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aviolentindustrialcomplex · 2 years ago

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The Ritual of Beauty, a film about generational trauma and Black women’s hair

Directed by Shenny De Los Angeles, “The Ritual of Beauty” explores beauty as a form of generational trauma. The first words on screen read “What happens to brown girls who never learn how to love themselves brown?” The film revolves around Shenny and her relationship to her hair and, by proxy, her relationship with her mother and grandmother. Shenny’s mom says “My mother always relaxed her hair. I learned how to relax my hair from her,” (Nast 3:15). In one shot, Shenny watches her mother relax her hair, a long and laborious process. Her mother describes what the process means to her, ending with the words “There’s a satisfaction in doing your hair knowing that, even if it doesn't look good now, in the end it will look much better. It lifts your spirit. You feel so beautiful.” Relaxed hair is beauty to Shenny’s mother. To Shenny, relaxed hair is violence. She says she wants her voice to be loud enough to “heal the parts of my mother she has never been able to love.”

At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, Black women began to relax their hair, finding that “the more European traits they had, the higher class they could be. The less apparent their African roots were — the more bleached and straightened their features were — the more refined (less savage) they could be considered,” (Bridgewater). Straightening came in the form of oils, hot combs, and, later, chemical relaxers and skin-scorching heat. Hair relaxers became a form of violence, a violent oppression of Black women’s heritage and identity. As in Shenny’s film, they taught this practice to their daughters and granddaughters, a form of generational pain and violence.

Straightening hair is a form of practicing respectability politics, the process by which a group tries to make social change by presenting themselves as more appealing or palatable to the dominant culture. According to a psychologist and hairstylist, “Hair texture, length, and style often guide an overwhelming force over the negotiation of self-image and self-worth for Black women,” (Newby). Dr. Afiya Mbilishaka conducted a study on Black women’s relationship to hair and “her research revealed that almost 80% of Black women reported the need to change their hair to match the office culture because of the fear of hair discrimination,” (Newby). This evokes Shenny’s essential framing question, “What happens to brown girls who never learn how to love themselves brown?” What happens when Black girls must fear a part of themselves and their own creation, their hair?

The violence enacted through hair is not simply generational within the family, but within the community as well. One interviewee said that she faced more violence from Black women when it came to her hair, and enacted violence herself, from fellow Black women. To zoom out even more, Black women find that they fear job discrimination and receive grooming policies from the employers at a higher rate in orientation and application processes (Newby). The CROWN Act is an act “to ensure protection against discrimination based on race-based hairstyles by extending statutory protection to hair texture and protective styles such as braids, locs, twists, and knots in the workplace and public schools.” (CROWN) Under the current law, hair is not protected by anti-discrimination laws.

Shenny's film is for “every black girl’s ritual to beauty,” (Nast 4:42). It is for “my mother, who knows nothing other than fire to her scalp,” (Nast 5:05). It honors the emotional, spiritual, and systemic pain that Black daughters have endured from their mothers. Shenny shaves her head in the final minutes of the film, taking ownership of her hair. She returns to the beach, an earlier image in the film, and presses her hands into the sand, resting her newly shaved head on them. The movie concludes with her washing her mother’s hair, symbolizing her reclaiming of her ancestry and the process of healing old, deep wounds.

Citations

“Black Women Occupying The Political Space Discuss Their Hair Journeys.” The Zoe Report, 8 Mar. 2021, https://www.thezoereport.com/beauty/politics-of-black-hair-crown-act-holly-mitchell-ayanna-pressley-jalina-porter.

Bridgewater, Safiya. The Oppressive Roots of Hair Relaxer The Commonwealth Times. 15 Feb. 2011, https://commonwealthtimes.org/2011/02/14/the-oppressive-roots-of-hair-relaxer/.

Nast, Condé. “Hair, Trauma, and Healing in ‘The Ritual to Beauty.’” The New Yorker, 5 Oct. 2022. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-documentary/hair-trauma-and-healing-in-the-ritual-to-beauty.

CROWN. “The Official CROWN Act.” The Official CROWN Act, https://www.thecrownact.com. Accessed 28 Feb. 2023.

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