Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Invited Post: Gone Swimmin'—African American Women and Hair

One of the best things about blogging is "meeting" readers via comments, particularly those who can illuminate aspects of beauty that I haven't dealt with firsthand. So when Mary Elizabeth left a lengthy comment on my post about neck hair and joked about how she was now basically guest contributing, I happily took her up on it! Mary is a portrait artist and maybe a little bit of a wannabe [ed. note—or not wannabe!] writer currently residing in Cleveland, Ohio. Check out her art blog at Mary-Elizabeth.net



Olympic bronze medalist Lia Neal might be surprised to learn that African Americans don't swim.


I grew up on an island in Florida but I didn't learn to swim until I was 12. According to USA Swimming this isn't unusual for African Americans. I first learned this tidbit while working as a summer camp counselor; it was part of our training, which also included watching security camera footage of a male African American camper nearly drowning at the bottom of a pool. Yes, for real. The video was intended to drive home the point that we as counselors shouldn't rely on the lifeguards while at the pool, but the other not-so-subtle message was that black children often cannot swim and therefore needed to be watched even closer. This is a great example of just how ingrained the idea that all African Americans don't and/or can't swim is. But why?

If you ask the internet, it will tell you it's African American women who are to blame because we don't want to mess up our hair. Apparently, this is explanation enough since real reasons are almost never given and are oversimplified when they are. I rarely see not living near a body of water cited, for example. For me it was because I never wanted to learn until I made a friend with a backyard pool that had a slide I desperately wanted to use and not drown. I personally know many black women who can swim. Not only that, but I've seen them with my own eyes at public beaches and pools...hair dripping wet just like everyone else. And yet many other people present at those same public beaches and pools would rather dismiss what they've seen with their own eyes as some sort of anomaly rather than consider what they have come to understand as fact may in actuality be a stereotype.

So why don't some black women want to swim and mess up their hair? I think the answer is more complex than the simple vanity the stereotype implies, and has its roots in slavery. It's obvious that most slaves didn't have time or resources to care for their hair once enslaved, but in their homelands they would have had elaborate hair care rituals. Women (and men) styled their hair in elaborate and time-consuming ways. (In fact, in Africa during and before slavery a person wearing an Afro was uncommon and would have been considered mentally ill and ostracized.) Imagine how awful it must have felt to not be able to care for your hair while remembering the sense of pride you once took in it. As families and tribes were split up and sold, hair care practices were lost and possibly even replaced by the hair care practices of white slaveholders. Needless to say, these practices didn't work for the tightly curly hair that many slaves possessed. To add insult to injury, slaves who worked in their owners’ houses were often required to cover their hair, as it was considered unsightly, while slaves with less curly hair types weren't required to do so—and were often treated better. The divide this created amongst slaves is very likely the root of the modern “good hair” vs. “bad hair” debate. Once freed, many straightened their hair with heat or chemicals—not to look more white (although I am sure there were those who did) but to have one less thing to make them stand out as "other" in a society that just barely accepted them.

Today many African American women opt to keep their hair natural and only straighten their hair temporarily with heat. I don't think I have to explain to anyone reading what a little humidity, let alone a splash from the pool, can do to flatironed hair...and if it takes you 2+ hours to flatiron the curls out of your hair like it does in my case, you're probably not going to go near any water and make all that work for naught. So there's part of the answer, although it's a little simplified in the interest of not boring you to death with the details of curly hair types, heat straightening, and the inherent fragility of curly hair. There are also some who opt to relax their hair, which is a chemical treatment that breaks the disulfide bonds in the hair strand, making it less curly—but it can also make the hair "bone straight" if left to process long enough. Relaxing the hair makes it more susceptible to chlorine and salt water damage just like color treated hair. These two reasons are enough to dispel or at least explain how the stereotype started, but they're just the more obvious ones that I know of. Maybe some African American women just don't have any interest in swimming and their hair provides a convenient excuse...what with a stereotype already in place to support it and all. Seriously, though, these reasons could apply to a woman of any race who avoids swimming. Nowadays it's common for women of all races to use heat and chemicals to straighten (or curl) their hair, so it's pretty ridiculous to pretend it's only one racial group that’s concerned about their hair and what effect swimming might have on style or health.

35 comments:

  1. I didn't realize that the internet blames the swimming discrepancy on African-American women's "vanity" about their hair. (But somehow I'm not surprised that was the best the internet could come up with). As I sociologist, I've always thought it was more to do with socioeconomic reasons. Here is an interesting post from Soc Images, one of our discipline's best blogs: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/?s=swimming

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    1. Thanks for the link! I suspect the reasons people come up with are widespread, and as Lisa wrote in the post you linked to, the best we can do is guess as to the real reason. I think people are quick to blame vanity for a lot of things involving gender discrepancies (race too, but in the post it seems that 44% of black men report not knowing how to swim--but 77% of black women report the same, making it a mix of the two).

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    3. There are definitely socioeconomic reasons but as Autumn said its not *the* reason. And unfortunately the average person (with no interest in sociology) isn't likely to read the articles you linked, or this post, and will instead settle for whatever misinformation they heard.

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  2. I'm very white and even I hate getting my hair wet when swimming if I've just blown it out or don't want to wash it again. There's been many a times when I've practically shouted at someone, "Don't get my hair wet or I'll kill you!" So, yes, definitely not an issue confined to race! However, I've never heard a man say anything like that so it may definitely be a female issue.

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  3. Thanks for the editors note in the intro. You're very kind. :D

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  4. If you have hair which doesn’t get tamed by anything, then a Japanese straightening treatment is just meant for you! It sometimes works even better than Brazilian Keratin treatment because of the way your hair looks after everything has been done. So go for ethnic hair straightening today and see the results for yourself!

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  5. Hey, Great info! That's what I do when I go swimming. However, I also recommend that after you wet your hair (I don't dampen, but completely soak my hair), I use coconut oil and a silicone containing conditioner and leave it in my hair. I put my hair in two braids and tuck the ends inside the braids. I do the extra steps to make sure that the chlorine does not penetrate my hair shaft. Although I don't normally use silicones, I use them here since I know I am going to shampoo my hair afterwards.Thank you so much....
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