Black fabulousness, with hair and without it
Here’s one positive outcome of Will Smith’s unhinged moment at the Oscars: It brought global attention to alopecia. And here’s another: Jada Pinkett Smith seems to have made peace with it. She wore her near-baldness intentionally, glamming it up at an event where the public gaze is about as intense as it gets. She winced at Chris Rock’s joke, but it didn’t undo her. She was fabulous.
Then there are us mere mortals. I too have alopecia. Sometimes I think it’s cosmic payback for being overly obsessed with image. My late husband said I loved the mirror too much. “You’re always looking at your hair,” he said, when he caught me in the act.
Hair is a crown, a kind of armor that helps you feel regal when you’re uncertain or undermined.
A couple of months ago, a check of the back of my head froze me in horror. Out of nowhere a wide, circular bald patch had appeared. It looked like the result of a brush fire that overnight had consumed most of the side part that anchors my signature look. I gasped, my presumed fabulousness suddenly punctured.
At first I was frightened, then floored. Whatever else I might be lacking in life, my hair had always been abundant. Now I was operating from a deficit — distressing, though it’s a position all too familiar to Black people.
The dermatologist diagnosed alopecia areata, an autoimmune condition in which white blood cells attack hair follicles and the hair falls out. There’s no cure, but the hair tends to grow back, with treatment or without but not always, and the growing back can take time.
When I was growing up, Black people intimated I was lucky because I was Creole and blessed with "good hair”— curly, but not kinky. Call it Black-ish.
As a teenager, I regretted that my hair was too white-girl to whip into a voluminous Afro, i.e. something fabulous. I tried cornrows but they unraveled overnight. My mother instituted a weekly wash-and-set on big rollers to smooth out the curls and make them more glamorous, a la Marilyn McCoo. But at the first sign of humidity my McCoo ’do reverted back to fineness and frizz.
In college, I decided to let my hair be. It worked. Most importantly, it was me. My natural hair went a long way toward achieving my core goal as an adult: to look as fabulous as possible, with as little effort as possible.
Now? My faltering hair fails as a symbol of resilience — specifically, the resilience of Black beauty as historical and cultural forces worked to annihilate the very idea. The failure feels personal. Black women put their locks through a lot, but the hair itself endures, surviving manipulation and change. But not mine.
When I go out, I can’t decide how much I care about the public gaze, so I often wear hats. Three months on, I’m (still) waiting for new growth, or possibly more loss. Self-esteem, like sand in your hand, is hard to hold on to. Yet I don’t have much choice but to keep being myself. I don’t look great in hats, and besides, I want the 95% of my hair that I still have, and still admire, to reclaim center stage.
Meanwhile, I struggle daily with the deficit thinking endemic to Black people and intensified by my unreliable hair. Of course I know that Black fabulousness is interior. It’s not about hair, it’s about aesthetic and spiritual perseverance, defiance even, no matter what’s lost.
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Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing writer to the Los Angeles Times.
