A comparison Between Hair and Design: Study One
“In Tulsa, a girl would no sooner have run around with unstraightened hair than she would have run around naked. It would have been worse than running around naked, letting everyone see your naps.”
― Martha Southgate, Third Girl from the Left
The Sacredness of Black Hair
In African communities, before colonization, black hair was used to classify marital status, age, religion, wealth, and rank in society. From ornate beaded braids to special headdresses worn by new mothers, kings, and queens these styles had deep cultural and historical roots. Not only for status we believed our hair to be sacral, braiding messages to the gods, our strands holding sacral power. We used our hair as design, you can even say it was the first instance of design being formed.
I grew up getting perms and it would burn and break my hair so badly that I eventually used hot combs. With hot combs, I would feel uncomfortable from the heat from the smoke, or the slightest touch on my ear. After that we stuck to braids, my hair being pulled so tight tears would come to my eyes. In my college years, I have come to just locing my hair, which taught me a vital lesson: It is ok if your hair is not tamed or managed, it's almost impossible to control. It will be fine if you leave it alone and let it be.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with my natural hair. When I was younger I thought it made me look like a man. I would cry for long braids or wigs, only to get ridiculed by other people my age usually for not even being good enough. I have 4c hair, the hair labeled as the most “unmanageable”. As I grew, I questioned why my hair couldn't be straight. As an adult, I never asked my hair to be anything but black.
I'll be graduating in May 2023, as a graphic designer. I often think about the art world and how it is run in relation to my blackness, a vital observation all black designers find themselves in. When it came to designing, I never felt like I “fit in” or that my work was respected. I would always do a lot in my design work, making it as ornate as possible, just to be told to tone it down so It could fit standards and the same simplistic white ass box. Don't get me wrong, I understand design standards. I have a piece of paper that cost me a few thousand. I know about readability and portraying messages. But in the way design is taught, it's less so being told how to make a lot of ornamentation work, but how to simplify into being palatable. I remember at one point I gave in and eventually designed how I was asked but I found myself completely giving up on design. I swore that after school I would never touch a computer again. In my senior year, I found that I was being very dramatic. But also I'm designing how I always wanted to without care for opinions that force me to simplify for the sake of palatability. A vital change has been reading about and consuming more black designs, or even asking other black artists to critique me over my teachers and peers. I definitely wasn't getting much of a black perspective from the classes I was in at the moment just like how hairdressers more often than not didn't learn about black hair in school. ( I was one of maybe three black design seniors, might I add) I remember my design history classes telling me one sentence about a black comic book artist and the rest being Bauhaus and Helvetica. Through finding my own resources to help me feel more included I've finally created some of my best work a few years too late if you ask me. The way I wanted to design by instinct never felt like the correct way. To clarify, my school had racial issues for sure, but from my experience in my major, I never felt racism, just a lack of educational understanding on how to work with black designers. I found the best way to make people understand my dismay was by using a marker of my identity. My hair is my identity, the first thing people comment on when they see me is my hair and like my hair, everything I design is criticized for its ornate blackness. In the design world, we are asked to straighten lines like our coils and create in a way that feels like we're putting a perm to our work. Like in design, we have been condemned for the intricate designs we weave. Black hair IS design itself and I am a designer.
For years we have seen the villainization of anything "too black" by Eurocentric standards. White people have gone from using black hair in their furniture to denying us jobs because our hair is "inappropriate". Before we dive into this we need to look at the origin of the sacredness of black hair. Black hairstyle as cultural classification dates all the way back to 2500 B.C. The Veda, one of the oldest Hindu Scriptures, depicts the goddess Shiva with "jata" also known as locs. Bantu knots appeared in the Zulu tribe as a way of classifying their tribe. There has been a criminalization of black creativity taking its start with our hair during the time of slavery, when we were taken we were firstly stripped of our hair. With the colonization of our culture, our hair was crucial to strip us off as it was a large representation of our power and history. There is a massive history of black hair in relation to religious practices and being a language and protection for our people in the times of slavery. The stripping of black hair was the first thing to remove black people from their roots, and their original designs.
This relates to design as it was something stripped of all of its ornamentations in relation to blackness over the years. It was once its own thing allowing creativity but was stripped down to a white artist standard by acts of villainizing indigenous art and other racist design standards that we allow ourselves as designers to conform to. Taking a look into design history, you'll see a plethora of whitewashing as a means to delete cultural influence as a valid form of design. For example, in "Ornament and Crime," written in 1908, Adolf Loos suggests that ornamentation is "primitive" and decoration was made for "degenerates." Adolf Loos had clearly never heard of the Baroque Period or visited the Palace at Versailles. Loos's essays were based on racist ideologies, even going so far as to compare arts and crafts to indigenous work, implying that it could be done by children. Loos threw around words like, "amoral," "criminal," and "barbarian" to describe his distaste; the same words white administrators have used to tell little black girls how they should be taming their hair. An example of this would be when Ruby Williams was sent home repeatedly for her hair being told that her hair was “breaching the school's uniform policy which stated 'Afro style hair must be of reasonable size and length’” This is not the only case in which black people have been sent home for their hair, such as “Nicole Pyles, 16, of Durham, N.C., says that a rule banning the use of hair beads by student-athletes is discriminatory.” She was forced to cut the beads from her hair during a game because “you couldn't see her number” while she's played 6 games with the same style in her hair before.
As of 2023 66% of black women change their hair for interviews and 54% feel as if they should straighten their hair to have a successful job interview. Oftentimes black people get sent home with the idea that their natural hair is not as it should fit a “design standard”. Simple is better, and well-kept equals clean-cut and less. You'll see when a company announces a new logo they always announce it with the same guidelines, to simplify for approachability. The new Twitter change into X simplifies to a black background white logo. “The main purposes for a makeover, says Maggie Sause, director of go-to-market strategies at New York-based branding agency Red Antler, are generally to improve a company’s recognition and reputation” a modern-day example happening for us all right now. Though, I and many others really could care less about the change. As a designer, I care more as I see the direct stripping of designs in ornamentation as a black designer.
Sources:
Comments
Post a Comment