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FaThers and Their aFriCan ameriCan daughTers:  
hair PieCes CreaTing Ties ThaT Bind

neAl lester 

Barbie never told Black girls they are beautiful. 
Essex Hemphill, “Soft Targets (For Black Girls)” (2006) 

Writing about the “mother-daughter dance over hair” in her article “For Black 
Girls, Hair and Self-Esteem Are Interwoven,” Karen M. Thomas (2006) asserts that 
hair is both “a mother’s way to pass judgment and a daughter’s way to rebel.” 
Thomas sees hair as “a sign of independence and self-identity [that] announces 
to the world who we are,” but for little African American girls, the hair “dance” is 
more complicated, often signaling “a daughter’s entry point into racial differences 
and America’s standard of beauty” (E3). Culturally and racially-specific hair stories 
represent nuanced intersections between adults’ choices about girls’ hair and 
young black girls’ ability to make their own informed hair and identity-forming 
choices in an adult world. Kim Green’s reflection in “The Pain of Living the Lye” 
underscores the effect of “good hair” on an African American child’s psyche: 
“I grew up mad at my hair because it wasn’t like the swinging manes of white 
children who surrounded me” (1993, 38). To achieve the “good hair” ideal, heated 
iron combs or lye-based chemicals become the tools of destruction and temporary 
construction. African American women routinely talk and testify about a loss of 
innocence by pinpointing the moment their hair journeys toward selfhood began, 
testimonials revealing an evolution from hair-straightening to eventual acceptance 
of self and hair. The beginnings of these self-defining moments in young black 
girlhood are clear and long-lasting, and ultimately shape the public and private 
images of black womanhood. 

Indeed, the rhetorical ploys that associate straight and relaxed hair care with 
“good” mothering tugs at the emotional and spiritual bond between African 
American mothers and their young daughters, evident in this advertisement for a 
popular children’s relaxer: “Mommy gives us PCJ Pretty-N-Silky because she loves 
us!” (Luster Products, 1996, 123 emphasis added). Another such advertisement by 
Luster Products (1991) offers a similar appeal: “For your daughters, playing ‘dress-
up’ can be wonderful make-believe fun and games. But as their mother, you know 
that looking out for them also has a serious side. And that includes caring for their 
hair. That’s why you use PCJ Relaxer” (65). Decidedly mixed signals equate mother-
daughter love and nurturing with hair relaxing and blur lines between the assumed 
carefree make-believe of childhood innocence and play with pleas to mothers that 
they are doing what is best for their daughters. The final tag of the ad is profoundly 
ironic, a claim that the product is “an original just like your daughters.”

If we take our cues solely from Disney and its most recently released 3-D 
animated flick Tangled — yet another spin on the Rapunzel narrative featuring 
its celebrated long, straight, silky haired blonde damsel — we sense that some 
things about beauty aesthetics seem never to change. Even the social and political 

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implications of straight hair for Disney’s first African American princess Tiana, from 
The Princess and the Frog,1 reveals minimal efforts to challenge prevailing ideals 
about “good” and “bad” hair. On the other hand, perhaps CHANGE really is in the 
air, and in this case, it’s all about little African American girls and their hair. This 
CHANGE may or may not have anything directly to do with the running platform 
of then-Senator Barack Obama and his subsequent election as the first African 
American US president. Or, perhaps the reality of the first African American First 
Family with its three generations of Obama females inhabiting the White House 
residence at the same time creates a new level of social, cultural, and political 
awareness about difference, especially racial and ethnic difference. Indeed, 
while public scrutiny of hair has followed past First Family females — Jacquelyn 
Kennedy, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, for instance — this current media attention 
to race and gender as related to hair seems another first.2

A decidedly new attitude about the race and gender politics of little African 
American girls and hair is being attributed to the early October 2010 Sesame 
Street segment that has gone viral on YouTube, in which the spunky brown girl 
puppet sings with gusto and full commitment the catchy, upbeat tune “I Love 
My Hair!” This little brown female puppet’s bold embrace of her nappy hair is 
precisely the companion to neo-Soul singer India.Arie’s self-affirming “I Am Not 
My Hair” (2006): “I am not my hair/ I am not this skin/ I am not your expectations, 
no, no/ I am not my hair/ I am not this skin/ I am a soul that lives within.” This 
same message about loving one’s hair as an African American girl interfaces with 
messages of self-acceptance and African American cultural affirmation projected 
in a bevy of children’s picture books about African American girls and their 
hair — Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair (1997), Natasha Tarpley’s I Love My Hair 
(1998), bell hooks’s Happy to be Nappy (1999), Joyce Carol Thomas’s Crowning 
Glory (2002), and Dinah Johnson’s Hair Dance (2007), to name a few. Together 
and individually, these children’s books challenge prevailing assumptions about 
a single beautiful hair ideal: long, flowing, silky, bouncy, capable of being wind-
tossed, manageable, and blond. Indeed, “good hair,” according to these alternative 
children’s book narratives, is hair that we are born with and hair that makes 
us happy with who we are. Reiterates poet/ playwright Ntozake Shange (1972) 
addressing black adults about the hair ideal for African Americans: “the roots of 
your hair/ what turns back when we sweat, run,/ make love, dance, get afraid, 
get/ happy: the tell-tale sign of living/” (n.p.). 

In addition to planting and nurturing this positive message to African American 
girls that chemically untouched hair is desirable, acceptable, healthy, manageable, 
versatile, and a source of pride, socially and politically conscious fathers are 
stepping in to assist socially and politically conscious mothers already challenging 
the many forces that negatively impact our brown daughters’ sense of their most 
positive selves. Through this lens of hair, fathers address the sins of glamorizing 
the straight and silky hair ideal. Chris Rock identifies the impetus for his comedic 
documentary Good Hair (2009) as his five-year-old daughter who, after playing 
with Barbie dolls, presented him with this disturbingly loaded question: “Daddy, 
why don’t I have good hair?” With this question so steeped in cultural folklore and 
written so indelibly upon the fabric of America’s distinct history of black and white 

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race relations, Rock set out to explore why this prevailing notion of “good hair” as 
straight hair, presumably like white people’s hair — even though all whites don’t 
necessarily have straight hair — still exists and has reached his and surely other 
young African American daughters. When asked how Rock talks to his little girls 

about their hair, he responds both 
seriously and humorously: “Like any 
dad, I just tell my daughters they’re 
beautiful as much as possible. And 
I keep chemicals out of their hair 
until they’re old enough to make 
that decision. Because if you put 
chemicals in a kid’s hair, she’s 
addicted. It’s like making the kid a 
vampire” (Fireman, 2009, p. 122). 
Another African American parent 
acknowledges the profound pain at 
witnessing his/ her child’s feelings 
of inadequacy that can only be 
countered through creative re-
messaging: “I think that at some 
point, if you have a little girl, we all 

deal with the day your child comes home from school and says, ‘I don’t want my 
hair to look like this; I want it to look like Annie’s.’ And Annie’s hair is blond and 
long and not what she has” (Sims 2010).

Paternal nurturing and social and political responsibility are at the heart of 
Sesame Street writer Joey Mazzarino’s response to his adopted Ethiopian daughter 
when “he noticed as she played with her dolls that she wanted long, straight 
blond hair” (Gray 2010). His politically-charged creative response was the two-
minute, upbeat video meant to remind his daughter that her hair was “nice just as 
it is” (Gray 2010). That the Italian American father’s song for his brown daughter 
addresses years of ambivalent emotions from many African American adult women 
about their subscribing to a straight hair ideal has been unexpected for Mazzarino, 
as summarized by an NPR staff writer (2010) in “‘I Love My Hair’: A Father’s 
Tribute to His Daughter”: 

In writing the song, [Mazzarino] wanted to say in song what she 
says to his daughter: “Your hair is great. You can put it in ponytails. 
You can put it in cornrows. I wish I had hair like you.” That simple 
message has caused an outpouring of responses from women. 
Mazzarino got a call from an African woman who told him the song 
brought her to tears. “I was amazed, ‘cause I sort of wrote this little 
thing for my daughter, and here this adult woman, it touched her.” 

This message has resonated loudly and clearly with African American women and 
girls as they navigate the politics of personal decisions; says one African American 
woman:

Figure 1. Like father, like daughter: 
hair’s family tapestry. Neal A. Lester with 
daughter Jasmine Z. Lester.

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I embarked on a hair journey to revive my curls after getting bored 
with the polished, broadcaster’s look. Tired of wearing my strands 
bone-straight and looking like “everyone else,” I stopped using the 
flat iron for six months, wore my hair in protective hairstyles like 
braids and twists, and then had a big chop three months ago to 
remove the straggling straight ends so that my curls could grow back 
healthy and strong. And while it took over a decade to embrace my 
natural hair, when I watch this two-minute Sesame Street video, I 
can’t help but fight back the tears as it sends a much-needed message 
to young black girls at a pivotal point in their development that will 
reaffirm why they should love what they’ve got on top. Who knows 
if I would’ve yielded to the hot comb or “kiddie” relaxer had I been 
exposed to such a positive image of black hair at an early age. I can 
only hope that little girls who’ve watched this [video] know that, as 
the Muppet sings, “there’s nothing else that can compare to their hair” 
(Oliver 2010).

As an African American scholar who is also a parent, I began researching, 
teaching, and lecturing on the race and gender politics of head hair when our 
daughter was born twenty-one years ago. This work started not because our 
biracial daughter had ever asked questions about her hair, but rather because 
others were so consistently preoccupied with labeling our first-born’s hair as 
“good hair” or “nice hair.”3 During our daughter’s childhood years, I was her 
primary hair groomer because my more flexible job schedule as a university 
professor allowed that morning ritual. Plus, my Italian-Argentine spouse hadn’t 
a clue what to do with our daughter’s hair. As our daughter has moved into the 
young adult world, I have missed those days of bonding through detangler and 
hair-grooming sessions that united us on what I hope was some spiritual level. 
That she consciously alternates between flat-ironed straight and curly hair means 
that some spoken or unspoken lesson about her hair’s healthiness and about self-
acceptance must have been absorbed. Joey Mazzarino shares details of a similar 
bonding-through-hair grooming-ritual with his young daughter: “My wife is an 
actress and if she was away I would be in charge of my daughter’s hair. I made 
sure it looked good … I’m still not great at braids, but I try. I do standard braids. 
I don’t know what I’m doing. It was hard to get used to but I love doing it with 
my daughter…. [The song I created] really comes from a place of love for my 
daughter” (Darden, 2010). Basking in the glory and creative possibilities of braids, 
afro puffs, afros, dreadlocks, and plaits, and then with various fun and funny 
hair adornments, this little unnamed brown girl puppet’s proclamation and dance 
performance underscore Joyce Carol Thomas’s (2002) message of self-affirmation: 
“‘What is good hair?’/ I ask my daddy/ And Mama answers, ‘Why it’s understood,/ 
Sister, if it’s on your head it’s good!’” (n.p.) Even Willow Smith, the tween 
child star of actor parents Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, sends a message of self-
affirmation in her chart-topping single, “Whip My Hair” (2010), wherein she uses 
her proportionally too-long braid extensions as a metaphor of resistance to those 
who demand conformity to another’s unreasonable and arbitrary expectations: 

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“Don’t let haters keep me off my grind/ Keep my head up I know I’ll be fine … 
I whip my hair back and forth/ I whip my hair back and forth (just whip it)/ I 
whip my hair back and forth.”4 Since we fathers and mothers are also trying to 
help our African-American daughters find their voices of self-acceptance, it seems 
appropriate to leave this final word on the race and gender politics of hair to our 
newest young cultural warrior as she prances confidently across the Sesame Street 
stage and onto our computer screens belting out this challenge and declaration 
of “I Love My Hair!” to every brown woman and girl — and by extension every 
brown man and boy — caught in this maze of American beauty aesthetics:

Don’t need a trip to the beauty shop, 
’cause I love what I got on top. 
It’s curly and it’s brown and it’s right up there! 
You know what I love? That’s right, my hair! 
I really love my hair. 
I love my hair. I love my hair. 
There’s nothing else that can compare with my hair. 
I love my hair, so I must declare: 
I really, really, really love my hair. 
Wear a clippy or in a bow 
Or let it sit in an afro 
My hair looks good in a cornrow 
It does so many things you know, that’s why I let it grow 
I love my hair, I love my hair 
I love it and I have to share 
I love my hair, I love my hair! 
I want to make the world aware I love my hair. 
I wear it up. I wear it down. I wear it twisted all around. 
I wear braids and pigtails too. 
I love all the things my hair can do. 
In barrettes or flying free, ever perfect tresses you’ll see 
My hair is part of me, an awesome part of me 
I really love my hair! 

African American women and girls still journey toward a day when their sense 
of themselves and their assessments of other African American women and girls 
are not based on futile efforts to achieve a hair ideal rooted in someone else’s 
limited and limiting constructions and images of beauty. This hugely important and 
popular vocal and visual cyber performance of “I Love My Hair!” in a little brown 
female puppet’s own exuberant voice extends this father’s message of positivity 
to his daughter far and wide in ways that books alone simply cannot and will not. 
African American parents can only hope that the combination of this father’s effort 
and other parents’ will be the CHANGE that nurtures, celebrates, and sustains their 
African American daughters as who will become African American women and 
mothers.

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NOTES

1. See Lester 2010.
2. See Eleveld 2008, Desmond-Harris 2009, and Jones 2008.
3. See “Nappy Edges and Goldy Locks: African American Daughters and the 

Politics of Hair” and “Roots that Go Beyond Big Hair and a Bad Hair Day: Nappy 
Hair Pieces,” in Lester 2007, 79-111.

4. The popularity of “I Love My Hair!” has led to a mash up with the Sesame 
Street video and Willow Smith’s hit “Whip My Hair”: http://hiphop.popcrunch.
com/willow-smith-whip-my-hair-sesame-street-i-love-my-hair-mashup/.

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Daughter. 19 October. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jenee-darden/
sesame-street-writer-pens_b_767353.html.

Desmond-Harris, Jenee. 2009. Why Michelle Obama’s Hair Matters. TIME Magazine 
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Eleveld, Kerry. 2008. It’s Not Just about the Hair. The Advocate (23 September): 
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Fireman, D. 2009. Chris Rock Made a Film about What? GQ 79 (10): 122. 
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Green, Kim. 1993. The Pain of Living the Lye. Essence 24(2): 38.
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African American Poetry, ed. Arnold Rampersad and Hilary Herbold. New 
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Herron, Carolivia. 1997. Nappy Hair. New York: Dragonfly Books.
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[CD]. New York: Roc Nation.  
Johnson, Dinah. 2007. Hair Dance! New York: Henry Holt and Co.
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Lester, Neal A. 2007. Once upon a Time in a Different World: Issues and Ideas in 
African American Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge.

______. 2010. Disney’s The Princess and the Frog: The Pride, the Pressure, and the 
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Luster Products. 1991. PCJ Relaxer Advertisement. Ebony 46(6): 65.
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Sims, Melanie. 2010. Curly Haired Muppet is Role Model for Little Girls. ABC News. 
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Arkansas Democrat Gazette (March 15): E3.

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