Can A White Girl Be A part Of The Natural Hair Movement? - Curly Nikki Post Controversy

We cannot even sit here with straight faces and pretend like we have not noticed the controversial topic of discussion this week. To get you up to speed, basically Sarah of Curls & Blossoms shared her curly hair story with Curly Nikki. Sarah is a white woman. Since then both she and Curly Nikki have received a ton of  backlash for sharing that particular natural hair journey and the opinions are rolling in like an uncontrolled wildfire.

The team here on BHI have been talking about it as well, we have all seen the comments and we have tried to rationalized why black women feel so strongly as to why we cannot see the “curly hair struggle” as a united struggle beyond race and beyond texture.

I will share the same two comments Sarah shared on her blog here:

“Why do we need to make spaces for people who already have representation? Always so willing to accommodate and yet always being less accommodated. Making spaces for white women in the limited spaces made for women of colour isn’t going to change anything.”

“Still shaking my head at the black women on here defending this mess. Y’all are absolutely pathetic. I don’t want to hear any of you complaining when white women take over Essence and they change “Black Girls Rock” to “All Girls Rock”. We basically have nothing for ourselves, so we carve out a little space of our own in the beauty world and sellouts are ready and willing to hand this precious space over to white women. It’s amazing. And sad.”

Then there is this comment:

“You are free to call your hair whatever you want, but seeking inclusion in a space that was created to allow black women the opportunity to buck conventional ideals of western beauty standards, learn to accept and embrace themselves despite the images that we see in the media, and gain an understanding for our hair despite having few external examples to learn from, is the real issue. You cannot ignore the politics that exist surrounding black hair. Black children are being sent home from school for wearing their hair in afros.

Black men have to wear their hair shaved low otherwise it’s deemed unprofessional, and black women are told that the way that our hair grows out of our scalps is inappropriate for professional settings. These are real challenges that we uniquely face and the natural hair movement was created in part to begin to dismantle them. So please, call your hair whatever you wish, but quit seeking inclusion in a space that was created to challenge the very privilege that you apparently don’t even realize that you enjoy.”

Sarah’s responded on her blog…

Sarah’s response:

I’m not denying my privilege. And I’m not trying to upstage other women’s struggles, or erase the connotations of the natural hair movement with African American women.

It ‘s horrible that little girls are suspended from school because of their hairstyle; it’s awful to think that women are told their natural hair is not professional.

The military shouldn’t have a place in telling women that styles like braids and locs are not permitted. These things all happened, but it doesn’t mean other women of other races don’t struggle because of their hair as well.

Now that you have read all of that, you kind of get the picture right? Just the other night I watched the BET awards and they had a section on the Civil Rights Movement and how special it was for us to have our own television station coming from a time when the TV would go black when black people were featured. Ironic right?

We have defined spaces for ourselves in music, art, pop culture and education because we were denied those spaces and still are being denied those privileges today.

It is all well and good for a black woman to lend their support to a white woman because we get that there is a struggle generally when you are curly but it is equally well and good when a black woman can stand up and say thank goodness for Curly Nikki, BHI, K is for Kinky*, Blackgirllonghair, Essence, Black Girls Rock, YouTube and the millions of other bloggers who speak on this subject daily; because now I can show my daughter that her hair isn’t as ugly as her school is making it out to be and your struggle isn’t the same as mine!

Respect for the spaces is a touchy thing, because while curly hair unites races, Hispanic, White and Black, the politics that surround hair divides us. We cannot deny that this isn’t just about hair, for Sarah it might be, because aesthetically she just did not like her hair which was clearly HER struggle. For black women and men, it is deeper than just hair to think otherwise is very silly and unrealistic.

Now does this mean that Sarah cannot share her story on a natural hair website?

Of course not, because she has the right to do that and Curly Nikki and all other blogs that are dedicated to natural hair, also have the right to share her story as well. But on the other side of the coin women of color also have the right to feel offended by it because of their own experiences.

At the end of the day, the blog still gets a check because traffic does not have a race, or a texture, so sharing your story on a popular website comes with its own reward.

Personally I am not here to deny anybody’s struggle, I do not care what color you are, but when you are on this side of the fence, when you have been denied being in predominantly ‘white spaces’ because of the color of your skin you can look at things a lot differently.

For some it isn’t enough to say ‘Hey I am sorry your kid was kicked out of  school or that the modeling agency said your hair was too nappy, but I have a struggle too!”

For some they want you to truly feel what they go through and as sad as that might be for our curly haired friends who happen to be white, that’s just how it is sometimes.

We all have stories and the black struggle is deep, disheartening, sharp, destroying to our self esteem, made us overtly proud, messed with our temperaments, our minds and our view of the world. It is so bad that we even feud among ourselves when it comes to texture and hair types.

So it isn’t easy for a white woman to penetrate the space that is working so hard to unravel that. We have so much work to do on our own that if your struggle did not cause you real pain like the one I just described, then suddenly your struggle does not seem that important.

Don’t get me wrong I am not saying that it is right, I am saying there is a place for us all, black, white and green to have some form of understanding of why this is an issue, and respect each other’s opinion.

As content creators we have to be completely honest about our business this isn’t just about hair, despite what your terms and conditions might claim, this is also about politics and money and race.

Sarah will benefit from this attention albeit negative in some circles and so will Nikki and others that speak on it as well. This is not the end of this debate, for some reason human kind has found ways to put man on the moon but the issue of race and division remains unresolved and nowadays, profitable.

What do you ladies think about all of this?