How I Am Detoxing From My Own White Supremacy As A Black Woman

Yes, because sometimes, I too am racist

The other day, I was having lunch with a Kenyan-German friend I recently met. We hit it off from the moment we greeted each other. Like me, she is married to a white man and has a biracial child. She’d been reading my blog for a while and could identify with some of the racist situations I write about.

When we started talking about hair, I got slightly emotionally. I have lived in Switzerland – a predominantly white country for most of my life. When I started looking to enter the workplace, I had a head full of braids at the time. I was quickly made to understand that I wouldn’t find work with braids. They were deemed to be too laid back, too unprofessional. The standard was straightened Afro hair and since I didn’t want to do that, I resorted to weaves and at a later stage, wigs.

For years I did this to satisfy my employer, my boss, my colleagues, and sometimes even my friends. My face looked different with a weave or wig. My features looked different, I looked less African, more European. Everyone, including me, felt comfortable. Seven years ago, I got tired. I went to an African barber and got him to cut it all off. He was surprised that I wanted to cut through the extensions, to throw them all out.

«Are you sure you don’t want me to remove them properly. They must have cost you a fortune », he insisted.

I didn’t care, I just wanted him to take them off as fast as he could. I couldn’t bare the feel of them anymore. If he hadn’t cut them off, I would have gone right home and cut them out with a vengeance, I was tired of the oppression they represented.

I stayed with a short Afro for about a year and then the itch returned. Every Black woman at work was running around with a wig or weave and I felt self-conscious, as though I was going against the current, being a non-conformist.

After a few weeks, I gave in and came right back to that — weaves and wigs. It was almost like a drug, an addiction. I was right back to that face in the mirror I did not recognize. Why? Why didn’t I have the courage to keep up my short Afro no matter what, why did I choose to go back to being oppressed by my hair. The short answer is white supremacy, and I felt so weak for not being able to resist it.

It is around this time that I realized that I had a problematic relationship with my hair, a key part of my identity. While I professed to like my natural hair, I often paid great amounts of money to hide it. Who was I fooling, the reality was that I did not like my hair. I had been waging a war against it for most of my life because I had been infiltrated with white supremacy. That was the truth, the true reason I couldn’t keep to my Afro and not give a f*** about what anybody else thought – white, Black and brown included.

Fast forward to Christmas 2020, my now 17-year-old mixed-raced daughter saw me struggling to put on a largely matted and ugly wig that seemed to age me by at least 10 years. I kept on insisting on installing it on my head despite a raging hot flush that just didn’t seem to want to relent.

«Why don’t you just come to the party with your natural hair», my daughter asked.

«But I can’t, » I responded frantically.

She looked at me quizzically and then said.

«But you don’t look like my mummy with that hair. It makes you look different. It takes away that which makes you beautiful».

I paused for a second, reflecting on what she had just said, but could not bring myself to drop the wig that evening.

I went to the party with the wig, but her words got me thinking and a few days later, I took off the wig.

I’m not perfect and I’ve had relapses here and there, but today I know that I look the most attractive with my natural hair. That is already a big step.

Most days now, you’ll catch me rocking some mid-length beautiful twists or braids. For me these are African hairstyles, and they represent where I am from in the world. They bring me back to my ancestry, to my “Blackness” my “Africanness”.

I can honestly say today that I’m done with anything that makes me look European, or more palatable for the white gaze. That’s my past, and if I can help it, I never ever want to go back there.

Thank you for reading my perspective.