Lisa Allen-Agos­ti­ni

My girl Nadel­la Ben­jamin-Ri­ley post this thing on Face­book that had me so vex, I thought my head was go­ing to ex­plode:"To­day some­one told me that my son's hair looks bad."They said it three times in front of him, look­ing at him, even though they were ad­dress­ing me. They said it needs to be trimmed to make it less 'un­even' and neater. That it looks dirty and un­kempt. They went on and on about the rea­sons why it should be shaped and cut."It took mas­sive strength for me to re­main calm and ra­tio­nal. You see, Cu­ba has my hair type. I ex­plained as best I could that we have a mixed her­itage and this is how our hair is. And will al­ways be. We were BORN this way. We have a mix­ture of straight, curly, coily, wavy, kinky, dark brown, dusty brown, black and red (prop­er rogue strands of bright RED/or­ange) hair.

No mat­ter how you cut it or trim it, shape it or style it, press it out, ap­ply heat or chem­i­cals our dif­fer­ing hair strands are go­ing to bend back in­to their nat­ur­al hap­py curv­ing (del­i­cate curves or phone cord coils)."She bet­ter than me. I would of tell that man in my best Bish­op's ac­cent what to do with he opin­ion so he wouldn't of even know is cuss he get cuss. Be­cause hair is a fun­ny thing with me and my fam­i­ly and when it come to peo­ple telling me about my chil­dren hair, I doesn't eat nice at all.My big girl is now 20 and the lit­tle one is 13. Both of them have nat­ur­al hair; I my­self have nat­ur­al hair right now be­cause every few years I does chop it off and start over with the hair God put on my head. I find it ent have noth­ing wrong with my hair or them hair, or Nadel­la hair or she chil­dren hair nei­ther.Black peo­ple have a range of "nor­mal" hair and all of we might be dif­fer­ent but that don't mean some­thing wrong with we hair.When I was first work­ing in the news­pa­pers, when I was in my ear­ly 20s, is a good thing no­body nev­er put God out their thoughts and tell me to comb my hair. I was go­ing through a no-comb phase at the time and rock­ing a big nap­py afro. When it grow out, like how it is all now so, I used to leave it out and it would roll up in a ball of fuzzy curls.

When I was small, my moth­er beat me to make me go and comb out them self-same curls, and I hear she flip out a time be­cause my big sis­ter put she hair in "picky plaits," as my moth­er used to call them. That shame of be­ing too black is the root of all this non­sense about hav­ing your hair "neat." Re­spectable black women used to straight­en their hair or wear a wig and a man would ei­ther grease he hair down, straight­en it or shave it off. But them days long gone.No­body can't tell me noth­ing about my hair, nah. And worse yet my chil­dren. Every Sat­ur­day when they was small we used to wash and air-dry we hair, go­ing and do­ing what­ev­er we had to do with we hair open.As far as I con­cerned, peo­ple who have straight hair doesn't make no fuss about whether they have their hair in a bun, hang­ing loose or in a braid. Why I must take on a bur­den that them ent study­ing?

I find to tell chil­dren they have to have their hair "neat"–mean­ing straight, grease down or tie up–in this day and age is one of the most back­ward things any­body could do. We didn't fight that fight 40 years go? We moth­er and fa­ther didn't have big big afros to make a point about black hair be­ing beau­ti­ful? So why, Lord, we still hear­ing this rub­bish from peo­ple?Nadel­la write in she post:"I don't sup­port look­ing un­kempt. I do en­cour­age per­son­al care. And above all I in­sist on lov­ing your­self. Each and every part. Each child de­serves that much. And most adults."And the peo­ple around them, that sup­pos­ed­ly love them will just have to ac­cept them as they were born. And not try to make them feel they must change what is nat­ur­al and God-giv­en to ap­pear more of any­thing to any­one. Just be your true self. And rock your 'fro."

Right on, sis­ter.