“What do you call it?” That was the question that a young woman of color asked me about my hair a few years ago. "What do you call it?" I replied simply, "my hair." And she asked, but what do you do to it? I replied smugly, "I wash it." She prodded about how it got to be so curly, and asked if I was mixed with something? I, in the midst of my sarcastic mind said yes, my mother and my father, but being that I was at a nice dinner with colleagues, through all of my aggravation, replied, "It's natural. I don't have a perm. It's just my hair." Whilst my white colleagues laughed and mocked, "what do you call it?" My fiancé and I were thoroughly annoyed. I thought: how is it, that a black woman doesn’t know that our hair textures are as diverse as our skin tones? Was she so thwarted in thought, by society's image of beauty, that she had never explored the magnificence of natural black hair? Was perming her hair ritualistic? More commonplace than dental cleanings? Had she grown into adulthood not knowing that perms are not the natural state of black hair? I was perplexed and aggravated, insulted and bruised. Not by her words, but by her ignorance. Yet and still I was strangely invigorated by my conscious decision to be how God made me, rather how man wanted me.
