Spectacular Intimacies: Texture, Ethnicity, and a Touch of Black Cultural Politics

An early scene in a documentary on the life of amateur scientist and entrepreneur Madam C.J. Walker, Two Dollars and a Dream, features Helen Humes performing “Nappy Headed Woman.” She laments, “You can’t comb it, don’t you try,” and “Straighten it or burn it, makes no difference I don’t care.” As is so often the case in the blues, what may initially come across as nihilism gives way to a more complicated, even indulgent performance of the will to tolerate pain. As integral as suffering is to her experience, the speaker pleads in the last verse to Madam Walker and offers her a $50 bill to “Help a poor girl if you will.”[1] The song is not a document of black women thriving with their hair in its natural state, nor a lament for the pain of struggling against it. Rather, through her relationship to another black woman, the speaker transforms her pain into a commodity: a demand for which Madam Walker can supply satisfaction. In order to observe how Walker and Humes’s performance valorizes straight hair, we must conceive of “nappy hair” as “hair that fails to be straight.” By the same token, we assign value to our natural hair by recognizing that it resists straightening and deciding whether and how to meet that resistance. The objective of this article is not to rationalize the subjection of black features to white supremacist beauty standards or to polemicize the current movement toward natural hair among black American women. Instead, my animating impulse is the energetic tension that exists between black skin, often defined as an immutable distinguishing feature of “the race,” and black hair, for which alteration serves as a defining experience.

Conceptualizing nappy hair as something other than hair that “fails” to be straight occurs to me as a fruitful opportunity to reassert the centrality of black bodies—considered in whole and in part—to articulating both the power relations that structure society in dominance and the critical practices that impel contemporary scholarship on forms of subjectivity, subjection, and possibilities beyond their limitations. Here, I hope to position this article as a gesture in concert with efforts by Chandan Reddy, Judith Halberstam, Sharon Holland, and Alex Weheliye in recent years to problematize theories of the subject in favor of more thoughtful attention to the complications involved in falling outside normative regimes of citizenship, gender, sexuality, and humanity.[2] The studies above share some prerogatives with the work of Kandice Chuh, whose Imagine Otherwise first posited the possibility of Asian American Studies as a critique without a subject, which is in turn informed by queer theory’s productive elaboration on the significance of sex/gender, sexuality, and desire beyond their function as identity markers.[3] In the same vein, I hope to explore the ramifications of thinking about black hair and black skin, not so much in the absence of black people, but in terms that regard the facts about blackness purportedly evidenced by these bodily features in light of their failure to define black subjects.

In this article I forward an appraisal of the cultural politics of black hair texture and black skin, apprehended in visual and tactile terms, in order to stimulate critical conversation on the role of the act of touch and the realm of the haptic in the propagation of knowledge about race and ethnicity. In turn, I explore how the developments in knowledge production examined below are germane to the articulation of racial power. This discussion proceeds from an analysis of current cultural interventions concerned with black hair (and their histories) to an assessment of the transformation of skin color’s significance that is taking place under a new regime of colorblind racial ideology. I focus on two examples: a performance titled “You Can Touch My Hair” and an emergent system for the classification of black hair textures, the Andre Walker system. Through these examples, I argue that hair and skin texture may come to supplant skin color as a reified property of racial difference. Accordingly, interrogating the act of touch attests to the need for a critical orientation toward quasi-scientific practices that are currently constructing knowledge about skin texture in racialized and gendered terms. This exploration involves a steady engagement with fundamental questions about the human and the object that have been initiated in recent years by interlocutors in Black and American Studies such as Alex Weheliye, Darieck Scott, and Sylvia Wynter.

The salience of Critical Race Theory resonates throughout the perspectives I am drawing into conversation in this article, as it prefigures and encompasses the concerns of the scholars above. The topics under investigation below form part of an antiracist critique of everyday life: treating race as a discursive formation that is materially present in the world, learning not to take for granted what constitutes racial discourse, questioning how race, class, and gender influence their respective forms of appearance, and linking black vernacular intellectual practice to interdisciplinary efforts to reckon with what race has meant and what it has done.

Performance is a useful heuristic for this analysis, because it allows us to describe how the defining power of race inheres in doing (and undoing) identity practices and social relations. In this sense, qualities typically described in terms of “ethnicity” might be reconsidered as performance. Here, I am not using ethnicity to refer to ritualized or traditional customs and habits enacted by persons in real time, but rather, in a slightly more pointed way, I refer to physical features determined to have identificatory implications within and across racial categories. Ethnicity may invoke skin color and hair texture, two overdetermined and overtaxed signs for racial identity, but it also involves the many ways of presenting the skin and hair, maintaining them, altering them, and submitting them to or withdrawing them from interaction. Ethnicity, as a way of naming the differences between and among phenotypes within a racial category and the way phenotypes are used to differentiate between racial groupings, links the determination of what comprises physical evidence of racial identity to the consequences of making that determination. As it is organized by racial discourse, ethnicity is not reducible to the presence or absence of physical signs any more than racial identity, but instead, considered as a performative dimension of race, it describes how the presentation and reception of distinguishing features makes the body meaningful in racial terms. In a purportedly colorblind society wherein biological definitions of identity seem to be obsolete, we should beware the ways in which race as a regime of powerful knowledge reasserts itself in “flexible” terms by using ostensibly benign knowledge about the body to maintain the racial power of ethnic distinctions.[4]

The cultural interventions I examine and my interpretation take place in the critical space made available by women artists whose works dethrone vision from its integral role in maintaining the masculinist imaginary. Scholars including Donna Haraway, Laura Mulvey, and Kaja Silverman mark this as a crucial priority for feminist cultural criticism. French filmmaker Agnès Varda is one artist who contributes to this project; according to Kate Ince, she employs “haptic visuality,” composing shots that “caress the skin” and reflexively “‘film one hand with the other,’” in an ongoing negotiation with phenomenology.[5] Marina Abramovic and Francesca Woodman provoke similar considerations in the work of Premi Prabhakar for undertaking performances that place their skin in contact with exterior surfaces including the bodies of spectators and the walls of the spaces around them.[6]

Feminist knowledge practices intersect with and augment race thinking throughout Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey’s collection Thinking Through the Skin. In her contribution to the anthology, Shirley Tate examines the abjection of blackness, typically enacted through figures of speech and visual constructs such as stereotype, as a paradigmatic construction of the skin as a site of subordinating difference. Tate explores a tradition from Frantz Fanon to bell hooks that demonstrates how “negotiating discourses of Black skin lead[s] to alternative identity positionings.”[7] In search of those alternatives, she works through the notion of hybridity to describe how relationships instantiated in speech implicate the speakers in constructing the meaning of blackness in their shared discursive space.[8] The aforementioned artists and critics destabilize the power of vision to define subjectivity, and I would like to extend their endeavors by questioning how we might politicize the power of touch to construct knowledge about race.

A Labored Genealogy of Black Hair Straightening

The lessons that black feminists have drawn from exploitative situations in which the construction of knowledge regarding hair texture takes place are critical to understanding how black subjects negotiate with and resist bourgeois conventions of self-fashioning. In that sense, its legacy comprises “thinking through the hair.” I am currently working at the confluence of two black feminist intellectual traditions that operate within and outside the academy. The first of these extends at least as far back as Madam C.J. Walker and regards hair texture—especially the texture of black women’s hair—as an integral part of the performance of class and ethnicity. In this discussion, I will move from reconsidering Walker’s interventions in historical perspective to an account of the questions her legacy poses for negotiating intimacy with black hair in the present. The second stage in my discussion questions the implications of some contemporary practices that revalorize the production of knowledge regarding black hair and skin.

Some of the most significant contributions of black American and African Diasporic subjects to the repertoire of identity and cultural practices in the modern world have begun in the domain of self-fashioning. The woman who would become Madam C.J. Walker, Sarah Breedlove, born in 1867, became a historical prototype for black women’s traditions of invention and entrepreneurship. The significance of her contributions to black subject formation—most notably, her popularization of the hot comb and her role advancing black women’s employment in the commercialization of beauty products—continue to resonate far beyond the quotidian and individual level.[9] The competing interests brought to bear on maintaining and altering black hair textures that Walker emblematizes can be traced back to demands placed on the bodies of black women working at the intersection of social mobility, desire, and ethnicity in the shadow of American slavery.

Walker’s innovations attained substantial breadth because of the significance of waged work in the everyday lives of black women moving into the 20th century. The parochialization of the middle-class home as a site of leisure and “feminine mystique” in the United States, which excluded black women from normative gender ideology, relied on labor saving techniques and accumulated wealth, and these developments took place against the backdrop of economic shifts that favored white men. Bourgeois femininity took shape for married white women under conditions in which a white “family wage” ameliorated poverty; high wages for white men became possible, in turn, through the marginalization of their black competitors as well as their white wives and children in the labor market.[10] The black intelligentsia encouraged women in their communities to approximate their white counterparts by supporting their husbands with uncompensated reproductive labor and training for “jobs that could be performed in the home,” such as taking in laundry. Noliwe Rooks points out that Madam Walker’s ethos of self-sufficiency situated black women as the primary stakeholders in their own self-fashioning. In her study of the political economy and cultural politics of black hair, in which Walker and the black women who became haircare professionals like her example play major roles, Rooks writes, “Walker broadened ‘acceptable’ public representations of working-class African American women by urging them to join her in careers outside of the domestic sphere.”[11] While the aesthetics of black women’s pursuit of social mobility converged with white femininity superficially via straight hair, it is important to examine black women’s efforts to transform the meaning of hair texture in material terms. Circumventing discriminatory labor practices, making cost-effective personal investments, and achieving financial independence from men factored into black women’s decision to participate in the emergent hair straightening enterprise in ways that uncannily prefigure the contemporary movement toward natural haircare.

The exploitative practices that accompanied black Americans’ incorporation into the labor force in the 20th century gave rise to invaluable legacies of resistance. As scholars from Dorothy Roberts and Jacqueline Jones to Carole Boyce-Davies and Adrienne Davis note, black women facing up to white supremacy conceptualized cultures of work in ways that exceed the limits of Western hegemonic feminism and conventional labor history.[12] Confronting the ubiquitous hazards of heteropatriarchy and racism, black women at work envision ways of life beyond the bifurcation of work and everyday life that defy the cultural logic of capitalism. Investigations oriented toward black women’s agency in articulating the meanings of labor and capital, like Rooks’s social and economic appraisal of hair straightening, have led to new theorizations of what constitutes politics. Considering the centrality of expressive culture to legacies of black resistance, as scholarship on black radical traditions continually suggests, returns our attention to the significance of hair texture as a matter of cultural politics.

While I argue in concert with the thinkers cited above that we might enrich our perspectives on black women’s roles in capitalism by reappraising their efforts to make their own fortunes, my turn toward expressive culture, and performance in particular, is also informed by Roderick Ferguson’s suggestion that critics “disidentify with historical materialism.”[13] Rather than interpreting the gender performances and class trajectories enacted by black women’s involvement in hair straightening as either anomalies peculiar to their position on the margins of dominant social structures or evidence of their capitulation to normative standards of beauty, I would follow Ferguson’s insights to ask whether the cultural politics of black hair texture demonstrate the simultaneous “normalization of patriarchy on the one hand, and the emergence of eroticized and gendered racial formations that dispute heteropatriarchy’s universality on the other.”[14] In light of Ferguson’s queer of color critique, informed by women of color feminism, we might perceive hair straightening as a disidentificatory practice: a practice that embodies the ideal of straight hair as an aspect of white bourgeois femininity while redefining what that embodiment means in relation to blackness. In the example set by workers who defined haircare as a uniquely black female business, hair straightening comprised part of an emancipatory strategy that allowed them to separate their economic interests from bourgeois leadership and domestic intimacy with men. Insofar as hair straightening comprises a spectacle that elicits mixed responses today, situating its significance within the lives of black women who have a unique and original claim to its value helps us recognize its disidentificatory potential.

You Can’t Touch This

The tension with which contemporary race relations are charged manifests in the lives of black women in many ways that involve the sense of touch directly. This tension haunts many of us as we move through social worlds in which the tangible signs of our blackness beg the question: “Can I touch it?” When I wore long locks, in college, an older white woman once asked, “Can I touch it?” from behind me in a video store. I wrote about the interaction for my school newspaper. I wondered how one might stage that confrontation through the looking glass: what would it take for me, as a younger black man, to speak the phrase “Can I touch it?” to an adult white woman whom I did not know? Part of my disquiet at moments like this, I now recognize, is the sensation of racism shearing away the cloak of male privilege from my black body. Being black, male, and cisgender in a white supremacist society entails experiencing, occasionally, a fraction of what black women experience constantly. Notwithstanding our common humanity and shared struggles against racism, black men’s experiences with alienation from dominant gender ideologies can yield the conditions of possibility for empathy across genders. This empathy sometimes becomes tangible in the context of kinship, friendship, and other sites of intimacy. Particularly for those of us with recognizable signs of ethnicity on our bodies— “natural” hair, dark skin, marks of scarification—our blackness takes on a worldly value that others can only realize through their sense of touch. Whereas Frantz Fanon’s analysis of the “epidermalization” of racial identity helps articulate how blackness is always already defined by white supremacy according to the sense of sight, the meaning of race according to the sense of touch is speculative in everyday life. The features that distinguish black bodies from whiteness look different, but differences in texture are merely inferred by sight; only the sense of touch can confirm them. In the visual register, the stereotyping of racialized features can make strangers appear familiar: when seen as the properties of a collectively known blackness rather than the private parts of a whole black individual, kinky hair and fascinating skin no longer belong to their bearer but to the race.

I think this was the assumption at work when a stranger once (more than once) called out “M.C. Hammer!” at me, apparently provoked by the resemblance between my haircut at the time and that of the rapper. On another occasion, I was almost flattered to hear someone intone, in a quiet falsetto, “Maxwell!” as I walked by. These stylized microaggressions accost black women all the time, with the extemporaneous citation of the celebrity’s name determined by her respective hairstyle: hey Jill Scott! and so on. Like the question, “Can I touch it?” directed at natural hair, these misrecognitions rehearse an objectifying script in which all bearers of racially distinctive features become indistinguishable from one another as individuals, rendered instead as collective expressions of a given phenotype.

The question “Can I touch it?” restated in the second person and answered affirmatively, was the subject of a performance and short film, titled “You Can Touch My Hair,” staged in New York in June 2013 by un’ruly. The un’ruly project and lifestyle brand, founded by Antonia and Abigail Opiah with several other black women as collaborators, frames black hair from the purview of black women’s investments in their own bodies and images of themselves. Un’ruly engages black women in consumer culture vis-à-vis natural hair by evaluating haircare products and practices. By positioning women with natural hair as agents in capitalism rather than passive subjects of its machinations, it reiterates the dynamics of Madam Walker’s earlier movement in the context of an economy increasingly driven by consumption rather than the production and distribution of goods.[15] The cultural politics of un’ruly reconfigure the relationship between cultivating natural hair and hair straightening by identifying “black hair experience” in pluralistic terms that lend themselves to celebrity, stereotype, social mobility, and everyday life.[16]

The performance, which un’ruly called an “exhibit,” took place over two days in New York City’s Union Square, is an object lesson in the cultural politics of racialized curiosity. For two days in June 2013, small groups of black women posed with signs that announced “You Can Touch My Hair,” and invited onlookers (of all backgrounds) to do so. One at a time, an individual from the gathered crowd would approach and greet the women with the signs, then put their hands on each of their hair briefly, sometimes running their fingers through the strands and locks, sometimes holding a portion of hair between their fingers, sometimes patting hair that lifted itself away from the scalp with their palms, usually moving from one woman’s hair to the next. Some of them took photos of themselves with the women holding signs. Throughout the process, the participants conversed with one another, sharing their observations, asking and responding to questions in dialogue with the women recording the event. Along with the women who were affiliated with the production, other people who participated carried smartphones and recorded what was happening, apparently without any restriction from the organizers. The format of this event comprises part of un’ruly’s strategy of blending “curated” and original content on their website. It makes use of public space, accesses an existing site for urban cultural and political gatherings, and lends itself readily to observation by the general public as well as other producers and consumers of specialized media. Un’ruly thereby maintains live performance as a distinct form of cultural and critical practice. The short film produced to accompany the event showcases the aforementioned engagements in addition to interviews that were recorded on separate occasions. Other elements woven throughout the film include coverage of the simultaneous recordings, conversations, contestations, street noise, and counterdiscourse taking place alongside the exhibit.[17]

Taking exception to the spectacle was a group of women filmed nearby, at the same site where women with “You Can Touch My Hair” signs stood. This group held signs reading “I Am Not Your Sarah Baartman,” “Touch My Hair With Your Hand & I’ll Touch Your Face With My Fist,” and “You Cannot Touch My Hair,” making their own critical cultural intervention through live performance. One of the contestatory presences was cultural critic and social media strategist Nicole Moore, founder of the blog The Hotness.[18] Moore’s counterperformance and her later writings on the experience problematize the curiosity that was a driving force in the exhibit. By speaking to the specter of Sarah Baartman at the event, Moore’s critique expands the relevance of the interactions taking place beyond the occasion of the performance and situated their meaning in the genealogy of knowing racialized and gendered difference through exhibition and touch, reminding participants and observers that patriarchy and imperialism have enabled spectators to satisfy their curiosity at black women’s expense.

Moore’s blog chronicling her participation in the counterperformance alongside the exhibit takes exception to its content as well as the mode of address employed by un’ruly’s signage. “Why Do You Want to Touch My Hair?” and “How Does My Hair Make You Feel?” might have “questioned rather than acquiesced” to the desires of onlookers, instead.[19] By affirming the validity of the question “Can I Touch Your Hair?” Moore argues that the language through which un’ruly invoked the occasion failed to prioritize its participants’ agency as black women. The potential impact of the event was similarly questionable, in Moore’s view, insofar as it sustained existing tendencies to scrutinize black women’s hair rather than initiating any new dialogue. The knowledge made available through touch on the occasion of the performance might not change the way non-black participants felt about black women, and it would not alleviate “intra-community biases” among black women regarding different choices with respect to hair texture and self-presentation. The counterperformance thus calls the conditions of possibility for the exhibit into question and reframes the politics of touching black women’s hair in a context that presumes their right to deny permission instead of offering it.

Pointedly, one woman who stood with Moore was depicted in the film holding a sign reading, “What’ll It Be Next … My Butt?” She posed the rhetorical question of whether an observer needed to touch her to know “why she was genetically predisposed to having a larger backside.” Her question insinuates that the desire to touch black bodies is a prerogative of sexual power, and not just a matter of benign curiosity, reminding the viewer/participant that an ostensibly benign, invited touch can nonetheless elicit coercive, even violent connotations. This critique insists that the act of touch has historical and structural features that can be felt in the present.

Antonia Opiah addresses some of the critical perspectives on “You Can Touch My Hair” in the film by the same title produced by un’ruly. Notably, her comments acknowledge the ways in which the interaction evoked the spectacle of Sarah Baartman, thus incorporating the response to the performance by its detractors into her account of the event. Opiah also explains the organizers’ choice to name the event an “exhibit,” conceding that it deliberately calls to mind the ways in which black bodies have been displayed in order to illustrate their difference from whiteness.

Sexology, comparative anatomy, and ethnographic displays from World’s Fairs to museums have all relied on strategies for exhibiting the living and dead bodies of black and indigenous people.[20] The “Year of the White Bear” performance by Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña, in which the artists enact a satirical representation of a couple from an undiscovered Amerindian island culture, addresses this legacy most memorably by incorporating fabulist language play, costume, and dance into a counterspectacle that mocks the audience of the racial diorama. Naming “You Can Touch My Hair” an exhibit ironically posits the possibility of touch as a counterdiscourse to visual display that might disrupt myths of black inferiority: if appearances lie, touch might tell the truth. While the visual field dominates the exhibit as such, in live performance, a combination of stimuli shapes the meaning of the occasion. The smoke from the “inauthentic” cigarettes that Gómez-Peña enjoys in the aforementioned collaboration with Fusco (and an audience member’s attempt to burn him with same) along with other responses, from shaking their stage/cage to ogling and touching them sexually, presented each moment as a discordant combination of visual, aural, olfactory, and haptic impressions.[21] In “You Can Touch My Hair,” vision elicits the desire to know, and touch fulfills that desire. The knowledge of texture attained through touch promises to demystify the appearance of black hair. Implicitly, touch does more than produce a unique observation: it constitutes a unique relationship between subjects.

While the interaction at the center of “You Can Touch My Hair” yields an immediate transition from ignorance to a knowing state for the observer/participant, the follow-up discussions joined by bystanders and recorded in the film provide further edification and critical exchange. Participants are encouraged to examine their motivation for accepting the invitation to touch a black woman’s hair, and they are debriefed about the experience after the fact. One white woman’s report in the film about what she learned through the experience of touch is particularly intriguing. Asked if there were questions about black women’s hair that touching it answered, she replied that there were not; what the experience provided was “getting a chance to touch it.”[22] The notion of the exhibit as a “chance” or fortuitous circumstance in which touch was expressly permitted communicates an awareness of the risk involved in trying and potentially failing to touch black hair without an open invitation; under other conditions, making the attempt might have elicited infelicitous consequences.

Herein lies the competing discourse made manifest by the presence of black women at the exhibit who denied onlookers permission to touch their hair: there was not only a confrontation between the knowledge made available to participants’ hands and ignorance about the telling difference that texture conveys, but also a contestation over the different purposes for which one might legitimately, ethically seek to know the touch of an Other. Said one protester, “I’m not interested in having a conversation where I make people feel better about their hair or they finally get to learn what my hair texture feels like. Have an intimate relationship with a black person, have a black friend … and ask them.” By voicing this alternative way of knowing the black body through touch in a performative fashion, enjoining the person addressed to “have an intimate relationship, have a black friend,” the speaker invokes an alternative situation—a relationship that must begin long before one poses the question, “Can I touch your hair”—as the setting in which coming to know the texture of black hair might take place. The suggestion that permission might be granted by a trusted friend or other intimate whose relationship to the observer already includes occasional or habitual physical contact also entails the risk of rejection, of course. This possibility underscores the agency of the individual to whom black hair belongs, and reminds the observer that in the context of interaction with a stranger, the risk of rejection does not pose the same threat as the potential loss of a friend, the disappointment of a lover, or the judgment of a respected peer. The possibility that we might violate the boundaries of a stranger is risky, with respect to social mores, but we reconcile ourselves to the vulnerability involved in putting ourselves at risk of rejection when we seek to touch someone with whom we are intimate.

The Skull beneath the Skin

Circumstances in which black people allow our bodies to know and become known through mutually desirable touch make it possible to comprehend blackness as something other than abjection. The phenomenal significance of a caring, careful touch that entails risk and requires permission—the intimate touch—occurs across racial lines and within them, as well. When black subjects touch one another, we encounter our shared humanity and vulnerability as well as our individual differences. Among ourselves, we practice what Michelle Wright has identified as a “negation” of the very negation that defines blackness as only and always merely “Other to the white subject.”[23] By rejecting certain constructions of ourselves that make our identities meaningful only as antithetical to whiteness, installing whiteness as normative for the human, we arrive at unique forms of self-definition that belie the normative regime of human subjectivity. Wright and Roderick Ferguson point to the politics of recognition and self-fashioning found in black feminism as crucial, in this regard, because they entail a refusal to be only and always Other to whiteness or manhood, or otherwise limited to a singular definition of the human.[24] One way of finding significance in encounters between persons who are circumscribed within the same set of racial boundaries by shared phenotypes and heritage is to perceive them as crossing the internal borders that exist among our racialized bodies: differences of age, gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, or individual life experience.

The concluding portion of this article will introduce an analysis of racialized differences in skin texture. My readings of scientific discourse on skin and previous interventions in performance studies suggest that racialized skin texture is the inchoate subject of a benign differential that is currently under construction, paradoxically, at a post-biological and “colorblind” moment in the history of race thinking. The cultural politics of intimacy vis-à-vis racialized skin texture have yet to be explored thoroughly in scholarship, but the present analysis of hair texture and skin color may provide touchstones for the challenges and opportunities this area presents.

Haircare is, for reasons enumerated above, both laborand capital-intensive within black communities. As an illustration of what Foucauldian theorists term “power/knowledge,” the reproduction of black hair textures through commoditydriven practices lends itself to the expression of power dynamics, including relations of dominance and subordination, as well as the ostensibly benign process of disseminating information.[25] Up to this point, I have deliberately framed the conversation on hair texture in quotidian terms, but there is a robust knowledge economy organized around black hair texture as a form of physical difference that can be observed, analyzed, and manipulated by professionals as well as amateurs and individuals engaged in self-care. Over time, the construction of hair texture as a site of intraracial difference has lent itself to the formation of folk taxonomies in black communities: “good” versus bad hair; desirable and undesirable textures and styles; critical perspectives on the heritability, manageability, and expense of textures, styles, and habits of care; debates regarding “professionalism” and presentability that intersect with and contest the politics of black respectability. These considerations make the knowledge of black hair texture powerful in everyday life.

The development of ostensibly objective knowledge about black hair, however, situates it on the same discursive plane as skin color, in some ways. If skin color and hair texture are both subject to becoming known, through touch or through sight, in terms of their “true nature” prior to modification, then knowledge about them can be made to function more authoritatively. While in some ways, refining knowledge about black hair might make self-care more legible for non-specialists who wish to cultivate the self-knowledge necessary to make decisions about their bodies, the example of skin color shows us how facile it can be to portray physical features with racial significance in terms of a simple dichotomy between the unvarnished truths they might yield, on the one hand, and their liability to contrived performances, on the other.

The discourses of identity that inform contemporary state practices in the United States, for example, tend to portray superficial qualities like skin color and secondary sex characteristics as “accidents of birth” about which authoritative knowledge can be attained while insisting that they are not causally linked to differential outcomes and life chances among the people defined by them. At the same time, claims to “colorblindness” plead ignorance about the material differences that persist between groups who are disempowered by irrational racial distinctions and those who are empowered by them by claiming that observing the distinction is invalid and inherently suspect. Scholars like Lawrence Bobo and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva extend this critique to note that contemporary accounts of the same racial disparities that were once rationalized on the basis of immutable characteristics like skin color are reiterated in arguments that “rely on cultural rather than biological tropes to explain blacks’ position in this country.”[26] These discourses on race correlate the cultural traits that prevail among members of minoritized racial groups—speech patterns, naming conventions, styles of dress, sexuality, and childbearing—with these groups’ collective experiences of social disadvantage; rather than structural change, they favor policies such as the promotion of marriage that incentivize normative behavior and punish deviance.[27] Color-blind racism thus assumes that racial minorities themselves continue to drive inequality by maintaining their distinctiveness. In this fashion, it leverages the “truth” that differences in skin color are superficial into a means to argue that racial differences observed in culture are profoundly meaningful, and it thus “works to obscure the role that truth claims play in the reproduction or transformation of power relations.”[28]

If we conceptualize racial differences as differences of power, however, physical and cultural criteria are equally suspect as explanations for persistent disparities between racial groups. Furthermore, accounting for the ways in which we perform our racial identities entails observing how we bring “culture” into being, sometimes fashioning it into the form of “ethnicity,” using our bodies and the objects, space, and other persons in the world around us as raw materials. For this reason, I find it important to conceptualize ethnicity in ways that comprise phenomena that blend phenotype and cultural practice, like the presentation of hair and skin, because attempts to disaggregate them can easily play into reductive and disingenuous arguments that legitimate injustice. Hence, it is not simply the truth-effects of racial distinctions but also the priority placed on them that demands scrutiny. If the truths the body is compelled to tell and the truths embodied in cultural practices are equally subject to interrogation as aspects of the performance of racial identity, we might understand both their natural variation and their susceptibility to transformation as political.

The rhetorical invocation of “skin color” as a proxy for race in colorblind racial ideology strikes me as one instance in which truth claims regarding race masquerade as apolitical. The contemporary cultural logic that might claim race does not matter invokes “skin color” to stand in for race in order to signal the putatively inconsequential quality of racial classifications based on such arbitrary factors. This gesture, however, attempts to disaggregate skin color from an ensemble of other features, including political, historical, and material factors, to which a structure of difference articulated in racial terms remains quite relevant. The rhetorical gesture that reduces race to skin color and insists skin color does not matter suppresses our capacity to recognize how colorblindness itself reinstalls the skin into the dominant structure of power/knowledge by fortifying its capacity to articulate objective truths. In a similar fashion, the propagation of objectifying knowledge regarding hair texture, against the backdrop of assertions that differences between textures are real, but superficial, rather than fictive and political, opens onto the same horizon of possibilities as the reappraisal of skin color. While no one wants to oversubscribe to reductive versions of black cultural politics (i.e., assuming that dark skin and natural hair form the embodied conditions of possibility for antiracist praxis), we might employ performance as a framework that militates against the reifying tendencies of truth claims about race by bearing witness to the scenarios in which these claims achieve their efficacy as truth.

As an example of a contemporary knowledge project that offers opportunities to enact the cultural politics of blackness in a variety of ways through self-fashioning, I would identify the Andre Walker hair classification system. The Andre Walker system is a quasi-scientific method for categorizing texture according to the shape, appearance, and structure of individual strands and full heads of hair, including the hair’s resistance to normative beautification practices.[29] The first notable feature of the Walker system is that it takes for granted that women are the presumptive subjects of cosmetic haircare and that hair subject to prescribed forms of care belongs to women. This concession to the gender ideology of market capitalism is one of several contradictions that I will point out. Nonetheless, Walker’s system has come to my attention because of its manifest value in the lives of black women who employ it within a regimen of self-care.

Walker’s schema conjoins visual and haptic properties in ways that blur distinctions between the processes involved in growing, styling, and caring for hair (or leaving it alone) and their product: hair as an aspect of physical appearance that can only hypothetically be touched. Andre Walker, a celebrity hairstylist, came to prominence as the man behind Oprah Winfrey’s hair in the 1980s.[30] Walker’s photography-intensive 1997 book Andre Talks Hair articulated a four-part hair classification system (Type One: Straight, Type Two: Wavy, Type Three: Curly, Type Four: Kinky) with subtypes within each class that describe physical properties such as reflectivity, compressibility, heat tolerance, and moisture retention. While these properties are discernible within the everyday experiences of people across racialized and gendered lines, it is notable that intimate contact with black women’s hair is the Walker system’s point of departure. Oprah Winfrey ranks alongside Angela Bassett and Whoopi Goldberg with Type Four hair.[31] That the preponderance of black women inhabit Type Four, in the illustrations to his book and his examples, while white women and East Asian women populate Type One, is an apparently immaterial coincidence, according to Walker: “You can be African-American with naturally stick-straight hair, or you can be a kinky-haired Irish-American. And because our country is becoming such a multiracial hybrid, it just doesn’t make sense anymore to stick to such rigid definitions.”[32]

Walker’s rationale for disclaiming rigid racial classifications relies on a “grass-is always-greener” hypothesis, which rests on a false equivalency. The parallelism in his statement above equates one set of the many national origins submerged within American whiteness with the complex, recombinant blend of ethnicities that makes up African American (and, by extension, black and African Diasporic) racial identity. Because of the traumatic fragmentation of our knowledge regarding the ethnic heritage of our ancestors and the coerced patterns of reproduction that have produced our range of phenotypes, African American descendants of slaves do not enjoy the same benign indeterminacy regarding the historical roots of our various hair textures, eye colors, and other phenotypes that Irish Americans might. In the course of becoming African Americans, black captives and their enslaved progeny experienced a conversion, en masse, from paradigms of identification grounded in ethnicity to a regime of subjection ordered by race.[33] Within this same regime, due to the conventions of hypodescent by which “one drop” of “black blood” can identify a person as black rather than white, the unlikely presence of kinky hair might have engendered life-changing shifts in racial belonging for an Irish American and her or his descendants, at one point in history. Many historians would further emphasize that Irish American is hardly interchangeable with “white” to the degree that African American functions with respect to the term “black,” in the same national context.[34] To acknowledge that the Walker system is in fact grounded in preexisting understandings of racial identity, regardless of its author’s intentions, is not the same thing as asserting that this system is necessarily serviceable to white supremacy. The naturalization of hair texture according to the Walker system unsettles racialized conventions, in part, because it ascribes the manageability and resistance of hair—that is, discipline—across a range of phenotypes. By making racialized differences in hair texture a matter of universal knowledge and subjective problem-solving, it demystifies haircare for the market as well as the individual. By revalorizing differences in ostensibly apolitical terms, the system elides some of the political significance of the acts performed in and through black hair—political significance that is made legible by other self-styled identity practices. Even in its efforts to evacuate hair texture of its racial, political meanings, therefore, the Walker system recalls how black women perform disidentification through self-fashioning: enacting a variety of relationships to power through the selective deployment of the various meanings that the popular imagination ascribes to the choices they make about their features.[35]

At the very least, the Walker system takes part in undoing the pathology that describes varieties of black hair in its unvarnished state as inherently problematic by insisting, instead, that they can thrive with or without modification. On the terms of the dominant culture, however, “nappy” hair comprises as a demand for specific forms of care. In the same fashion, Ahmed and Stacey note that skincare regimens ultimately enumerate the ways in which “skin surfaces will always fail to be smooth” instead of attending to the various states, with or without modification, in which the skin acts as an interface with the world.[36] Knowledge made available through the hair and skin is only available insofar as it is touched by power, and it cannot escape politics. The studies and ongoing practices cited here demonstrate how skin and hair become overdetermined signs of racial, gender, age, and class identity when their meanings are constructed without deference to their bearers’ agency.

Blue Tone

Hair texture travels alongside and apart from skin color as an embodied and occasionally mutable phenotype subject to racial marginalization. Like skin color, hair texture has been fashioned into a shibboleth of essentialism, an archetype for resistance, and a site of self-care. Reifying these qualities has produced disastrous results in the lives of racialized and gendered subjects marked by them, including internalized oppression and violent pressure to conform. At the same time that the Walker system demonstrates how acts that reproduce authentic, authoritative knowledge about benign differences do not necessarily undermine racism, not all modes of self-fashioning that alter the embodied experience of identity are violent. Like haircare, skincare is often conscripted into the cultural politics of race, gender, class, and age in ways that construct the surface of the body as a source of information that must be disciplined into telling the truth. Emerging clinical discourse on differential skincare practices highlights how presenting moisturized skin functions as a means of performing health and self-knowledge in everyday life. By reifying the skin as the “true mirror of the age of a human being,” research driven by corporations like L’Oreal, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever compel the skin to attest to its demand for treatment.[37] Some studies aim to reconcile the feminized practice of adhering to skincare regimens with the market imperative of expanding their consumer base by establishing criteria that mark untreated skin as a hindrance to the presentation of healthy masculinity.[38] Others incorporate black knowledge about skincare into treatment regimens by appropriating black vernacular—namely, using the term “ashy” to refer to dryness—as a way of performing the internalization of a value system that places a premium on the presentation of moisturized skin.[39] While apparently shedding the negative connotations of terms like “nappy” and “ashy” by recuperating their descriptive value, these gestures also deactivate the terms’ power to invoke an intimate, intra-racial discursive space in order to place them in an objective, disciplinary frame of reference.

Whereas the practices of moisturizing and natural haircare are fraught with the risk of losing racially specific knowledge and techniques of self-care as they become commoditized, the practice of skin bleaching has a powerful legacy that extends beyond the violence it performs to the capacity of the body to tell truths about racial identity. As patterns observed in the history of hair straightening would suggest, skin bleaching is driven by economic and political forces that operate at the structural level where racial formation takes place as well as the individual and sub-individual scale on which self-presentation occurs. In the course of presenting and mediating discernible ethnic features, individuals employ ethical, medical, cultural, and intimate frames of reference to negotiate the racial systems that lend their physical features social significance.[40] Though it is challenging to reconcile a critique of the gendered structural racism that incentivizes light skin with the attention to the tactical and subjective priorities of the individuals who pursue these advantages, deference to these individuals’ agency demands that we construct knowledge about skin bleaching in the same conscientious way that has proven viable for understanding hair straightening.

In literature, George Schuyler’s prescient satire Black No More and memoirs by Toi Derricotte and Marita Golden speak to color complexes at the level of the skin.[41] These and other texts attest to dark and light skin as sites of knowledge production within blackness, and it would be compelling to explore them in another venue as counterpoint to the quasi-scientific knowledge that currently seeks to stake truth claims regarding skin color and texture. At present, it should be possible to draw some inferences that link the politics of hair and skin texture to skin color by drawing on the lessons learned from the inquiries above. Black hair, in its natural state or as the subject of alteration, resists its construction as “hair that fails to be straight.” Similarly, as dark skin resists its construction as “skin that fails to be light” on the bodies of persons who present it, it also becomes skin that yields to bleaching, on the bodies of other persons. It may do both for the same individual, as skin-lightening products have been marketed for the purpose of concealing blemishes or rendering the skin’s color uniform across an individual’s face or body parts.[42] By transposing the significance of part of the body onto the identity of the whole individual, marking him or (more often) her as “fair,” “healthy,” “typical” or “atypical,” or even “natural,” alterations to skin color and hair texture alike highlight how racial identification depends on the mediation of ethnic signifiers situated on the surface of the body.

The politics of skin texture are not only vexed by the troubled past of skin color and hair texture but also by the future. Differentials in the biophysical properties of the skin may come to supplement differentials of color among the ways in which we perform racial identity through our bodies.[43] As science works toward a concept of the skin as a “smart biological interface,” what practices will militate against the legacies of oppression bound up in the construction of smart subjects and “dumb” matter?[44] The clinical studies that portray “ashy” skin as a need for treatment tend to use the term interchangeably with the word “ashen,” recapitulating an obstacle to communicating knowledge about skin texture and appearance in racially differentiated language communities.[45] As many black writers who have worked with white editors and publishers can attest, “ashy” is not a synonym or corruption of “ashen,” yet the disciplines that propagate knowledge differentiating language communities in racial terms and the commodity-driven knowledge practices that produce skincare products seldom speak to one another. Finally, when it comes to the capacity of skin to register pain and the capacity of subjects to tolerate it, medical discourse reveals sharply racialized differentials in white practitioners’ willingness to perform empathy with black people’s need for care.[46] These and other quandaries continue to politicize black skin—the skin of black individuals—as a substrate for haptic practices of racial knowledge, even as political rhetoric disavows the problems associated with observing race in the visual field by pronouncing colorblindness. Although colorblind ideology eschews knowledge about the skin’s appearance by disavowing its reliance on visual perception, knowledge of skin texture proliferates with an undertheorized vigor. Perhaps knowing the skin through the sense of touch seems to evoke situations involving intimacy, reciprocity, and agency, rather than distant, disconnected visual surveillance? The process of apprehending knowledge about hair texture for public use suggests otherwise.

Like knowledge of hair texture and knowledge of skin color before it, constructing power/knowledge about skin texture involves staking ever more precise truth claims about deeply contested identity formations while marginalizing other ways of knowing through touch. Practices of self-care and vernacular frames of reference, such as intimacy, insofar as they allow racialized subjects to contest the defining power of meanings inscribed on our bodies, remain indispensable as venues for critical responses to dominant discourse on what blackness is and what it does. Thus, in the future, our critique of the biopolitics of race may benefit from cultural interventions inspired by considerations of skin texture, as the sense of touch attains a greater role in the propagation of racial knowledge and power.

Performances like “You Can Touch My Hair,” the inspired counterperformance that enacted a live critique of its presumptions, the movement among black women to cultivate their natural hair, and haircare practices from Madam Walker to Andre Walker demonstrate that whom you allow to touch your body matters. Black women’s interventions in culture and commerce have proven indispensable to confronting the forces implicated in the cultural politics of texture and resistance to certain forms of touch. The “Nappy Headed Blues” is a valuable touchstone for the cultural construction of the way it feels to be black, historically, but it has greater interpretive value in the present alongside performances that attest to the pleasure of having type four hair, kinky hair, hair that resists straightening. Whether our hair texture characterizes us in whole or in part, some of us are “happy to be nappy.”[47] Likewise, there is pleasure in black skin, particularly when its texture becomes known through intimacy, but it likewise bears witness to pain. It breaks, bleeds, and scars. As a complement to pleasure and pain, there is a repertoire of resistance in the texture of our skin that makes the blues an appropriate idiom for its presentation. From its resistance to the sun to its whip-scarred history and propensity to keloids, the ways in which the skin covering our black bodies yields and does not yield attests to its commonly human yet uniquely individuated texture. To know that our skin is black is only to define a part of our bodies and a part of our blackness. By emphasizing what it means to know our touch, I insist that knowledge about our bodies belongs to us, as people who may choose to make our touch known or to deny that privilege.