Dear Ms Understanding,
I have my hair braided and I wear it braided to work. Every so often, I get a white person comment about it and ask to touch it. It’s uncomfortable for me but I usually politely oblige figuring it’s easier and faster than having the conversation that I’d like to. I’d like to know how to politely inform anyone that requests to touch my braided hair that this is not OK. I am Australian-African with dark pigmented skin and kinky hair.
Thank you
Dear Black is Beautiful,
I’ve been here before and it’s a terrible feeling.
No matter how well-intentioned, questions from white people about African hair usually come from a place of racialized curiosity and are loaded with cultural assumptions about European hair representing the gold standard of how everyone’s hair should look and feel. Hair that is curly, kinky, short, too dark, etc, is weird, interesting or (my favourite) really cool.
So, your discomfort is well founded. It is not appropriate for anyone at work to touch your hair. It’s a violation of your private space, and it’s unsanitary. It is also not appropriate for anyone in a professional setting to ask to touch your hair. As we know, there are many stereotypes about Black people and Black women in particular having “attitude” and being aggressive. So, it’s hard to say no, even if you are super-polite, without coming across as the aggressor.
While your previous strategy of silence is a good strategy for avoiding conflict, it also places an enormous emotional burden on you, what is sometimes called the emotional tax.
Despite this, please know that your feelings are valid. You aren’t being “sensitive” or unreasonable. If a man asked a woman if he could feel her breasts because he’d always been curious about how they feel, the office would be up in arms. Just as this request would be sexist, the request to touch your hair is racist.
Sadly, sexism is far more easily recognised than racism in this society, so even though you’re right to challenge the behaviour, think carefully about how you respond. Until we eradicate racism, Black people almost always bear the negative consequences of racial confrontation.
Often, white people argue that their curiosity is innocent, and they aren’t trying to be offensive. What the colleague who asks you about your hair doesn’t realise is that they are simply the latest in a very long line of people who have made that request over the years.
The cumulative effect of all these questions, is to be reminded that you are not ‘normal’, to be told in some many words, that you are so fundamentally different from white people that the normal conventions of adult behaviour must be suspended, because your difference is so strange, so unimaginable, that it must be touched and physically experienced to be made real in their minds.
Their request to touch your hair is another way of saying that your hair is so different, so strange, that it inspires the curiosity of a child. Because to be honest, the only people who have to touch something to believe it is real, are children who are encountering something for the first time. Since your colleagues are grownups, they don’t get a free pass.
I’d pre-empt the entire situation by depersonalising it. Get in touch with your people and culture team, and talk to them about this as an issue of professionalism, diversity and inclusivity. Stick to the principles, and get the workplace to proactively let people know that touching you or even asking to touch you are not OK.
Ideally the team includes this information in a wider set of activities like an anti-racism training, or a new set of policies.
Then, the next time someone asks to touch your hair you can respond honestly and directly with something like, “No, you can’t touch my hair, it makes me uncomfortable, weren’t you at the training?”
You can then ask them to get in touch with the relevant HR person. It’s an important redirect; a reminder someone in the organisation is being paid to enforce anti-racist laws and policies, and unless you work for the People and Culture team, that person is not you.
Good luck!
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Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist. She is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
