TWSP Ep2 - Sitting Between The Knees: Work What Your Mama Gave You!

Sitting between our mother’s knees getting our hair done was a time when lots of information, knowledge, and coded talk was passed along to black girl children about beauty, womanhood, self-esteem, self-love, and self-protection. Lots of policing our appearance, speech, and sexuality with pressure to be good girls, respectable ladies – not the kind who makes the rest of us “look bad.” Getting and keeping our hair “fixed” or “done”  was our first and most important strategy as girls on how to avoid the racist, classist, and sexist stereotypes other people might put us into.

Before all that wisdom and knowledge could be passed along, there was the detangling process. A black girl’s hair has to be detangled before it can put back right. Many Black women have experienced the horrific childhood moments of sitting in between our mother’s legs as she combed through our hair which involved lots of tugging, tears, and even a few love touches to the head. Detangling. Deconstructing. Decolonizing. Demythologizing. Demystifying. Breaking stuff down. Hair texture mattered, but what we now know is that product and the proper tools matter too. You learn that if you have the right  -- detangling moisturizer, the proper brush and comb-- and patience, detangling becomes a breeze! In this episode, the hair docs specialize in the ministry of detangling the politics of Black hair for Black women facing the double bind of caring for their hair and resisting hair discrimination. (Intro/Outro Music provided by Epidemic Sound: Sunday by Ballpoint)