The societal pressures they feel to straighten their hair is intense.
In music videos, television news casts, and at school, my two step-daughters perceive that virtually every Black woman they see and/or know has chemically or mechanically straightened her hair. So, it ought not surprise me that my sixteen year-old step daughter, graduating from high school in three months, has taken advantage of her new decision-making authority not to choose a university or search for scholarships that suit her interests, but rather to pass an electric iron through her naturally long and wavy hair.
The desire and basic ability to maintain one's personal appearance is a sign of healthy self-esteem and a threshold indication of basic mental health. However, the compulsion to look like someone in a music video or to look just like white people is a psychological illness and a physical health risk and health hazard, as Michael Jackson clearly demonstrated.
Like too many teenagers, she doesn't value what makes her unique, but wishes she could be "just like everybody else." My wife and I have expressed our opinions to her since before she was an adolescent - that the pressure for Black women to straighten their hair is part of a determined effort by whites - in the media and even in job interviews - to assert that their hair, like everything else about them, is inherently better than Blacks' natural superficial physical characteristics.
(I know that many Black women and men were born with naturally straight hair and I am not talking about them, so let's not distract ourselves with questions that are irrelevant to this particular discussion.)
I'm talking about the tremendous pressure Black women feel to straighten their hair - at any cost - in order, effectively, to look more like white girls. (Some Black women, like my stepmy step-daughters, are born looking more like white girls because they have DNA from white people in their family genetic heritages.) However, long and wavy hair has not been enough for them. They want their hair to be perfectly straight.
This issue is not merely one of aesthetics. Here in Brazil, women use a process called "permanent progressive" wherein formaldehyde (a known carcinogen) is placed in the hair and then washed out. If two much formaldehyde is used or it is not washed out soon enough, Black women can literally die for straight hair. I reported such a case at the American Journal of Color Arousal (AMJCA) on August 14, 2009:
The television news report in this YouTube video says that 150 children per year die in Brazil while styling their hair, with 49% dying as the result of electrical shocks. “Parents should not allow their children to use these electrical mechanisms because of the risk of electrical shocks” says one professional interviewed on the news.
One of Brasil's top media outlets reported:
Women never stop efforts to become more beautiful. For centuries, they have been squeezing into corsets to keep their waists thin. In China and Japan, women bandaged their feet to make them smaller. Now the madness has gone beyond hair removal. Many women are putting their health (and their lives) in danger to keep the hair smooth and voluminous.The death of a 33 year-old housewife in Missouri, this week raised the controversy over the new hair straightening techniques. Maria Ení da Silva died after undergoing a escova progressiva (permanent straigtening). According to her family, she applied a mixture of cream and formaldehyde at a hairdressing salon on Saturday, March 17, and was directed not to wash her hair for three days. During this period, she complained of headaches, shortness of breath and itching. On Tuesday, March 20, she fell ill, was taken to two hospitals and died. Globo.Com
This story is particularly maddening for my wife and me. Last year, disobeying my wife’s firm and repeated decision, our youngest daughter went to a local store and bought an electrical hair straightener, because virtually all of the girls at her school electrically or chemically straighten their hair. The social pressure she feels to straighten hair is intense. When girls straighten their hair, their peers, boys, parents and community suddenly begin to say, “You look beautiful. You look so pretty with your hair straight.”
Since my wife and I are unable to convince our daughters that their hair is beautiful in its natural Black state, I have warned them not to straighten their hair in the bathroom, where the electric iron can fall on the floor and transmit 120 volts or 240 volts of electricity to girls' (and boys') wet feet, freeze them in their tracks and electrocute them, causing them to fall on the floor where the electricity burns their bodies in a different place every time they twist and turn, trying to free themselves from the force of their store-bought electric chairs.
What Black girls don't realize is that white girls have this hair witair without endangering their lives, while for Black girls there is danger, expense and time wasted that could otherwise be spent choosing a college and getting better grades that would lead to full scholarships. While white girls prepare for professions, Black girls strain to look like white girls or like Black girls with white genetic heritage.
Sad, but true.
crossposted on Holy Bullies and Headless Monsters
No doubt it will repeat his distorted tale of being fired from AllState because he wrote an anti-gay column (which utilized the discredited work of Paul Cameron) "on his own time."
The tale is a distortion because Barber used company equipment to write the columnn and he also identified himself as an employee of AllState; two facts that always seem to be excluded from the religious right telling of the story.
This book leaves me conflicted for two reasons:
1. I don't want to wish any ill will on anyone, especially someone who is working hard on a book. Having had to self-publish one myself, I know how difficult it is to do such. Barber didn't have to work as hard as I did because he worked his connections. And I admire that just a little. Barber parlayed his AllState factoid into a cushy position at Concerned Women for America, the Liberty Counsel, and now a book with mentions by Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee.
You have to admire his chutzpah; that is if you ignore his basic disregard for truth.
2. Far be it from me to make comments on someone's personal appearance, but I have to say it. Barber looks like a Las Vegas lounge singer.
Oh come on. Can't you just picture him in a sleazy dive somewhere off of the Vegas strip singing some off-key version of a Frank Sinatra song with a phony Italian accent in front of a bevy of half naked female dancers where he will be followed by an awful comedian whose top pops off in the middle of her routine?
This is the guy who is fighting a culture war for the preservation of so-called American values? A guy who looks like a rejected character from Showgirls?
Seriously though, I'm sure the book will get lots of attention. And this isn't a good thing because Barber doesn't bring anything new to the table. He is yet another phony religious right expert who will exploit the Christian beliefs for his own purposes via peddling the same old lies.
Case in point, a recent One News Now article which inaccurately claims that he debunked a recent study which proved that children in lgbt households suffer no adverse effects:
Matt Barber of Liberty Counsel tells OneNewsNow that the conclusions are totally false. He points to another massive study conducted by homosexual researchers at the University of California.
"The preponderance of studies shows that girls raised by lesbian so-called 'parents' are more sexually adventurous or less chaste. They're more likely to experiment and try lesbianism to self-identify as lesbians," Barber notes. "[And] boys raised by homosexual men have a fluid concept of gender roles and are more likely to engage in the homosexual lifestyle."
How in the world does Barber conclude that the pro-lgbt parenting study is false? Not only does he not give proof of this but he also doesn't give the name of the study which he says refutes it.
I emailed Barber asking which study he was referring to and of course I didn't receive an answer.
But after a little research, I discovered which study he was referring to; a 2001 study conducted by researchers Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz.
And I think the reason why Barber didn't give any information regarding the study is because the way he distorted it has been debunked on numerous occasions by Stacey herself, as this link will show.
And as far as his other claims regarding "domestic violence" and a "short lifespan," those are lies peddled by the religious right for the past 30 years and have been easily refuted by so many others, me included.
But why in the heck should Barber care about truth? He has a book deal and more prominence.
That's all that matters, right?
Related posts:
How religious right groups distort legitimate research to demonize the gay community
Dissecting a One News Now article
A case here has captured the attention of local media and has exposed the pathological world of the closet, and the hypocrisy and jealousy of an anti-gay pastor who allegedly took the life of an North Carolina Central Unival University student Latrese Curtis, who was "in the way" between him and his roommate, who was the object of the Pentacostal minister's sexual obsession. (WRAL):
Robert Lee Adams Reaves is charged with first-degree murder in the January 2008 stabbing death of Latrese Matral Curtis, 21. rivers discovered her body the morning of Jan. 30, 2008, along Interstate 540 near Louisburg Road. She was stabbed nearly 40 times in the head, neck, chest and stomach. See the autopsy report.
Prosecutors have said in previous court hearings that Reaves killed Curtis in a jealous rage because she was having a sexual relationship with his roommate, Steven Randolph, who had rebuffed Reaves' advances.
"Bishop" Robert Reaves of Cedar International Fellowship in Durham has had a checkered past that would have raised some red flags in his congregation.
Reaves, Wake County Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Lindow said in opening statements, has a long history of trying to mentor young men and make sexual advances toward them.
"Steven was not the first person Reaves made sexual advances on," she said. "The same pattern about approaching young men started years earlier and ended with the death of what he viewed as an obstacle to that - Latrese Curtis."
Yes, Reaves must have been preaching anti-gay bigotry even as he engaged in illegal activities that include criminal sexual conduct in Marlboro County, S.C. He was convicted of third-degree sex charges on Jan. 1, 1988. He was also charged with simple assault and battery in 1982 in South Carolina.
Testimony has begun in the trial, and Steven Randolph, who is a former N.C. Central University basketball player took the stand and said that he engaged in a sexual relationship with Curtis, who was separated from her husband, and when Reaves found out about this, it made him fly into a rage, allegedly leading to the brutal slaying of Ms. Curtis.
Apparently Randolph had already been on the receiving end of sexual advances by the closeted pastor and alleged predatory behavior spun out of control.
Hours after Randolph had his first sexual encounter with Curtis, Reaves asked him about his sexual habits and preferences and raised the possibility of his working for an escort service, according to testimony..."He asked me if I was a freak, as far as sexually," Randolph testified Thursday.
Randolph testified that in the fall of 2007 he did not immediately recognize the pastor's proposals as sexual advances toward him. But Randolph said once he realized Reaves' intentions, he told the pastor he was not homosexualosexual or bisexual.
That encounter made Randolph so uneasy, he testified, that he not only left the house immediately to seek refuge with friends, he also got a gun from his cousin to keep in his bedroom.
Randolph told of an unusual string of events in the ensuing months: His girlfriend received phone calls from unidentified young men, threatening to end Randolph's aspirations of becoming a professional basketball player; his tires were slashed; and weeks later his girlfriend's tires were slashed outside her home.
In even more sordid detail, Randolph also testified that Reaves, during one of the propositions for sex, told the basketball player that he could live rent-free in the house if Reaves could perform oral sex on him.
Again, here we see a pious man of the cloth, unable to reconcile his tortured worlds of religious indoctrination and his homosexuality, turns into an alleged deviant predator -- and murderer.
Legally, it's not looking good for the Durham pastor -- a Wake County sheriff found a knife in Reaves's car.
"It would have been the very back passenger seat," Deputy Alfred Sternberg said. "If you go behind that, there's a rail for where that seat is, and that's where it was."
And his DNA was on the murder victim's steering wheel, according to the forensics experts in Friday's testimony.
Randolph's testimony
Rod McCullom has been following this story for a while; check out his take.
News Report on case: http://www.wral.com/news/local...
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