Nadia Turner, the independent black rocker chick, wasn’t about to let them straighten her hair so she could look more acceptable to the majority. She didn’t last long.
To get votes from Americans, black women on American Idol have to straighten their hair. This culture finds black hair threatening and ugly. Simon Cowell gives compliments to contestants such as Kimberly Locke, and yep, even the blonde Brooke White, who straighten their hair. Most women with curly hair or kinks accept the damaging frying processes or the fake hair sewn or glued in by the time they progress in the show. Many, such as Jordin Sparks, never go back to their natural texture in service to their careers. Long, straight hair is deemed the most beautiful hair to have, and women must be beautiful to make it big nowadays.
I don’t blame these women. What else can they do if they want acceptance? If some method is discovered to bleach skin that actually works, you can rest assured they’ll be whitening up.
Syesha curly
We’ve come to expect it from American Idol. Beautiful girls with curls are transformed, week by week, into cookie-cutter, straight-haired lookalikes.
Syesha straight
First season, there was Tamyra Gray. Season 2, Kimberley Locke got the Idol treatment — her wild ringlets becoming tamer by the week. Jennifer Hudson got the straight makeover in Season 3, always to the rave reviews of judges who seem to feel uncomfortable with any kind of texture. At least they let Season 4’s Nadia Turner rock her curls, but they tamed down Carrie Underwood’s Botticelli long waves. Season 5’s Lisa Tucker didn’t make it far enough for them to get their flatiron onto her long curls. Jordin Sparks, who came onto the scene with her big voice and big, amazing ringlets, now rarely sports any texture after her Idol makeover. And now there’s Syesha Mercado — beautiful Syesha. Her amazing ‘fro is a part of her unique style.
They wouldn’t think of messing with Jason Castro’s long dreadlocks. Yet they can’t keep their hands off Syesha’s hair, attaching extensions and eliminating any sign of a curl or kink.
American Idol, at its core, is a talent competition. And Syesha has loads of it. Let her do what she does best, without sacrificing her natural beauty.
Not that we help the matter. We’re concerned ourselves with frying, lying and sewing or gluing hair on our heads so it looks as if we have straight hair too. It’s the minority that accept their natural hair as it grows out of their head.
Hair isn’t considered professional unless it’s straight or caucasian-curly by too many people of all races.
Whatever way you look at it, America has a huge hangup over wooly textured hair. We all can accept other creatures with wooly-textured hair (we’d call anybody who’d put lye on a poodle or sheep to straighten their hair guilty of animal abuse), but we can’t seem to wholly accept our own.
Relax this sheep’s wooly hair and forbid locs on it. Better yet, sew on a weave.
It’s a shame when the few who do get grief. A sister in the military with her hair natural and neat is apparently being threatened with dishonorable discharge because her hair isn’t straightened to approximate the hair of another race.
This is what the military sister looks like. Shocking, huh? Locs of any sort are against military rules. Our hair locks naturally if allowed to grow long, but that doesn’t matter.
There’s a discussion on the issue at this blog. Chime in your two cents and cut off that acid-relaxed, fried hair while you’re at it. If so many of us didn’t comply with the hatred and denigration, there would be less of it. Would you bleach your skin to look so-called cuter or more professional?
Added: Examples of loc styles recently banned by the military. These women would have to cut their hair off to the scalp because they all have locs. Their hair is NOT artificially straightened.
Science has vindicated us according to the NY Times.
Those naturally skinny heifers crowing about how superior they are and how much work they do to maintain their slim bodies are also exposed as having more manure than body fat.
“Those who doubt the power of basic drives, however, might note that although one can hold one’s breath, this conscious act is soon overcome by the compulsion to breathe. The feeling of hunger is intense and, if not as potent as the drive to breathe, is probably no less powerful than the drive to drink when one is thirsty. This is the feeling the obese must resist after they have lost a significant amount of weight.”–Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at the Rockefeller University.
I know this is right. I quit smoking with a slight fraction of the difficulty that dieting holds. It was nothing, only a few weeks of acute discomfort at most. Dieting is far worse discomfort for a far longer time. Yet, skinny women puffing away on cigarettes and complaining they couldn’t quit considered themselves superior, that they had more will power and discipline to me just because they were thin and I wasn’t.
Stop drinking when you’re thirsty if you want to know how it feels to diet, if you have the good fortune to be naturally slim. Only drink 8 ounces of liquid a day, divided into three servings at least four hours apart. Doing this for sixteen hours won’t harm you if you’re healthy and eating other fluid-rich foods. How’s it feel? Can you keep it up for months, maybe a year or so? Oh, sorry, you’ll have to do this for the rest of your life.
Remember Kiri Davis’s brilliant and oh-so-true documentary, A Girl Like Me?
I’ve posted this documentary on this blog before. It’s incredibly moving for black women. It was the most significant thing I’ve seen in a long time because of my life and my experiences. For many, many other black women too. This girl deserves an Oscar as far as I’m concerned. Well, Kiri Davis entered in CosmoGIRL! and Take Action’s Hollywood Film contest. The prize is a $10,000 scholarship.
When bloggers learned about Kiri’s entry, they urged folks to go to CosmoGIRL! and vote for her.
CosmoGirl.com is currently hosting a film contest. The winner will receive a $10,000 scholarship!
One of the finalists is the amazing Kiri Davis, whose short film “A Girl Like Me” does an incredible job of showing just how deeply we are affected by European beauty ideals. Even young children aren’t immune, as she demonstrates in her black/white doll test. You might have seen me blog about it at Anti-Racist Parent a couple months back.
I don’t see this as such an unusual event in the online contest world. Kiri’s documentary was incredible, but consisted of a sort of subject matter that your average white woman or CosmoGIRL! reader couldn’t or wouldn’t relate. So I’d say Kiri was at a severe disadvantage from the jump. Black bloggers simply brought attention to the contest to black women online.
If the other two finalists had as films that affected people as strongly, bloggers could have urged their readers to go and vote for them.
Shortly after black bloggers started drawing noticed to the contest, CosmoGIRL! closed the online voting with the following notice:
We have determined that the online voting has been corrupted as a result of one or more instances of tampering with the voting process by users. As a result, none of the online votes will be counted, and we will submit all three of the semi-finalists to our panel of experts for final judging and selection of a winner. The winner will be featured in the August 2007 issue of CosmoGIRL!
There could be some possibility that cheating was going on in any of the three entries. I know only one vote per IP was allowed per day, but maybe some hacker worked around this.
But to close voting the tampering should have been extremely severe and specifics disclosed.
“I’m guessing that Kiri’s film might not appeal to the typical CosmoGirl demographic,” wrote Yursik. “But if you ask me, Kiri is the future.” Angel La followed up with a similar message on Concrete Loop, and within a few days Davis’s film went from last place to first place in the voting. The rules, as they stood, allowed each person to cast one vote per day
The contest will be decided only by a panel of celebrity judges (which I’m sure will be diverse, but likely most, if not all, will be hair-flinging types, figuratively if not literally).
It looks like there is the possibility that voting closed because Kiri pulled so far ahead and in no way will her video appeal to hair-flinging, wannabe CosmoGIRLS! Many folks hate to be reminded of the perks and privilege they enjoy.
Bloggers are pissed because of this possibility. I don’t know if I’m so pissed, because I don’t know the details and haven’t seen the other two videos (Kiri was the only black entry, but who knows, one may be about fat girls who suffer under severe discrimination too–but somehow I doubt it).
Something doesn’t seem right about this. Tampering with the voting process? You could only vote once per day, how could someone tamper with it? Kiri was in third place and when people from Afrobella and Concreteloop started to give her support, she entered first place. But now the voting is closed? I don’t know about you, but I call bull-shit!
Kiri said in a clip about her film that the subject matter was meaningful for her personally because when she was a young child she was told she couldn’t be a princess because she was black and princesses aren’t black.
I blinked because my daughter was told the same thing by the kids in Topeka, KS when she was very young. Those kids were trained by their racist parents and this society that my daughter was less then they were and were determined to make her believe it too. It’s ubiquitous. That’s why the message of Kiri’s film is so powerful and moving to us.
The magazine needs to realize those budding CosmoGIRLS! in Topeka and the rest of the U.S. need to see this film and experience another reality.
ADDED: Here’s the CosmoGIRL! page where the other two vids can be found. Seemed like there was something wrong with the sound.
One is about weight, but alas, not about fat girls so much as eating disorders and how girls are oppressed by the bony body requirement to be considered beautiful, particularly white/Asian girls although it’s becoming more marked in the black community. But I think back in my day black men liked booty too much for bones to be in vogue, but this is changing with the younger guys whose psyches are more sculpted by this culture’s standard of white beauty and booty (flat).
The ONLY thing that works, short of slicing up your gut, is to change your lifestyle. The only way to do this effectively is to move. Diets basically try to fake out a third world lifestyle– they all lower food intake, e.g. starve, and usually try to increase energy burn.
We all know how hard it is to artificially impose a third world lifestyle in our first world lives. It’s damn near impossible. Normal people eat to satiety when food is available. Normal people don’t exert themselves unless necessary or they’re having fun. Even then when they get tired they flop down under the umbrella and order another Corona with lime and basket of high fat corn chips and guacamole.
People who do well on diets are basically crazy. Or more nicely, obsessive compulsive with generous helpings of martyrism thrown in, sorta like some of those (Opus Dei?) Catholic sect folks who wear that thing around their thigh just because it hurts. If this describes you, go ahead, starve and sweat. You will lose weight and keep it off as long as you keep starving and sweating for the rest of your life. Pain feels good, no?
But how do normal people fake out a third world (hunter/gatherer, primitive agricultural, or whatever you want to call it) lifestyle?
You know the answer, don’t you? You eat whole foods instead of processed and increase the ratio of vegetable and fruit calories in your daily total food intake, while lowering the ratio of non vegetable fats, sugars, dairy and meat. You somehow figure out how to increase your daily exercise. Some folks get a whole book out of the above few sentences (along with lots of recipes) and sell it for $24.95. It can’t be a diet, you gotta know you’re going to eat like that forever, the rest of your life.
An Atkins diet is easier to lose weight on because you’re not as hungry, but keeping the weight off using any low carb diet is near impossible because of carb cravings over time. It’s simply not a lifetime diet if carbs are readily and easily available. Imagine the aroma of fresh baked whole grain bread or a succulent peach and forgoing these healthy foods for your entire life. Hell, you’d kill for a dried-up supermarket orange after a while on that diet.
You will lose a little weight and if you do these things (increase fruits, veggies and exercise) for the rest of your life, you will keep it off and increase your health a great deal. Is that enough for romance heroine slimness if you have a generous portion of those fat genes? Probably not. However, if you are increasing your exercise, increasing your veggie and whole food along with decreasing other calorie dense foods, how much more can you do? Believe me, you probably are doing more than many naturally thin folks who eat what they want when they’re hungry.
So they can kiss your fat ass, right? Right. Learn to love your curves and that salad, fresh fruit and exercise. You can be healthy, happy and fat too! We also need to write more fat heroines, IMO.
Anyway, the way we’re going, maybe the folks running things will run us into another economic depression or world war and you’ll be ever-so-grateful for your fat genes.
