Sweet Nostalgia

Sweet Nostalgia

When my sister and I were little girls playing dress-up and make-believe in the basement of our suburban home in Commerce City, Colorado, the outfit almost always included a white towel that we draped over our heads to pretend we had long blond hair. You see, in 1970, Goldie Hawn, Raquel Welch, and Morgan Fairchild frequently graced the television screen and the covers of the fashion magazines.

Then, one Saturday morning, I remember sitting in the living room after my sister, and I had completed our Saturday morning chores. Resting on the coffee table was the current issue of Ebony magazine. On the magazine's cover was Diana Ross, wide-eyed and beautiful, sporting a curly kinky afro. I stared at her, and it was as if she stared back at me. I had never seen hair like that on the cover of a magazine. I had never seen hair that looked like mine portrayed as beautiful. Yet, there she was, the embodiment of a Hollywood beauty queen. Now, she would go on to become one of the most glamorous women in show business. (Who could forget the infamous 1983 concert in Central Park with the torrential rain adding luster to her glistening beaded gown?) But in 1970, she wasn't yet a diva. She was a black woman showing the world how a black woman's hair looked. The message screaming at me through those brown eyes was, " you don't need blond hair to be beautiful."

The afro was a cultural phenomenon in the late 1960's and 1970's, but it was viewed more as a symbol of revolution than beauty. We often saw young black folks with their fists raised in the sky as a gesture of protest and defiance while they chanted, " Say it loud! I'm black, and I'm proud!" The Afro was a political statement.

However, on the cover of Ebony magazine in February 1970, Diana Ross's hair was a symbol of beauty, elegance, and sophistication.

Black women's hair has endured many fads over the years. We went from the press and curl, to the Afro, to braids, to Jerri Curls, to silk presses, weaves, and on and on. We've even been in a "natural hair movement" for the past decade or so. It began as a grass-roots wave of women who wanted to embrace their natural hair and stop torturing their hair (and let's face it themselves) with chemicals and glues and overall harsh treatment. These black women rejected the notion that a black woman had to straighten her hair and sew some bundle of harvested hair on top of her own to be beautiful. But something happened on the way to black women embracing their natural selves. Capitalism. Once it became known that money was to be made selling "natural" hair care to black women, every beauty manufacturer got in the game. And, to absolutely no one's surprise, they immediately began selling black women on the idea that what they wanted was something "like" their natural hair...but better! The market was flooded with gels and creams and serums to help black women "fix" their curl pattern and make it something more attractive. Ugh! Somehow we managed to turn "natural" into "unnatural"...again.

Those of us with kinky, wiry, curly hair did not see ourselves represented in the natural hair movement. Hair like ours needed to be trained and manipulated to look like something acceptable to those who still believe in the European standard of beauty. "What you want," they told us, " is not that kinky, woolly head of hair. You want loose, bouncy curls that swing in the morning breeze.

I purchased every gel, cream, serum, and potion. And I looked in the mirror and did not like what I saw. I just wanted to see my hair. The way I saw Diana Ross's hair that day. Kinky, coily, and undeniably authentic. I wanted to go back to the feeling I had that morning in 1970 when I looked at the cover of a magazine and thought that I was accepted. No, not just accepted, but glamorous, sophisticated, and ...enough. I want to go back to 1970. When, for a brief moment, an authentically black woman, with her authentically black hair, stared at me from the cover of a fashion magazine, full of beauty, grace, and sophistication. Let's go back to that.