Need a film to name-drop this summer? Try Good Hair, Chris Rock’s documentary about the Afro-American hair industry and, well, to put it bluntly, black women’s obsession with having shiny, straight “white” hair. The idea came to Rock, he says, after his young daughter, Lola, ran up to him in tears, asking: “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?”
Although black women represent 6.5% of the American population, they also account for 40% of the US hair-product market The film serves to highlight the fact that although black women represent only 6.5% of the American population, they account for a whopping 40% of the US hair-product market. It’s got it all: great footage of all those Dark and Lovely ads from the 1960s; great truisms — “Black people relax their hair because it makes white people more relaxed”; Rock unsuccessfully trying to peddle black hair on the streets of LA; a viciously competitive “hair-off” in Atlanta; and all sorts of new lingo to learn and somehow integrate into casual conversation — it’s the beauty fanatic’s answer to The Wire, if you will. “Creamy crack”, for example, is hair relaxer (because once you start you can’t stop), and “nappy” is what you call your hair when it’s all frizzy and coarse and you can’t do anything with it.
Naturally, Rock has had a little stick for it — reinforcing negative stereotypes, making a mockery of his own race, encouraging white folk to be more frightened of black hair than they already are, and so forth. “When it comes to hair, we’re still living in segregated America,” says Lori Tharps, a co-author of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. “The hair salon on a Saturday is right up there with church on a Sunday as the most segregated place in America.” (In his defence, Rock says that part of the reason he made this film was to highlight the practice of putting toxic relaxant on toddlers’ hair.)
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Is that the point here, though? Does one have to be black to be this obsessive? Isn’t hair — especially now we’re not allowed to obsess about our bodies any more because beauty comes in every shape and size, blah, blah — the seat of every woman’s neurosis and obsession, whatever colour she is? Isn’t the fact that researchers in Germany believe the classic Nordic blonde may be on its way out, make everyone, on the hair front, a little, er, black?
Surely, the deeper issue here is that we’re always going to want what we haven’t got. Just like Japanese girls want carrot-coloured hair and oriental women want theirs all curly. Meaning it’s not only Beyoncé, Tyra and Michelle Obama who want white girl’s hair (or “European” hair, as it is called by those in the know), it’s also white girls. Oh yes, someone out there could easily make a white version of Good Hair.
Take Gwyneth, for example, a slave to the Brazilian blow-dry and the straightening irons, because of her self-described “Jewfro”; take Jennifer Aniston, another star with natural “frizz”.
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“It’s all about having the control, and if you can deal with black hair, then honestly, you can pretty much deal with anything” Take me, actually, the queen of wanting what she hasn’t got. Remember Eve Plumb from The Brady Bunch, or Susan Dey from The Partridge Family? Yup, that’s what I’ve always wanted: thick hanks of shiny blonde white girl’s hair that I can toss, Miss Piggy-style, over my shoulders whenever the boys walk by. Remember the white girl’s wig sketch that Whoopi Goldberg did in the 1980s? Just like that. I don’t care if it makes me look more Middle Eastern than surfer girl. That’s what I like, okay? The one person who understands this beauty “tic” of mine is the hair stylist Johnny Sarpong, who has been applying black-hair techniques to white women’s hair — hot combing, weaves, weaves with “closures” (meaning fake partings), extensions and so forth — for decades.
“Having an understanding of black hair opens you up to a world of possibilities,” he says, from a shoot in Paris. “It’s all about having the control, and if you can deal with black hair, you can pretty much deal with anything.” In other words: black hairdressers, they’ve got the power.
I’ve known this to be true ever since Sabrina at the Chelsea salon Richard Ward came into my life. She doesn’t pad round me with the blow-dryer, or break into a sweat at the idea of taming such thick, unmanageable hair as so many of her white counterparts do. She shows it who’s boss, she beats it into submission — which is, frankly, what you have to do when you’ve got pubic, or should I say “nappy”, hair like mine. She understands that even with this pelt, which hurts sometimes because it’s so heavy, I still want extensions. She understands how the ideal, for old-schoolers like me, is still probably Barbie. Barbie? Or is it Beyoncé? A white girl copying a black girl copying a white girl. I suppose that just about sums me up.
Good Hair opened in cinemas nationally this week