Thoughts from the criminology team

In my role, I get emails from students about dissertations. One such student contacted me about how she was doing her dissertation on the political implications of Black hair on Black women / girls in education. Meeting this student in early February (I won’t name names), it really got me to think about the role of Black men in how Black women see themselves. Getting that message on Instagram showed me that even as a Black person, a man no less, I don’t have to think about myself in relation to my hair. That within the Black community there is a privilege.

Don’t Touch My Hair by SOAS academic Emma Dabiri had been on my list for a long old time but my meeting with this student showed me I needed to fast track my reading of this text. We talked about Black hair historically, including the famous State of California vs Angela Davis in 1970 where she was on trial for kidnap and murder. Her hair out in true Black Panther fashion; whilst the FBI wanted to put her on trial, she put the FBI on trial.

Black hair is personal to Black people, especially women who I found growing up and even today working at a university with many in the student body, made to feel that it is “a constant source of deep deep shame” as said by Dabiri in her book. Having spoken to a few of Northampton’s Black female students about this, much of the criticism of hair does not come from White people (though they are also culpable), it comes from Black men whose own standards of beauty can often be European. Straight hair and lighter skin over Afro coils and darker skin.

Mixed-Race, though racialised as Black, from a White Trinidadian mother and Black Nigerian father, Emma Dabiri has tightly-coiled hair. Through Don’t Touch My Hair, she takes us on a tour of race and society; history, Black politics and White power and how they all have elements tied up together. It’s in the colouring, incl. oral storytelling, colonialism (and decolonisation), popular culture and cosmology.

Even as a youth, as one who would become a Black man, my own hair was donned “wild” and “unruly” by those who dictated what beauty looked like. I did a degree where we read books that described Black people as savages. Before we get to hair, Black bodies were shunned and hated, in: art, literature, films… going back to works of cinema like Birth of Nation often said to be responsible for resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan.

“To be white is to be human; to be white is universal, I only know because I am not.” – Reni Eddo-Lodge

“Straightened. Stigmatised. Tamed. Celebrated. Erased. Managed. Appropriated. Forever misunderstood. Black hair is never just hair.” For some their hair is part of their identity, and Black hair is ladened with history, culture, and politics. It’s a link between now and then. Dabiri details why Black hair matters in a series of chapters, from pre-colonial Africa to today’s Natural Hair Movement, as well as the Cultural Appropriation Wars.

I grew up around Black women who found solidarity in their hair. Afro hair. Braids. Twists. Dreadlocks. It was a celebration of their blackness, as was choosing to have my own hair long at school, might I add all-White private schools. For me to have my hair then was a political statement. It wasn’t until I came to University where I was introduced to young women who wore weave and wigs. Prior to that I had a childhood surrounded by people who wore it natural in the tint of shea butter and ‘Black people time.’

I ventured with White poets that had braids and dreadlocks. On one hand, I believe how can a hairstyle belong to a people? In the way of the artist, I didn’t challenge it. Why does appropriation exist? Dabiri showed why it’s so important. On the other hand, I recognised that to appropriate something as your own without acknowledgement is to steal history. She shows us that Black hairstyling varies from pop culture and cosmology to prehistoric times, to Afrofuturism (with Noughts and Crosses) and the blackness of the panther, alongside networks leading enslaved Africans to freedom.

Through her relating to the Nigerian ancestry on her father’s side, as well as the histories and stories of Black people in the United States, Britain and Latin America, she explore the history of Black hair and how we have been conditioned to relate to it. Wild. Unruly. High maintenance. Colonialism has done a number on Black people and those racialised as Black, depriving a whole people of any positive beauty standards, including hair history.

Choosing to talk positively about Black hair and changing the often discriminatory language (in itself) could be perceived as an act of decolonising, and if we are serious about decolonisation, we must look at language as well

You can tell this text was written by an academic, and true to form her sources are diverse. It was heartbreaking on my degree to have sources and texts that were whitewashed as much as race, and nearly dominated by men. As far as academia is concerned, I feel seen in Don’t Touch My Hair. That it shows people that look like me writing in their field, tying back to lack of Black representation in higher education, especially Black women.

From oral history to whitewashed British history, she points out the lack of representation and recognition of Black people in history books, regardless of their achievements in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths [STEM]. Today, we are challenging universities to decolonise but Black students are tired of seeing themselves as stereotypes. There are other images we need to see, not just the same old same old. If Black children could see themselves as more than stereotypes, perhaps by the time they reach university they might have more self-identity as Black Britons.

Whilst this text is from the female perspective, I felt that representation. As a Black person who spent five days of every seven as a child around White people who didn’t have a clue about race issues, especially hair… I engaged with this book from beginning to end. English private schools don’t sound too dissimilar to the ignorance and racism Dabiri encountered in Ireland.

As the only Black person at the schools I went to between the ages of eight and fourteen, many would find their hands wondering into my hair without consent. One of my favourite writers is Afua Hirsch. Like Emma Dabiri, Hirsch, also grew up mixed-race and wrote a book called Brit(ish) exploring her own identity, branching off into many subjects, including class.

Dabiri’s commentary on the “desire to conform” to a White “aesthetic which values lights skin and straight hair is the result of a propaganda campaign that last more than 500 years” is one I’m sure Black people everywhere relate to but will struggle to articulate. Coming through Britain’s private system, it’s one I struggled to avoid, as on more than one occasion my hair was compared to “wool” like I was Black in the war years, where they referred to “woolly-headed niggers” on British Army correspondence.

Emma Dabiri arrives at a time when the emerging generation of Black Britons are finding themselves lost in academia, writing dissertations on Black Britishness and seeing the deficit of texts that represent them – Don’t Touch My Hair is part of the revolution, and it defies gravity

This might be the privilege of not living in a city or even being an essential worker but I have been (mostly) strangely calm through the Coronavirus pandemic. However, talking this through with a friend of mine, she noted that for Black people, many of our existences have revolved around survival since the Slave Trade and colonialism. The fact that I am so collected is that I derive from this history, but more so because I come from immigrants who are also working class who come from countries once colonised. Peoples that did whatever they had to do to survive. Here, is where race can also intersect with class, as the working-class can think in this state of “do or die” too.

As I wait out this self-isolation with the rest of the world, I am able live with the privilege of having a garden. I can go into the garden and watch the cats immediately scarper. I can sit out and have the sun rain on my face. Yet, Coronavirus shows how little regard many people have for the welfare of their neighbours. Whilst individually, you may not be showing symptoms, Joe Bloggs next door may be seventy-five years old in remission. Moreover, it has shown Coronavirus doesn’t discriminate. We are all human and we are all at risk, regardless of class, creed, faith, gender or social standing.

My maternal grandparents are both Windrush Generation from Grenada

Growing up under parents who themselves grew up under Caribbean parents, we share this survival mentality. That we expect to struggle. Not to remain complacent, even when we have gained something. Even as a pre-adolescent living on St. George’s Avenue in one of those houses, we still had this struggle mentality. All creatures are wired to survive, whatever it takes, but there is something special within Black Britons who are ourselves products of European colonial ambition, passed down the chain like genes.

Yet, trans-generational trauma runs rampant, families living in the aftermath of colonialism still with a you-have-to-struggle-otherwise-you-are-not-living-properly mentality

Coronavirus reminds me of how Black people, and other ethnicities who have past histories of colonial rule, specifically those living in the colonisers’ country were always ready for a pandemic because we live in a constant state of survival. Growing up British-Caribbean under members of the Windrush Generation, it’s hard not to notice that Caribbeans survived on things like rice dishes and soups, things that last. Moreover, buying items with long shelf lives, including canned goods, and marinading meats.

Is this a trait in all immigrant households? Is it a trait in working-class households? Is it a trait in households who come from stories of colonialism? I grew up with tough love, as my parents and my grandparents did before me, as did their forbears all the way back to the Slavery – where we toiled and died on sugar plantations under the lynch and the lash of masters’ wrath. To stock up on essential items is fundamentally Caribbean, and speaking to my African colleagues about this too, it’s like-for-like.

My mother tells me about when she grew up, that Wednesdays were “feast or famine day” (corned beef and rice) and Thursdays were fried bakes and eggs. Bacon and sausage (if you were lucky). When I see my grandmother wanting corn beef now, I had no idea this was considered “struggle food.” I grew up eating cornmeal porridge, always when I’d go to my Jamaican grandparents house in the West Midlands, and my Jamaican aunties’. Cornmeal is struggle food. When I read about the African-American experience, I read about how dishes like Grits came from American Slavery.

When I talk to my Black friends and family members around the world, they are united in the idea that they were always prepared for a pandemic, because they grew up the same way I did. In many African households, they use hard chicken for stews, yet I didn’t realise this came from thinking rooted in poverty. This is low quality chicken we were left with, historically.

Not that I didn’t know already but watching an episode of Black-ish on this brought it all home, that irrespective of class, many of the foods so ingrained in the cultures of Africa and the Caribbean are also go-to “struggle foods.”

My grandparents have always been stocked up on tinned goods for the 24 years I’ve known them. They’ve always been stocked on cleaning products. Heck, as child at my grandparents’, I would bathe in Dettol. You can fry dumplings and fish cakes (saltfish fritters) if there’s a bread shortage. But growing up, some of the looks I would recieve at the foods I would eat would now be labelled as micro-aggressive behaviour. That these foods are an overhang of Slavery… ground provisions made from animal scraps etc.

Curry goat with all the bones, Saturday soup, fried bakes, cow foot, pig tail, salted cod, fried plantain, cornmeal, oats porridge, rice and beans, and the list goes on. Mind you, I do not enjoy all these foods but colonialism laid the ground work. This is what makes decolonisation and postcolonialism interesting spaces. You have to ask yourself, where is the cut off point on whether it matters that “survival mentality” has been inherited from these systems of oppression and power? Moreover, is it wrong that they have been absorbed into cultures, assimilated as valid qualifiers in said cultures?

My experience of blackness is one as child of immigration, born and raise in Britain. As part of the Black diaspora in the UK. How do Africans born, raised and living in Africa see this? Or Caribbeans living on those small islands, where you can really see the heavy imprints left by colonial rule? In decolonisation, there are elements of cultures that are products of colonisation and therefore could be picked apart and critiqued, right?

Where is the line drawn between culture and colonialism? You begin to see how ingrained food is in culture, and it’s not so easy to trim through the fat of race, nor do people want to deconstruct the things they love and enjoy. I grew up in households where we told each other to “stay safe.” And the fact of the matter is the language of Coronavirus is the norm for many Black British people. “Stay Safe” – “Text me when home” – “Don’t walk that way.”

I have nobody to thank for my calmness during a pandemic more than my grandparents (and ancestors) as our histories are written as pandemics, it’s only now it’s effecting the lives of the super-rich that it’s now an institutional global crisis.