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Bantu knots! Box braids! Cornrows! Dreadlocks! Space buns! These are just a few of the hundreds of beautiful styles created for Black women’s hair. If you pay attention to fashion and beauty, you’ve probably noticed these styles popping up frequently on the red carpet, the runway, and even in your workplace.
You also may have noticed all the controversy that seems to surround Black hairstyles, especially cultural appropriation. Now, you may wonder why it is so offensive for non-Black people to wear these hairstyles. After all, it’s just hair, right? Wrong! There is a long and colorful history behind Black women’s hairstyles that goes beyond aesthetics.
The first braiding style a Black girl is likely to have in her life is cornrows. The style is aptly named for its similarity to corn fields. The hair is braided close to the scalp in several vertical rows, straight down to the nape of the neck. While cornrows can technically be used on any hair texture, the style is “…specifically for curly, coily, and tight-textured hair.” While cornrows can last several weeks on coily textured hair, they tend to last only a few days when used on straighter hair.
Cornrows are considered to be a protective style. They can protect Black hair from breakage and shedding, as well as help retain moisture. On silkier textures however, cornrows can damage everything from your edges to the ends of your hair. This is because cornrow plaiting requires a certain tightness to keep the style secure. While tight plaits protect curly hair, they can weaken straighter hair due to it needing to be braided tighter. This is why the style is not recommended for non-Black women.
This is not the only reason cornrows should only be worn by Black women. Cornrows are not just a convenient protective style. They’re a deeply loved cultural symbol of our ancestors’ beauty, resilience, and suffering. The origins of cornrows trace all the way back to 3,000 B.C., in Sub-Saharan Africa. The style was used to display beauty, age, wealth, tribal origins, and even marital status. When the transatlantic slave trade began, white slavers would shave the cornrows off of Black women’s hair. This was intended to break the spirits of Black enslaved women. By destroying a symbol of their identity, slavers hoped to separate them from their homeland and culture.
Despite their best efforts, slave owners couldn’t erase Black women’s skills, and they continued to braid as their hair grew back. The skill was then passed on to their daughters. Cornrows were also used by enslaved women to store grains and to create maps for escape. Today, cornrows are not used for map making, but the style faces prejudice, often described as “ghetto” and “unprofessional.”
Another popular Black hairstyle with more controversial roots is the tignon, commonly referred to today as a headwrap. The tignon is a long, colorful piece of fabric that is twisted into an up-do that covers most or all of the hair. While this is a popular go-to style for Black women today, the style was once a requirement, not a choice.
The tignon laws were implemented in the 1700s, as a way to limit the self-expression of Black women in Louisiana. New Orleans was incredibly culturally diverse in the 1700s. This was due to a constant influx of art and fashion from Spanish and French settlers as well as the Black Creole population. Black Creole women tended to decorate their hair with colorful beads, trinkets, and gems. This made them highly sought after by wealthy white men in search of “exotic” women.
In fact, Creole women were so popular for their beauty that white women insisted they be legally suppressed. Thus, the tignon laws were formed. These laws banned Black women from decorating or even showing their hair in public. The laws were made on the basis that Black women were “…intentionally scheming to tempt white women’s husbands away from them with their advanced cosmetology skills.” The laws also ensured a clear separation of class between races, as light-skinned Creole women were often mistaken for Europeans. Though the tignon law was intended to subdue the creative beauty of Black women, it birthed a new fashion era.
Black women used colorful, patterned fabrics to twist their hair up into new styles that still outshined their white counterparts. Decorations such as flowers, hats, and jewels were added to the wraps. Because the tignon was intended to be a sign of racial divide, they were worn only by Black women, which made them stand out even more. The tignon laws were eventually abolished, but Black women still wear our hair up in various styles today using the headwrap. It shows that not even covering every follicle can diminish the versatile beauty of Black hair.
If you are reading this as someone who is not part of the Black community and thinking, “Wow! I didn’t know all this, but why does that mean non-Black women shouldn’t wear these styles today? Slavery is over!” Allow me to explain.
Slavery may have ended several hundred years ago, but the stigma against Black women’s hair has not gone anywhere. Tignon laws may no longer be enforceable, but we are still subjected to harmful stereotypes and discrimination over our hair. There are still laws and courts in our country that allow for discrimination and even bans on certain Black hairstyles.
Black women are often pressured to straighten our hair to fit eurocentric beauty standards. Meanwhile, styles like cornrows, dreadlocks, and Bantu knots are categorized as unkempt, unprofessional, and too “urban” for civil society. Unless of course, the style is also worn by white and other non-Black women. While Black women continue to face ridicule and discrimination over the styles we created, Marc Jacobs can put Bantu knots on white models and not only be lauded as a fashion icon, but even be credited for the style itself. Kim Kardashian, who is well known for her appropriation of Black culture, once wore box braids on the red carpet and credited a white woman for the hairstyle.
This is what happens when a society does not value the people of a culture as much as the culture itself. The consumption of Black hair, art, music, and literature is often accompanied by the methodical erasure of the roots of our culture. This further perpetuates the false belief that Black people, especially Black Americans, have never created anything of value. When non-Black women wear these hairstyles they are not only participating in a culture they have no connection to, they are aiding in the erasure of an identity Black women have struggled to nurture and protect for centuries.
White women wearing dreads or box braids does not lift the stigma for Black women who wear these styles, as their privilege does not extend to us. Black women and girls have had to fight many social and legal battles that continue to this day in order to comfortably wear the hair that grows out of our heads. The complex relationship to Black women’s hair cannot be absorbed or fully respected by women wearing our culture as a trendy urban style. Yes, Black women’s hair is beautiful, but sometimes beauty is meant to simply be appreciated, not imitated.
