CAN You Touch My Hair? Response To The ‘You Can Touch My Hair’ Exhibit

If you ever go to the Manhattan area, Union Square is a must see spot, from the park to the farmers market, and who am I kidding, the shopping and the FOOD!!

A couple of weekends ago in addition to all the wonderful things Union Square had to offer, the naturals were out in full glory. Yep that’s what we are, we are naturals, a phenomenon to behold.

Women stood in Union square holding signs asking people to touch their hair, in the name of ‘education’. The exhibit, yes exhibit was called ‘You Can Touch My Hair” and social media exploded with pictures, commentary and opinions galore.

Well its no great surprise that I have an opinion too, and let me waste no time in sharing it: I am sorry but you absolutely CANNOT touch my hair.

Don’t’ get me wrong, I get the premise of the exhibit, at first it sounds like a really cool thing to do, stand in Union Square in an effort to start a conversation about black hair. So many people do not know about what it is that grows naturally out of our heads, and if they do know, they probably have not had the experience of touching it.

Then I thought about it some more, would I actually standing in the middle of a crowd with an open invitation to get head fondled by strangers? Am I a pet or some new unexplored fetish? At the end of the day when someone touches you and walks away what are they left with? What is the conversation like? Oh your hair feels like cotton candy! Errm, what then?

This is where the issue is, blogs, forums, social media conversations are all an effort to create a sense of “normal” for women who are not familiar with their natural hair after wearing a relaxer for so many years. There is also a valiant effort to help women get healthy when it comes to their hair which can be a universal thing, for natural, relaxed, black, white Hispanic or Chinese, we all want to be educated on healthy hair care practices.

In my opinion, when you create a spectacle you take away from what is considered normal, which is the ultimate goal. It is just plain weird to get randomly fondled whether you are a part of an exhibit or just walking down the street.

Clearly some other women came to the same conclusion as me holding a counter exhibit with placards with funny but less than welcoming messages on them.

People are naturally curious about a lot of things, especially on the human body. But would you walk around with a sign that says, Come Touch My Butt? On top of all that, how in the world would you be able to tell where someone’s hands have been, this was not a very sanitary exhibit and I could run down a list of possible scenarios of things you could catch and places where people randomly put there hands, but I wont.

If the idea is to satisfy the curiosity once and for all then an open invitation to fondle is not the way to go. We have deeper issues like the fact that an afro is still considered an hairstyle that should not be worn in the office. Our hair naturally grows in a manner that creates and afro and so where there is absolutely no tolerance for it maybe there should be a conversation about why and how we can fix that instead.

On the flip side of things what about the success of the weave* industry and the fact that African American women lead the statistics of being the largest purchasers of human hair. In an industry ran primarily on the backs of innocent women and children in poor countries trying to make ends meet selling their tresses, this is something truly worth discussing. But I digress.

Honestly, free for all touching is a distraction to deeper issues that are not only rooted in how wider western society views black hair but also how we feel about our hair as well.

It was a fun idea and I am sure inspirational for some and a field day for people who just like to touch without asking, but in the long run it misses the mark by a mile.

To shift ideas we have to start somewhere and maybe this was an attempt at a start, so for that we must applaud the bravery of the women who chose to participate in the exhibit. However if the only thing the ‘touchers’ walked away with was ‘her hair feels like cotton’ it’s not enough and probably not worth the possible stranger germs anyway.

Just my opinion, feel free to counter.