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| The poem is possibly shoddy, yet was flabbergasted by the Research, which includes:?African American, Japanese, Dominican Republic, Mulatto, etc.?Much to fit in, yet it contains my main point, I hope, spent hours on research etc., so ready to be done and get the information within your reach.?I was a student of African American Literature, and don't address it enough.I have African Americankinky hairin the paststraightenedto blendinto What?1865Slavery ended.1872hair iron invented.Mulatto'sduring Slaverymore proned to Rapehad straighter hair.Slavery endedwe triedto iron out the Difference.African American Womentried to look White.Caucasion Womentried to look Whiter.2008One Hundred Forty Three Years laterwho owns who Now?copyright trixy
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Q: My son is mulatto.Although I keep it very short so that it will lie down, he is starting to ask to let it grow out.His hair is thick, coarse and wavy but straight in some places.Is there any product that he can use to make it straight, soft and moveable once it is long?What about a straightener?His hair isn't as coarse as a full-blooded African-American but it's not as soft or moveable as a Caucasian's either.?Wednesday, May 7, 2008BooksWorld U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion ArtsStyle Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos Art & Design BooksBest-Seller Lists First Chapters Dance Movies Music Television Theater Straighten Up E-MAIL Print Save ShareDiggFacebookMixxYahoo!BuzzPermalink?By THOMAS FLEMING Published: July 13, 2003
HER DREAM OF DREAMS The Rise and Triumph of Madam C. J. Walker.By Beverly Lowry.Illustrated.481 pp.New York: Alfred A. Knopf.$27.50.ROUGH AMUSEMENTS The True Story of A'Lelia Walker, Patroness of the Harlem Renaissance's Down-Low Culture.By Ben Neihart.210 pp.New York: Bloomsbury.$21.95.AT the center of both ''Her Dream of Dreams'' and ''Rough Amusements'' is the uniquely American story of Sarah Breedlove, a larger-than-life black woman born in 1867, the child of ex-slaves, on a sliver of Louisiana that jutted into the surging Mississippi.Orphaned at 7, married at 14, a mother at 17, Sarah could have been and by any measurable odds should have been a faceless statistic of the traumatized, disease-ridden post-Civil War South.She should have been cut down by the yellow fever, cholera and malaria that rampaged through her youth.Or drowned in the almost annual overflows of the Father of Waters that swept so many away.She could have become a victim of the explosions of white rage that left African-Americans floating face down in the brackish river or charred corpses in their torched shacks.But she survived.She went on to endure thousands of hours over washtubs in Vicksburg, where she shed one husband, and St. Louis, where she shed another and buried two babies.For some unaccountable reason, she never lost an inner faith that she was destined for better things.To her own and everyone else's amazement, things became better and better for this strong-willed, remarkably persuasive woman.After a brief period of selling another black woman's products for straightening African-American hair, she invented her own formula, headed for Denver, where she acquired another husband, C.+J. Walker, a shrewd, glib promoter, and began selling her remedy door-to-door.Within a decade, she was Madam C. J. Walker, the most successful black entrepreneur in America.In 1919 she died of diabetes in a magnificent mansion in Irvington-on-the-Hudson, with John D. Rockefeller as a near neighbor.Freed of her mother's often domineering voice, Walker's daughter, Lelia McWilliams, soon launched another legend: Harlem's bejeweled, fur-dripping queen, who threw off husbands with magical ease and staged fabulous bacchanals where black and white artists and people of every conceivable sexual inclination met to mock the bourgeoisie from dusk to dawn.Then came the day of the locust, the fateful Oct. 24, 1929, when the stock market crashed and the gray specter of the Great Depression brought everything -- capitalist success, jewels, furs, mansions, art -- into question.For the first 200 pages of ''Her Dream of Dreams,'' Beverly Lowry makes Sarah Breedlove's story a riveting, wrenching drama.The author of six novels, Lowry is best known for her memoir, ''Crossing Over,'' about her struggle to find meaning in the hit-and-run death of her son by reaching out to a woman ax murderer on Texas' death row.Now head of the creative nonfiction program at George Mason University, Lowry undertakes to tell Sarah's story by relying on the methods of the biographer.She triumphs in these early pages, finding in obscure archives facts about Sarah's parents and their antebellum white owners, a forgotten husband and a startling number of hitherto unknown Breedlove relatives who helped Sarah survive in St. Louis.Along the way we are given a fascinating look at the black world of the late 19th century, with its surprisingly affluent, churchgoing mulatto leaders and its dominant figure, Booker T. Washington, ''the Wizard'' of the Tuskegee Institute.He preached hard work, patience and submission to Jim Crow and even worse abuses until some distant day when whites would recognize blacks as worthy of equality.Lowry writes with brio and enthusiasm.She lures us into the story with clever flash-forwards to Sarah's days of triumph.She makes no secret of her contempt for compromisers like Booker T., even while Madame relentlessly pursues him for an endorsement.Although she could not even spell her name correctly when she incorporated her company (''Sarrah''), we are awed by her determination and astute use of better- educated black men and women to overcome her deficiencies.Lowry makes us understand why Madame trumpeted her annual earnings and angled for resolutions by the National Association of Colored Women acclaiming her as the outstanding businesswoman of her race.This self-glorification was necessary in an America that remained stubbornly unconvinced of black ability.Lowry relentlessly tells us how many blacks were lynched each year and quotes Woodrow Wilson's bland defense of segregation throughout the government as a social cleavage that ''unfortunately corresponds with the racial line.''
The second half of the book is not nearly so successful.Surrounding Sarah Breedlove Walker with historical facts and statistics wears thin because Lowry seldom connects her to them.The documentation of Walker's life is scanty to the point of evanescence.The book cries out for the fictional techniques Lowry used in ''Crossing Over'' to take us into Sarah's mind and heart.Not even her decision to jettison C. J. Walker has emotional content.We get only glimpses of an inner self until the close of her life, when she begins to talk about using her success and money to improve the lot of her race.She abandons the Wizard for the aggressive tactics of the N.A.A.C.P. By this time the reader is groggy from lists of cities Madame visited on her latest cross-country trip.A reprinting of almost three pages of ''hints'' issued for her saleswomen is an eye-glazer.But Sarah's remarkable journey manages to triumph over these lapses, and her death in her dream of dreams on the Hudson is deeply moving.Ben Neihart's ''Rough Amusements'' is like a jazz riff on Lowry's celebration in symphonic historical chords.The book opens in 1930, three months after the crash, with A'Lelia McWilliams (she added the A' after her mother died) and her entourage attending one of the classic events of Roaring Twenties Harlem, the Faggots Ball at the Manhattan Casino on West 155th Street.Neihart's two previous novels about gay men on the town revealed a writer with a wicked eye and a syncopated, frequently electrifying style.The spectacle of the Faggots Ball dance floor packed with five or six thousand cross dressers sends him into overdrive: ''Hundreds of queens . . .came as Spanish seoritas in black-and-red ruffles, twirling frilly parasols; as trampy showgirls cinched into iridescent silver gowns, bewigged and capped by ostrich-feather headpieces; as kimono-clad geishas, powdered white, with silky straight black hair; as Floradora chorus girls, imported from the London operetta.A few black queens dressed as exaggerated minstrel show Topsys fresh from 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'In ragged dresses and broken shoes, hair knotted wild, they would turn to each other with a delirious, angry edge to their voices and shout: 'Law Missis!This pahtay's fulla white folk!'''
Crammed into this short book is a penetrating backward look at the Harlem Renaissance.We meet Langston Hughes, the gifted poet who is A'Lelia's ''dear genius,'' and Carl Van Vechten, the gayest of gay dandies, who featured her in his novel ''Nigger Heaven.'' There is a plot of sorts -- A'Lelia is warned that Dutch Schultz and his mobsters are planning to kidnap her for ransom.But nothing much comes of it, beyond glimpses of Dutch and his gang, drinking themselves unto ossification.We are also told a great deal about the sporting life, a bachelor's approach to pleasure in New York, and favorite hangouts of the sports, notably the Slide at 157 Bleecker Street, where decadence reigned supreme.In his fascination with New York's moral contradictions, Neihart largely loses track of A'Lelia and spends pages with an aging transvestite, Jennie June, who sings a self-pitying song to the assembled cavorters and narrates to various listeners her frequently violent encounters with soldiers, sailors and Bowery Boys.Remembered too are blissful liaisons with more refined types, like Walt Whitman's ''adopted son.''
The Faggots Ball remains a backdrop for Jennie's monologues but A'Lelia cuts out, inviting dozens of friends to a private party at her luxurious town house on West 136th Street.In the end it is Jennie June who encounters Dutch's mobsters.The syncopated prose dwindles to an almost perfunctory wail as beautiful, spoiled A'Lelia dies a year later and, symbolically speaking, so does the Harlem Renaissance and Madam Walker's dream of dreams.Neihart comes no closer to getting inside A'Lelia's head and heart than Lowry does her mother's.The final word on both books might well be a thought that strays into Langston Hughes's head as he ponders A'Lelia's troubled life: Maybe it would take a gifted black novelist like Zora Neale Hurston ''to tackle the story of A'Lelia and her mother.''
This is interesting:
Quote: Old wounds inform clash of race and image in Dominican Republic Candace Barbot/Miami Herald
By Frances Robles McClatchy Newspapers July 26, 2007 SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic --Yara Matos sat still while long, shiny locks from China were fastened, bit by bit, to her coarse hair.Not that Matos has anything against her natural curls, even though Dominicans call that pelo malo -- bad hair."If you're working in a bank, you don't want some barrio-looking hair.Straight hair looks elegant," the bank teller said."It's not that as a person of color I want to look white.I want to look pretty." |
| I want to look pretty."And to many in the Dominican Republic, to look pretty is to look less black.Dominican hairdressers are internationally known for the best hair-straightening techniques.Store shelves are lined with rows of skin whiteners, hair relaxers and extensions.Racial identification here is thorny and complex, defined not so much by skin color but by the texture of your hair, the width of your nose and even the depth of your pocket.The richer, the "whiter."And, experts say, it is fueled by a rejection of anything black."I always associated black with ugly.I was too dark and didn't have nice hair," said Catherine de la Rosa, a dark-skinned Dominican-American college student spending a semester here."With time passing, I see I'm not black.I'm Latina."At home in New York, everyone speaks of color of skin.Here, it's not about skin color.It's culture."The only country in the Americas to break free of black colonial rule (it had been controlled by neighboring Haiti), the Dominican Republic still shows signs of racial wounds more than 200 years later.Presidents historically encouraged Dominicans to embrace Spanish Catholic roots rather than African ancestry.Here, as in much of Latin America, the "one-drop rule" works in reverse: One drop of white blood allows even very dark-skinned people to be considered white.As black intellectuals here try to muster a movement to embrace the nation's African roots, they acknowledge that it has been a mostly fruitless cause.Black pride organizations such as Black Woman's Identity fizzled for lack of widespread interest.There was outcry in the media when the Brotherhood of the Congos of the Holy Spirit -- a community with roots in
Africa -- was declared an oral patrimony of humanity by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)."There are many times that I think of just leaving this country because it's too hard," said Juan Rodriguez Acosta, curator of the Museum of the Dominican Man. Acosta, who is black, has pushed for the museum to include controversial exhibits that reflect many Dominicans' African background."But then I think: Well, if I don't stay here to change things, how will things ever change?"A walk down city streets shows a nation where black and dark-skinned people vastly outnumber white people; most estimates say 90 percent of Dominicans are black or of mixed race.Yet census figures say only 11 percent of the country's 9 million people are black.To many Dominicans, to be black is to be Haitian.So dark-skinned Dominicans tend to describe themselves as any of the dozen or so racial categories that date back hundreds of years -- Indian, burned Indian, dirty Indian, washed Indian, dark Indian, cinnamon, moreno or mulatto, but rarely negro.The Dominican Republic is not the only nation with so many words to describe skin color.Asked in a 1976 census survey to describe their own complexions, Brazilians came up with 136 different terms, including cafe au lait, sunburned, morena, Malaysian woman, singed and "toasted.""The Cuban (black person) was told he was black.The Dominican (black person) was told he was Indian," said Dominican historian Celsa Albert, who is black."I am not Indian.That color does not exist.People used to tell me, 'You are not black.'If I am not black, then I guess there are no (black people) anywhere, because I have curly hair and dark skin."Using the word Indian to describe dark-skinned people is an attempt to distance Dominicans from any African roots, Albert and other experts said.She noted that it's not even historically accurate: The country's Taino Indians were virtually annihilated in the 1500s, shortly after Spanish colonizers arrived.Researchers say the de-emphasizing of race in the Dominican Republic dates to the 1700s, when the sugar plantation economy collapsed and many slaves were freed and rose up in society.Later came the rocky history with Haiti, which shares the island of Hispaniola.Haiti's slaves revolted against the French and in 1804 established their own nation.In 1822, Haitians took over the entire island, ruling the predominantly Hispanic Dominican Republic for 22 years.To this day, the Dominican Republic celebrates its independence not from cen-turies-long colonizer Spain, but from Haiti."The problem is Haitians developed a policy of black-centrism and ...Dominicans don't respond to that," said scholar Manuel Nunez, who is black."Dominican is not a color of skin, like the Haitian."Dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled from 1930 to 1961, strongly promoted anti-Haitian sentiments and is blamed for creating the many racial categories that avoided the use of the word "black."The practice continued under President Joaquin Balaguer, who often complained that Haitians were "darkening" the country.In the 1990s, he was blamed for thwarting the presidential aspirations of leading black candidate Jose Francisco Pena Gomez by spreading rumors that he was Haitian.To some of the women who relax their hair, it's simply a way to have soft, manageable hair in the Dominican Republic's stifling humidity.But several women said the cultural rejection of African-looking hair is so strong that people often shout insults at women with natural curls."I cannot take the bus because people pull my hair and stick combs in it," said wavy-haired performance artist Xiomara Fortuna."They ask me if I just got out of prison.People just don't want that image to be seen."The hours spent on hair extensions and painful chemical straightening treatments are actually an expression of nationalism, said Ginetta Candelario, who studies the complexities of Dominican race and beauty at Smith College in Massachusetts."It's not self-hate," Candelario said."Going through that is to love yourself a lot.That's someone saying, 'I am going to take care of me.' It's nationalist, it's affirmative and celebrating self."Money, education, class -- and, of course, straight hair -- can make dark-skinned Dominicans be perceived as more "white," she said.Many black Dominicans here say they never knew they were black until they visited the United States."During the Trujillo regime, people who were dark skinned were rejected, so they created their own mechanism to fight it," said Ramona Hernandez, director of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College in New York."When you ask, 'What are you?' they don't give you the answer you want ... saying we don't want to deal with our blackness is simply what you want to hear."Hernandez, who has olive-toned skin and a long mane of hair she blows out straight, acknowledges she would "never, never, never" go to a university meeting with her natural curls."That's a woman trying to look cute; I'm a sociologist," she said.Purdue University professor Dawn Stinchcomb, who is African-American, said people insulted her in the street when she traveled to the Dominican Republic in 1999 to study African influences in literature.Waiters refused to serve her.People wouldn't help Stinchcomb with her research, saying if she wanted to study Africans, she'd have to go to Haiti."I had people on the streets ... yell at me to get out of the sun because I was already black enough.It was hurtful.I was raised in the South and thought I could handle any racial comment.I never before experienced anything like I did in the Dominican Republic."I don't have a problem when people who don't look like me say hurtful things.But when it's people who look just like me?" ?Wednesday, September 14, 2005Japanese hair-straightening: The follow-up?Kei has responded to my request for information about the seemingly oxymoronic, or at the very least improbable, "Japanese hair-straightening" trend.Her post is complete with pictures of and references to ethnically Japanese women who do, in fact, straighten their hair:
Phoebe asked, "Is it just that the minority in Japan without naturally straight hair feel especially bad about it, leading to an especially efficient hair-straightening process to fill that niche?"Basically, the answer is YES.I am one of the minority that Phoebe speaks of; I was annoyed by my not-straight hair, and yes, this especially efficient hair-straightening process was created for people like me........I will say this in it and other relaxing techniques' defense: it may not seem a big deal to people with straight hair, or people who don't care about straightening their or anyone else's hair.Rather, these processes mean more to the people who want their hair stick-straight.Speaking from experience, I can say that it does make a significant difference to all of a sudden have manageable hair, and to not have to spend 30-45 minutes straightening your hair before you go to bed, before you go out, etc.
Read her whole post.I say this not only because I'm amused that someone of Japanese heritage has the exact same concerns about her hair (too poufy, too inconsistently wavy) as I do, but because she really does shed light on 1) the subtle things people want to change about their appearances, things no one else would notice--hair that would seem straight to someone non-Asian might seem excessively poufy to the person whose hair it is; and 2) the fact that women of all ethnic backgrounds apparently straighten their hair.The women you see walking around NYC, if not elsewhere, with stick-straight hair do not, by and large, come by it naturally.That African-American women often straighten their hair is common knowledge, and apparently there's a special term, "jair," for the straightened hair of Jewish women.("Apparently" as in the NYT Style section heard one person say it and thus suggests it's a commonly-used term).But I also know women with ethnic backgrounds ranging from WASP to South American who straighten their hair, so hair-straightening is by no means just a Japanese, black, and Jewish thing.Why is this so significant?Because hair often is seen as a political issue--natural and proud of one's heritage versus artificial and self-hating.But if many, many women of all backgrounds are doing it, at most it can be seen as a political issue insofar as men of all backgrounds seem to be spared from this particular chore.But as I see it, even if the fashion of straight hair comes from a desire to "look white" (absurd, given how few white people have naturally stick-straight hair, but I suppose not unlike the trend of blondness in that respect), society is improving if not only is this physical trait something that can be bought, but is something that even white and Asian women are buying.Natural versus unnatural ceases to matter, which, while it might sound upsetting for those reared on the rhetoric of Whole Foods, is actually a good thing in this case.I'd rather live in a society where, for a small amount of money, the desired look can be achieved, than one in which racial purity determines who's considered attractive |
| I'd rather live in a society where, for a small amount of money, the desired look can be achieved, than one in which racial purity determines who's considered attractive |
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 July 2008 )
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