair Everywhere!
These days, Black girl hair is all over the place (pun intended)! Certainly, the styles donned by women in the black world spans from short naturals, to cornrows, braided extensions, perms, weaves, dreadlocks, and what I call “funky flowing ‘fros.” I should know, as I’ve worn my type 4-c hair in each of these styles at various points in the past decade. But black girl hair has also highly visible in popular culture in the past few years-perhaps this is the Michelle Obama effect? For an academic, I consider myself something of a television aficionado (I call myself that to avoid the label of nighttime “couch potato”). Some of my favorite shows over the last few years were Scandal (ABC), How to Get Away with Murder (ABC), and Being Mary Jane (BET). Yes, they are outrageous and dramatic and fictional, but they feature powerful black women as lead characters and-given that I have long contemplated an ethnographic project is on black women’s hair practices in Cuba-I cannot get enough...