At a conference for writers, about 40 people crowded into a workshop on writing personal essays. The workshop leader wanted to get us off to a fast start by thinking about a topic that was easily relatable: hair. Hair? We thought, searched our memory banks, scribbled notes. Then we focused on a single experience.

Oh, my. Once people started reading aloud these stories, the air in the room became electrified. Having a parent cut your long hair short before the first day of school. Having an older sibling totally mess up your hair with blunt scissors. Teens being relentlessly bullied by other teens or criticized by parents for choosing one hair style over another.

People unable to find hair products or hair stylists suitable for anything other than white people’s hair. People whose tightly sprung curls or bushy hair made them feel embarrassed, or less beautiful, among their carefully coifed white school mates.

The snarls that hurt – every morning. The times pigtails or cornrows were pulled to make someone cry out. The sabotage of gray hairs and hair loss, putting the lie to our immortality.

We writers found ourselves weeping and laughing and recoiling in fear as tales from different ages, genders and ethnicities were read aloud. Sometimes, as a story was being read, we looked at one another in startled recognition. “That happened to me, too!”

Whether you are of Caucasian, African, Asian, Mediterranean, Native American or Latin heritage, hair takes on deep meaning for each of us. It’s like a body part, but there is no other body part quite like this. This one you can design, color, alter to fit your mood or your personality or the fashion of the day. Each of us keeps our hair under our control with every look in the mirror.

Even though the hair on our heads can be quite different, one person to another, we share a universal sense that we alone are in control of what we choose to do with our hair. Until that control starts slipping away due to age or circumstances, hair is symbolic of our personal power, our pride of heritage and our self-concept.

No one, but no one, has a right to do anything to our hair without our consent. No one can dictate to us how long our hair can be or which style we choose for it. Right?

 

“White wrestling referee forces black teen to cut dreadlocks” (Vibe, 12/21/18). The referee gave this high school athlete 90 seconds to cut the locks he had neatly pinned up to go under his wrestling cap – or forfeit the match. He decided, under that extreme pressure, to let his trainer cut his hair, and he won his match, but he has felt so emotionally drained and embarrassed by the incident, he has not participated in a match since (Ebony, 12/27/18).

 

Talk about this incident with your friends. Even better, get a group together and talk about your own hair experiences. I promise it will be enlightening.

But there is more work to do. Tune into your reactions to other people’s hair. What evokes distaste and/or admiration, when it comes to the hair world? Can you identify the perceptual framework you have been using to judge hairdos (i.e., white culture, classic cuts)? Then can you shift your frame of reference to, say, the human race, and begin looking at the hair of people around you differently? With less judgment and more benevolence?

Hair is an easily available entry point into understanding the link between our perceptions and our prejudices. If we see one person’s hair as inferior to another, that perception is followed by the judgement that the person is therefore inferior to us. If we see a person’s hair as something expressive of their individuality, their self-concept, their ethnicity, their pride – the same elements that are wrapped up in our own hair – then we will see the person as an equal. What we see is what we get.