Making The Case For Black Girl Hair Reparations
That’s right, I said coarse.
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Whether it’s been a decade or yesterday since we last applied a relaxer, the ingrained psychological, emotional, and physical damage caused by chasing a particular hair aesthetic is nothing short of triggering.
The problem was never a need for better hair or that we needed to go to damaging lengths to achieve good hair. The real problem is that chemical relaxer products cheated us of the revelation that our hair was already the goal. And that more than anything, — there are no other lengths to go when our hair had already arrived at its rightful texture and place.
The recent findings between cancer and Black hair products not only make Black hair injury dangerous but deadly. Black women and girls deserve to be armed with the ability to seek whatever compensation is necessary and available after long being misled and injured by dangerously harmful products.
Historically, the concept of reparations has been actively proposed as a means of transitional justice and can take many forms such as monetary payments, waiving of debts or fees, affirmative action, national apologies, removal or renaming of any item that honors offenders, and creating systemic initiatives to make amends for injustices.
Since Black hair chemical relaxer companies became household names due to Black hair consumers, making reparation measures could be the closest offset to a long, deep-rooted injustice. And since most of our hair problems were caused by the ones such companies gave us, we are allowed to believe that we deserve nothing short of all the reparations.
Though a public acknowledgment of damage and distress caused to Black hair by chemical hair companies is rightfully owed, it may never arrive, but it shouldn’t stifle the chase after the compensation we deserve.
Initiatives such as the natural hair movement have already emerged in a way that has hair relaxer companies punching the air. If such a movement can decline their sales, then the case for reparations should at the very least run them to the extent of rightful extinction. Leaving Black women and girls to chase the best hair aesthetic of them all.
And that is free from injury and distress.
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