naturalista...

I am not anti-straight. And actually I'm not pro-natural. If you want to rock a perm, texturizer, weave, press, jheri curl (well not really), whatever, I have no problem with it. As long as your hair is healthy and is fly...do you, darling.

However, I am natural. And as a natural, I feel compelled to say, that there is a reason I like natural over the others. When I was a child, I grew up with a head full of hair so thick it was praised and hated. So I felt like when it was in a more manageable state it was better. It just so happened that manageable meant straight. And because of that I began to think that straighter was better. Not that straighter hair meant I looked like a white girl, because when my hair was in its biggest and most out moments, I can hear my family members exclamations of "Whooo, that chile' got all that hair". It wasn't a negative, it was just a lot.

I think that while it's fine to praise other styles of hair, we need to also praise the basic state of our hair. That's where we go wrong. We say it's beady-beads, buckshots, napps, and a whole slew of other negative terms. But regardless of what you call it, that doesn't change the fact that it's YOUR HAIR. And while you have the ability to alter it and change it as you see fit...when all that is gone you will still be left with YOUR HAIR. And how does that make you feel? I know someone women who'd panic if they had to deal with their natural hair, and the kicker is they probably don't really know what it looks like.

What if there was never lye, or a pressing comb? What then? We'd all be accepting of what we have, because it would be all we know. Since we have options (and I'm all for them), we've immediately latched onto other things rather than learning to accept our own hair and then moving on to options.

Black women's hair is such a tricky subject, mainly because it's tied to emotions. Hair is not just hair. It's so much more. It's an extension of your look and tied to how you feel. Between Sesasme Street and Willow Smith, I'm happy that we are giving young girls the encouragement to love their hair as is, in addition to everything else it could be.