4C the future

A journalist that I follow on Twitter named Hannah Phifer made a Tumblr post in 2016 that read, “Black women will always be too loud for a world that never intended on listening to us.” While Phifer makes explicit use of the word “loud,” Black women everywhere know that this adjective can be easily interchanged with almost any other unsavoury descriptor that has historically been used to typecast the Black female population—“aggressive,” “rude,” “ghetto,” “angry.” All of which is to say, Black women are more often than not simply regarded as being too much. 

What is a young Black girl—socialised early on to believe that they are intrinsically “too much”—supposed to do? Do you roam the halls of your all-white school with your head held high, naysayers be damned?

Of course you don’t. 

You cower. You shrink yourself to make other people—whiter, lighter people—feel bigger.

In elementary school, I wanted, more fervently than I wanted a lot of things, for my hair to be long. Not just long—for it to be silky and straight and shiny, to cascade down my shoulders and reflect the light. 4C hair is the exact opposite of this in that it is soft, bouncy, light as air, and coily (so coily that it grows upwards rather than down). This opposition confounded me as a child. I couldn’t fathom why every one of my non-Black friends had hair that was different than mine; why I stood alone with an Afro that I was bred from my early years to disdain, largely due to (a lack of) representation of my hair type in the media and every Black woman in my family refusing to wear their hair out in favour of a protective style.

Which is precisely why when my mom approached me with the idea to relax (chemically straighten) my hair in middle school, I jumped at the chance. From ages ten to fourteen, I sat diligently every month while she lathered my hair with the perm mixture, looking for ways to pass the time and trying to ignore the sting of the chemical burns on the back of my head. It’s worth it, I thought. Do you want pretty hair or not?

And, for a while, “pretty hair” was exactly what I got. It fell to my shoulders, I could slide a comb all the way through without it getting stuck (if you know, you know). I felt (temporarily) placated with the knowledge that I could (temporarily) achieve the hair that I had so coveted.

It wasn’t until my freshman year of high school that extensive research and rudimentary soul-searching led me to embark on what many refer to as a “natural hair journey.” I ditched the relaxer for sulphate-free shampoo and conditioner and swapped my hair straightener with a diffuser. This was coincidentally around the same time that the natural hair movement was gaining traction on social media. 

The movement made it feel as though, as Black women, we could regrant ourselves the agency that had been so unremittingly denied to us time and time again. Society didn’t have the power to tell us that the hair that grew out of our own hair follicles was ugly, or unruly, or took up too much space. And while the popularity of the natural hair movement has continued to be instrumental in my self-love and natural hair journeys, some members of our community—specifically women with type four hair—feel as though it has been co-opted and misrepresented in a way that once again centres outdated principles of “good” and “bad” hair. “Good” curly hair grows downwards, in ringlets, and is still generally palatable and acceptable to a mass audience. “Bad” curly hair is Afro-textured and coarse. It is estranged from what most people know hair to behave and look like, and therefore it must be alienated. Thus, the public “face” of the natural hair movement was largely dominated by women with 3C or similar-textured hair; hair that was still objectively “natural,” but not so far removed from “white hair” that it could be considered alien. Yet, while this dichotomy exists, an intra-communal pressure among natural hair aficionados to cash in on the supposed exceptionality of 4C hair also exists, which is why there has been discourse around TikTokers in the natural hair community claiming to have type four hair when, evidently, their hair is anything but.

I feel that it does all Black women a disservice to haphazardly conflate the discrepancies between hair textures. While some hairstylists have purported that these categorizations are arbitrary (seeing as it’s more than possible and quite common to have more than one hair texture on your head), the way that society views and treats thicker, coarser hair is drastically different from how looser curl patterns are regarded (and in some cases, revered!). While we share a common struggle, the nuances of said struggle must be continually explored and deliberated so that we can continue to champion those who are disproportionately threatened by the demand to hide, diminish, and otherwise shrink the hair that they were born with. To minimise themselves. To take up less space.

There are times when the voice in my head reverberates incessantly, telling me to lay low, warning me to not rock the boat. There are days when it holds me hostage. To that I say, I not only have a right to take up space, but an obligation. The hair that grows from my head is not a burden, but a light, gentle cloud framing my face and reminding me that a younger version of myself would smile to see my Afro. For myself, for my sister, for my future daughter, for my fellow 4C-ers, I will take up just as much space as I need to (and then some).