my hairstyle, or lack thereof
Aug. 31st, 2006 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tropeOne of my coworkers showed me this video yesterday at the start of a LONG group conversation about hair, looks, self-image, and race.
Uth TV: A Girl Like Me
This was actually semi-relevant to work, since we spend a lot of time working with teenage girls, and encouraging them to love and respect their bodies in whatever ways they feel most appropriate. We're fighting, in our defunded non-profit kind of way, to counteract the thousands of media messages they receive every week about how they should look, how they should act, and against whose standards they will be judged. It's especially gruesome to watch because most of the youth we see in Chicago are black, Latina, or from some other minority group, and they are totally buying into a mainstream/white advertising culture that only wants them as consumers and doesn't care about their health or their history.
I shook my head a lot during the conversation and kept saying how sad it was that we were teaching girls this negative self-image, and how these girls should be able to do whatever they wanted with their hair, whether it was it was long or short or kinky or curly or blond or black or purple. One of my colleagues, an African-American woman, finally got a little exasperated with me and said that she couldn't expect to get a job as easily if her hair was natural, just like I couldn't expect to get a job as easily if my hair were dyed blue. The difference is that I didn't have to spend any time or money to keep my hair from being blue. My loud "oh, it's been three months since I've been to the hairdresser, I guess it's getting long, I just don't have time to fuss with it" attitude, seen in that context, is totally obnoxious. My nemesis at work is extremely image-conscious, with the clothes and the shoes and the looming plastic surgery and the Hair, but it's the Hair that drives me crazy. Does she really have to be discussing this during work?, I think. Can't she just leave it alone for two weeks at a time? The answer, I guess, is no, she can't. As a black woman, anyone from the clients we work with to her colleagues might be judging her if her braids are fuzzy, her wig is old, or any other rule gets broken--rules I never learned until I moved to the city and started listening carefully. And watching her coworker shun makeup and eyebrow waxing and any kind of hair product because "I don't find it fun and I just want them to respect me as I am" is maybe part of what makes her lash out at me.
Damn. I will miss the inward snark about her hairstyle of the week. I guess I can still make fun of her proofreading skills, so all is not lost. She'll always be the nemesis, but I think the least I could do is lay off the hair thing.
Uth TV: A Girl Like Me
This was actually semi-relevant to work, since we spend a lot of time working with teenage girls, and encouraging them to love and respect their bodies in whatever ways they feel most appropriate. We're fighting, in our defunded non-profit kind of way, to counteract the thousands of media messages they receive every week about how they should look, how they should act, and against whose standards they will be judged. It's especially gruesome to watch because most of the youth we see in Chicago are black, Latina, or from some other minority group, and they are totally buying into a mainstream/white advertising culture that only wants them as consumers and doesn't care about their health or their history.
I shook my head a lot during the conversation and kept saying how sad it was that we were teaching girls this negative self-image, and how these girls should be able to do whatever they wanted with their hair, whether it was it was long or short or kinky or curly or blond or black or purple. One of my colleagues, an African-American woman, finally got a little exasperated with me and said that she couldn't expect to get a job as easily if her hair was natural, just like I couldn't expect to get a job as easily if my hair were dyed blue. The difference is that I didn't have to spend any time or money to keep my hair from being blue. My loud "oh, it's been three months since I've been to the hairdresser, I guess it's getting long, I just don't have time to fuss with it" attitude, seen in that context, is totally obnoxious. My nemesis at work is extremely image-conscious, with the clothes and the shoes and the looming plastic surgery and the Hair, but it's the Hair that drives me crazy. Does she really have to be discussing this during work?, I think. Can't she just leave it alone for two weeks at a time? The answer, I guess, is no, she can't. As a black woman, anyone from the clients we work with to her colleagues might be judging her if her braids are fuzzy, her wig is old, or any other rule gets broken--rules I never learned until I moved to the city and started listening carefully. And watching her coworker shun makeup and eyebrow waxing and any kind of hair product because "I don't find it fun and I just want them to respect me as I am" is maybe part of what makes her lash out at me.
Damn. I will miss the inward snark about her hairstyle of the week. I guess I can still make fun of her proofreading skills, so all is not lost. She'll always be the nemesis, but I think the least I could do is lay off the hair thing.
