As a black woman, I knew that mothering three daughters meant a great deal of my time was going to be devoted to doing hair.
The rituals hadn’t changed much since my sisters and I were young. Our mother would spend hours washing, drying, detangling and straightening our hair with hot combs, oils and pomades.
It wasn’t the “slippery hair” of their white suburban classmates, and the style was sometimes mocked or misunderstood by nonblack friends. But it gave my girls the freedom to play soccer, run track and swim. “It’s about practicality,” said stylist Kim Dafney, owner of Kim’s Touch of Class Hair Design in Northridge. “People want simplicity, something they can manage all week. … And not just black people. Whites come in for braids, twists and extensions — styles that blacks have worn for years.”
Yet employers have for years, with the assent of the courts, been demoting, firing or refusing to hire black women who deign not to straighten their hair and choose natural styles instead. “The language they’re using,” Mitchell said, “is that if I braid my daughter’s hair and send her to school then that’s somehow inappropriate — that she has a responsibility to not be a distraction to others. That is so deeply offensive to me.”
“I was devastated,” she told me from her chair at Kim’s Touch of Class salon, as Dafney expertly flat-ironed her long thick hair. Hamilton works in real estate now and she’s not going to take the chance that her hairstyle might turn people off.
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