News

If children, the natural extension of their parents/household, are allowed to be seen outside the house looking unkempt, like a ‘ragamuffin’, what does that say about their parents? Wild, wooly hair would surely garner inevitable comparisons to Buckwheat, (the dark skinned Black boy on Little Rascals) and that was unacceptable – for little Black girls or boys.

It has been extremely important to me, as the mom of a young Black man, to find hair icons for him to look at and find himself reflected in the world.

A black child’s proximity to mainstream respectability is a kind of social barometer for many black parents. Respectability politics, the tendency of a minority group to police its unique cultural practices, is not universally accepted as good practice in black communities.