African American Hair and its role in Advertising, Black
Women′s Careers, and Consumption Behavior

by: Sandra Radtke

Table of Contents

Prologue page 1

1. The History of African American Hair  page 2

2. Advertisements for African American Hair Care Products

2.1. Early Advertisements by White-owned Companies  page 6
2.2. Early Advertisements by Black-owned Companies  page 12
2.3. Current Advertisements pages 14

3. Hair Care as a Career Choice page 15

4. Black Women’s Magazines page 18

Epilogue page 21

Prologue

Ever smell fried hair?
It ain′t like when your hair
catches on fire from a careless light
and it ain′t like if you burned
your dog′s coat picking ticks
with a flaming match
Not exactly, anyhow.
It′s kinda like that
but you add a lot of
Dixie Peach and burn it in
with a red hot comb.
Careful near the ears…
(From “She press huh hair” by Gregory Millard)

In this paper for the seminar The American Culture of Consumption, I want to deal with the complex topic of African American hair. In 1992, African Americans bought 34% of all sold hair care products in the United States. They spent thrice as much money on this than any other customer group. The majority of the purchased products were hair relaxers. (Rooks, p.117)

These are only figures but they demonstrate how important hair is to African Americans. I want to explain the roots of this significance in the first chapter and show how the way hair was rated changed during the times of slavery. Then, I want to examine advertisements for black hair treatment products by white- and black-owned firms to find out if they differ in their strategies and how strong their influence on the consumers was and still is. The third chapter will deal with hair dressing as a career choice. In conclusion, I would like to provide answers for the question why African Americans might feel the urge to change their hair’s texture at all.

1. The History of African American Hair

Hair has always been extremely significant in terms of society, aesthetics, and spirit in all African cultures. As Patterson points out, it was socially important because it communicated age, marital status, ethnic identity, religion, wealth, geographic origin, and rank in the social hierarchy. Young girls from the Wolof culture in Senegal, for example, partially shaved their hair to show that they were not courting. Likewise, widowed women would not take care of their hair anymore during their period of mourning so that they would not attract other men. Royalty would often wear hats or elaborate hairstyles to emphasize their status. (http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/Projects/Fall02/Patterson/History.html) Of course, hair also has a high aesthetic value. Especially West African communities praise long, thick hair on women because it symbolizes the power of life, prosperity, and promises many healthy children. It is also expected that the hair is clean, neat, and well styled, e.g. in cornrows or other braids, especially with beads or shells. Many Africans believe that hair is the way to communicate with the higher being since the hair is the most elevated point of the body and therefore the closest to the Divine. This is also the origin of the belief that a single strand of hair can be used to put spells on other people. (http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/Projects/Fall02/Patterson/History.html)

Likewise, the importance of hair can be found in African American literature, for example in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Here, “hair becomes another character in the novel” as Mary Helen Washington claims. (cited in Rooks, p.7) Indeed, hair is a significant symbol for the protagonist’s (‘Janie’) development. It represents her strength and independence from the standards of the people in her community, who feel it is inappropriate for a woman of her age to wear it down. Her braid, which is described in phallic terms, implies her masculine power that threatens the men on her side. Most interesting, it is a symbol of whiteness as it is very straight. This sign for her being half- white is the reason why Jody, her husband, marries her. But he forces her to hide her hair under a rag and thus symbolically turns her into a servant. After his death, Janie takes the rag off and regains her independence and strength. (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/eyes/themes.html)

Obviously, the novel applies many of the connotations that hair has among Africans and African Americans. It functions as a symbol for strength and freedom. In my opinion, the fact that Janie’s smooth hair makes her more attractive for Jody shows that many African Americans have internalized what the whites and their advertisements claimed, namely that African hair is not as beautiful as Caucasian hair. Howsoever, the normal relationship between Africans and their state of hair was disturbed by the slave trade when their hair texture and the color of their skin became nothing else but the determiner for race. Physical characteristics were linked to intelligence, civilized behavior, and sometimes even to humanity. This theory can be found, for example, in Charles Hamilton Smith’s book named Natural History of the Human Species, where he writes that “the typical woolly haired races have never discovered an alphabet, framed a grammatical language, nor made the least step in science or art”. (Rooks, p. 38) This reference to the different appearance of Africans, or African Americans respectively, was supposed to prove their mental disadvantages and therefore served as an excuse for slavery and racial discrimination. Slaveholders began to refer to their slaves as ‘woolly-haired’ to link them to animals and thus to justify the inhumane way in which they were treated. (http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/Projects/Fall02/Patterson/History.html)

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