Emma Dabiri, sociologist: "Hairstyle is a good indicator of the political climate"

Emma Dabiri arrives at the reception of the St. Pancras hotel, in London, with a disarming smile and erases the minutes of delay with a stroke of the pen.

She is incredibly pretty, and she knows it, but, as she herself has recounted, her beauty was not enough for that black girl, born of a mixed couple, to find security and answers to her fears and fears in the Dublin where she was born and grew up. Doubts.

Her fair skin, she nevertheless inherited an afro hair with which, like many other black women, she was never clear what to do with.

She until she decided that it was beautiful, and that the history of the African hairstyle was also the history of a liberation and a conquest.

Don't touch my hair,

from the Captain Swing publishing house, has been a worldwide sales success.

Through the history of the African hairstyle, the stigma suffered by millions of women and fostered by centuries of racism, Dabiri, writer, academic specializing in African studies and prestigious documentary filmmaker at the BBC, delves into race, racism and the ways to drive away condescension and seek cooperation between different struggles against the same injustice.

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What about women's hair?

QUESTION. 

Why the hair?

REPLY. 

For many reasons.

But there is one especially simple one: the creative and rich culture or visual language behind the different black hair styles.

I think a lot of people outside of the black community aren't aware of this.

I wanted to explore that creative and artistic factor.

Hairstyling is not seen as an art form in the European tradition, but it is in black culture.

I wanted to give it the value and recognition that it deserves.

Q. 

But I was looking for something more than talking about an artistic expression.

A. 

Sure, because hair texture, the culture around the way hair is sculpted, the way black hair is perceived from the outside, are normally very good indicators of the political climate, of the vision that exists about black people, the type of treatment they receive in a society and at a specific time.

Q. 

Black girl and growing up in Ireland.

As it is also seen in girls from the United Kingdom or the United States.

Hair conditions.

A. 

When I was growing up, the conventional decision if you had a hair texture like mine, very afro, was to straighten it through chemical processes.

There was an idea not expressed out loud, but clearly explicit, that this type of hair should be hidden or disguised.

You did not even consider the idea of ​​showing your natural hair, just as it grows.

Q.

 Something has changed.

A.

 This movement in favor of natural hair, which I place around 2010 in the United States, later spread to the rest of the world.

More and more black people are rejecting that inferiority that derived from the way they perceived their hair.

Q.

 It is striking that differences arise within the black community itself.

R.

 Many times I think that the stigma still exists.

And among the blacks themselves.

Because the hair that is considered typical of the black race has different textures.

If one looks at the black population of the United States or the Caribbean, he understands that history has created many mixtures of race.

For this reason, among the blacks themselves there are different types of hair.

Is my case.

I am the daughter of a mixed couple, but my hair reflects the African side of my heritage.

And among these different textures there is a hierarchy whereby hair that reflects more of a European heritage will always be seen as more attractive, prettier, and more likely to advance.

Q. 

Does it irritate you?

R. 

Of course it irritates me, it shows how deep-rooted this type of thing is.

It shows how difficult it is to transform this thought.

They are internal currents that, despite the high level of conversation and public debate that we have, are not really addressed.

That's why I wanted to highlight all these nuances, which still exist.

And that's why I wear an afro hair style when I'm on TV or at public events.

Because it's still weird that people who have the same type of hair would naturally wear it in public.

Q.

 You are part of a new generation of writers who is moving away from the current identity discourse and looking back, towards the radical movements of the last century.

R. 

Because you need to join the dotted line, connect things.

One can see how attempts are made, in many of the current struggles, in many of the forms of oppression, so that the people who lead them or suffer from them end up facing each other.

It seeks to avoid at all costs that they unite, that they form a coalition capable of creating mass movements with the real power to change things.

Many of the current identity politics that are generated in social networks are very far from the identity politics that emerged during the sixties of the last century.

They were then working to forge coalitions.

They organized based on their identity, but then the Black Power movement collaborated with black women or with feminism.

They did not focus on themselves in a myopic way.

In the context of social networks, this type of radical movement disappears.

It is reduced to a facsimile where people are getting smaller, atomized, infinitely divided into smaller and smaller groups.

Q.

 And more angry.

R.

 Take a look at Twitter, where scandalizing has a reward.

The more reductionist and emotional your content is, the more responses you get from those who agree with you or those who are against you.

It becomes a primary space where conversations arise that would require complexity, nuance, generosity, and understanding.

And what arises is division and scandal.

It's a disaster.

Q.

 You prefer to speak of a coalition rather than an alliance in the fight against racism.

R.

 That alliance [between black and white] discourse that proliferated after the murder of George Floyd was quite condescending to me, as a black person.

The more I read about it, the more I heard about the ally (white) and the victim (black).

A story that emphasized the idea of ​​a white savior, an idea that we should steer clear of rather than encourage.

We return to the above, to unite the different struggles.

So that those who have been educated as whites understand that, despite not suffering racism in their flesh, they do suffer a reduction in their vital opportunities because of the inequalities that capitalism perpetuates.

I like to quote the poet Fred Moten when he says that "I don't need your help, I need you to realize that this shit is killing you too, even if it does it more slowly".

Q.

 And, curiously, it suggests that we don't waste time with so-called microaggressions: those jokes, stereotypes, biased comments that we don't even think about when making them.

A. They 

exist, they are there, and I have suffered from them all my life.

But if they exist, it is because they are the symptom of a larger structural problem.

If we focus too much on them, we take up all the bandwidth and get distracted when looking for solutions to the system that originates them.

Many conversations around them also arise on social networks, where everything is emotional.

They generate division and force us to give constant circles around them.

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