White Men Appreciate Natural Hair More than Black Men

A Brotha’s Response

by: Dr. Corey Guyton

As a Black man who is married to a beautiful natural queen and a supporter of our beautiful sistas who take the natural journey, I am member of many natural groups on Facebook. I enjoy seeing the wonderful camaraderie amongst the sistas and I learn something new every day about their journeys. Although 90% of what I read and see is wonderful, there happens to be one area that is somewhat disturbing – the notion that some sistas take it upon themselves to promote their interracial relationships and express in a condescending manner about how White men are better than Black men because White men accept their hair for the way it is.

To be completely fair, this is a very small number of sistas and definitely not all of the sistas who are in interracial relationships. Additionally, I want to make it known that I am not anti-interracial relationships and I think people should be with whomever they choose. My concern is that being condescending to an entire race of men while propelling another race of men is a very unfair assessment especially when all of the factors at play are not taken into consideration. Lastly, I want to say that there are a lot of sistas in these groups who defend Black men in these types of discussions.

Some of you have read my article, The Reasons I Did Not Want My Wife to Be Natural, and know my journey of not always supporting natural hair; and how my wife’s decision to return to being natural caused me to look introspectively to realize that I had some internal insecurities I needed to address. When I was not a big supporter of natural hair, one could have easily assumed that I was a Black woman hater and did not accept sistas for who God naturally created them to be. I would like to give you a few things to consider about the socialization of Black men and how some of us get to a point where we do not embrace natural hair.

Our Progression by Age

• 0-5: We had no clue about what natural or relaxed hair was and it made no difference. During these times many of us saw our mothers, sisters, church members, and many of the other women around us with relaxed hair.
• 6-10: Many of us did not fully understand it, but we saw our mothers and sisters putting the white substance called a perm in their heads quite often. We knew that the person applying the substance had to wear gloves and it did not smell the best. At any sign of new growth, these important women in our lives nearly had a heart attack and did not want anyone to see it.
• 11-13: Everything from ages 6-10 continued to happen. In addition, many of us started middle school and really took an interest in dating. The popular girls generally had straight or loosely curled hair (3a, 3b, or 3c); and a lot of people overlooked or picked on the girls with tightly coiled hair. We also heard many jokes about people being “nappy headed” who had tightly coiled hair. In many cases, adults (male and females) made the same jokes about people. This is also a time when we started having our celebrity crushes, who were more than likely women with relaxed hair, because that is all we saw on television.

• 14-17: We hit high school and most of the popular girls still had relaxed or loosely curled hair; the important women in our lives still used perms; and people still got picked on because of their hair textures. For most girls to be on the cheerleading squad, they wore straight weave to fit in with the non-Black cheerleaders; for homecoming pageants, they either relaxed their hair or wore weaves to “look more presentable”;  and for prom, they generally relaxed their hair or wore weave to “look their best”.
• 18+: We took everything we learned for 18 years, internalized it, and created what we believed to be the standard of beauty.

On the contrary, these were not discussions or experiences that White men had to be immersed in, so technically they have no reason to look at the different hair textures and be critical.

The reality is that a lot of Black men were raised and socialized to believe that hair textures matter and that one is superior to the other. It is also very easy to point the finger at Black men and call many of us horrible individuals for not embracing natural hair, but there has to be a very strong psychological root to this lack of embracement because there are a large number of Black women who feel the exact same way that many Black men feel.

I am writing this article to say that it is fine to date whoever you feel will appreciate you, but please do not label an entire race of men as being horrible or compare us to another race when the socialization, background, and circumstances are not the same. There are Black men who are very degrading to our natural sistas and that is not acceptable. But there are a lot of brothas who are mis-educated and need someone to enlighten them. The best thing we can do is to try to help educate more brothas and sistas about natural hair and pray they “get it”. If they don’t get it after being educated, then we can leave them drowning in their world of ignorance and keep it moving forward. One thing I have learned about natural sistas is that they do not need a man’s validation to know their worth but they appreciate when a brotha removes the blinders and embrace their natural beauty.