Reprinted from USA Today: By Maria Puente
Secrets, comedian Chris Rock declares slyly, are bad for the human spirit. That’s why he’s gleefully talking out of school in his new documentary, Good Hair, which has some people rolling in the aisles and others rolling their eyes.
In Good Hair, Rock sets out to explore the historically fraught concept of “good hair,” which for African Americans burdened by the twin legacies of slavery and racism has traditionally been defined as hair more like white people’s. Do black women, he wonders, spend countless hours and hundreds of dollars in hair salons to make their hair straighter and silkier because they want to lookwhite?
In following his search for answers, the movie manages to be at once funny, fascinating and heartbreaking. But it also has spurred unprecedented conversations among whites and blacks about - hair.
HER STORY: What did our reporter’s mom say when she went natural?
VIDEO: Watch the ‘Good Hair’ trailer
“The hair salon on Saturdays is right up there with church on Sundays as the most segregated place in America.”
“When it comes to hair, we’re still living in segregated America,” says Lori Tharps, 37, a Temple University journalism professor and co-author with Ayana Byrd, 35, a Glamour magazine editor, of Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America. “The hair salon on Saturdays is right up there with church on Sundays as the most segregated place in America.”
White people don’t know much about black people’s hair, and blacks don’t want to talk about it, or at least not with whites, they say. Thus the secrecy about hair.
And that’s the way it always has been - until Good Hair, which opened in select cities two weeks ago and goes wide today. Now everybody is talking - on Oprah, on Tyra, on Today, in Essence magazine, in scores of workplaces and salons, in numerous Internet blogs and around countless virtual water coolers as Rock travels the country promoting and defending the movie.
“Secrets will rot the soul,” Rock says. “They’re good for no one. Unless you’re planning a surprise party or something.”
‘Old-school journalism’
Surprise, surprise - Rock, 44, has turned out to be a pretty good reporter, in addition to being a comedian/actor/awards-show host. Who knew the guy wanted to be Edward R. Murrow? He’s thinking of doing more documentaries.
“I miss old-school journalism,” he says. “Nobody plays anything down the middle anymore.”
Credit: Roadside Attractions
Rock says he was surprised by what he found out about hair. “I knew women wanted to be beautiful, but I didn’t know the lengths they would go to, the time they would spend - and not complain about it,” he says. “In fact, they appear to look forward to it.”
As the movie opens, Rock says in the voice-over that he decided to investigate the meaning of good hair after his little daughter asked him one day, “Daddy, why don’t I have good hair?” Now where did she get that idea?
So he visits hair salons, where women get their heads slathered with toxic goop (known as “creamy crack”) to “relax,” or straighten, their hair. He watches as they sit for hours getting their hair braided or a “weave” of hair extensions that can cost $1,000. He helps a scientist demonstrate what the relaxer chemicals can do to an aluminum can (it’s not pretty), observes a wacky hair show contest and travels to India to see where the hair in extensions comes from. (Indian women shave their heads and donate their hair in a religious ritual; the hair is later sold by Asian-owned companies.)
He interviews black men about their funny/painful experiences of sex with women with weaves.
He interviews black women (including actresses Nia Long, Raven-Symoné and Tracie Thoms) about their funny/painful hair stories. He interviews black men about their funny/painful experiences of sex with women with weaves. (Don’t touch the hair!) To make a satiric point that no one wants black people’s hair, he gathers some up and tries to peddle it on the streets of Los Angeles - and gets no takers. All this is framed by a hairstyling competition, a Las Vegas-style show for hair, held twice a year in Atlanta by the Bronner Bros., a leading black hair products company.
Pressure to conform
For many white people, Good Hair will be revelatory as well as entertaining. For many black people, it’s not news; what is new is that Rock is talking about it - in a movie aimed at the mainstream.
“Some people are saying: ‘You’re putting all of our business into the street. Why are you pulling the curtain back?’ ” says Chris-Tia Donaldson, 30, a Chicago lawyer and author of Thank God I’m Natural - The Ultimate Guide to Caring for and Maintaining Natural Hair, aimed at black women or mothers of black children who want to go natural. “The deeper issue continues to be glossed over, which is why do minority women in America feel so much pressure to conform to a mainstream standard of beauty that is hard to attain?”
Derek J, 27, an Atlanta stylist who is in the movie as the winner of the hairstyling competition, says some of his clients who have seen the movie or heard about it are upset. “They’re saying he’s attacking black women and their hair choices, but he’s not,” he says. “I tell them go see (the movie) because I’m in it!”
Jason Griggers, 40, another Atlanta stylist in the movie, who is white, hopes the movie will help break down walls between races.
“More dialogue is better than no dialogue,” he says. “When I started (going to Bronner Bros.), there was only a tiny handful of white people there, and now it’s much more integrated.”
Some reviewers say Good Hair is the best thing
Rock has ever done
Some reviewers say Good Hair is the best thing Rock has ever done; critics of the movie complain he failed to provide any context for women’s hair choices. For instance, there’s a movement among black women to let their hair go “natural,” but Rock doesn’t address that. Nor does he point out that women of all races and ethnicities have issues with their hair and try to change it.
“I feel like I’m living O.J. all over again,” says Tharps, sighing. “The mainstream media are saying it’s fantastic, it’s groundbreaking, it’s a wonderful picture into African-American culture. On the Internet, opinion ranges from it didn’t go far enough to pure anger and ‘I’m never watching Chris Rock again because he made black women a laughingstock.’ ”
Getting it out there
But even those who have issues with Good Hair aren’t condemning the film entirely, and they hesitate to dis Rock himself because, well, everybody loves Chris. He is applauded for at least raising the subject. “I love that there’s a film dedicated to hair; I just wish there had been more context,” says Byrd.
Alynda Wheat, a senior writer for Entertainment Weekly, wrote a column about where Rock went wrong (”Reason 2: $1,000 at the salon? Get real.”). She says Rock deserves credit for “introducing a conversation that’s so important, it reached the White House,” home to two black women, Michelle Obama and her mother, Marian Robinson, who wear straightened hair, and girls Malia and Sasha, who don’t.
But Wheat rejects the notion that hair choice these days is a political statement or a sign of racial insecurity. “I have absolutely no desire to be white, and no one I know sits down in a stylist’s chair because they want to be white,” she says. “If you’re going to educate people about something, it should be representative of a larger whole than just some actresses or one crazy shop where a weave costs $1,000.”
“Now it’s much more integrated”: Stylist Jason Griggers says that now,
more white people go to the Bronner Bros. International Hair Show in Atlanta.
By Bob Mahoney, Roadside Attractions
Rock responds that the only thing he’s attacking is the alarming practice of putting toxic relaxer chemicals on toddlers’ hair. He says that the movie isn’t about what white women do with their hair and that he personally thinks all hair is good hair. He doesn’t believe he’s spilling the beans by talking about hair.
“The point is not to say hair is good or bad, it’s to say that once we work through the history behind our hair, we can get to a place where it can just be hair.”
