Design by Ley
la Dumke

What are some hair vices you are aware 
of or find yourself apprehended by?
“I’ll be jealous of my friend with box 
braids or dreads,” Boothe said. “I just 
know myself, and that I’ll never get to 
that amount. I wish it was just like GTA 
where I could just switch on the hair.”

N
I
L
E
S 
 
FORT LAUDERDALE, FL

What is the relationship between your 
hair and spirituality? Do you have any 
thoughts on the connection between Black 
hair and Spirit in general?
She likened Black hair to halos, positing 
that “Black hair naturally defies gravity, it 
elevates us as people when we wear it natu-
rally. We are literally being lifted up from 
the crowns of our heads to the Heavens to 
God. It’s an expulsion of love and beauty.” 

N
O
V
A
M I A M I , F L O R I D A

What is healthy (Black) hair care? 
Why should we, or should we care 
about our hair?
“Whatever routine works for you and 
makes you feel and look good. We should 
care about (our hair) more and emphasize 
that not everybody’s path is the same. I 
think it’s important to create an under-
standing of Black hair in that it can be way 
more individualized.”

V I C T O R I A
DETROIT, 
MICHIGAN

What is the relationship between your 
hair and spirituality? Or do you have 
any thoughts on the connection between 
Black hair and Spirit in general?
“There’s this idea that the curl pattern of 
Black hair is on a higher frequency in the 
energy because of the spiral shape and it 
acts as an antenna in a way,” Clark said. “I 
think that it really helps us connect with 
our spirituality in that sense. 

Black 
Hair 
Series

THE

Michigan in Color
6 — Wednesday, February 15, 2023
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

G

alaxies 
swirl. 
Atoms 
spin. All things in the 
cosmos operate in spiri-
tual motion — a spiral 
movement, that is. A 
curl, if you will. Eyebrows raise at 
the sight of these natural affairs. The 
terrifying force of a tornado. The oth-
erworldly twirl of a whirlpool. The 
coarse and kinky, nappiest strands 
of negrohood. What was once seen as 
the good, the great, godly textures of 
ancient eras long gone, has now been 
rendered second-rate, second-hand, 
undesirably bland … that is the undu-
lating nature of Black hair. As Black 
authors Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. 
Tharps harrowingly declare in their 

collective “Hair Story,” “When you 
believe you’re inferior you’re much 
easier to control.” 
The mechanisms of mass program-
ming, white supremacist propaganda 
and the ideological imperatives of 
industrial capitalism have histori-
cally worked overtime to put forth 
these fabrications. It is no mystery 
that Black hair, for hundreds of years, 
has been as brutalized as Black peo-
ple. Hardly trimming away at our own 
treacherous mis-education, we stay 
stuck, entangled in despair, in decep-
tion, so entrenched by the detriments 
of a spiritually/spirally deficient soci-
ety, divorced from the realization that 
our hair in its most fine, most natural 

state is divine. As Black author SuZar 
puts it, “hair is the receiver and trans-
mitter of divine emanation it makes 
you receptive to spiritual forces.” 
Our hair — the highest part of the 
body — is holy, speaking wholly to 
our soul, the universe and dimensions 
beyond. The stories of old, of Samson, 
of Medusa, those told by the Rasta-
farians and the Afrikans of the Nile, 
could not deny the numinous nature of 
the nappy. As Numbers 6:5 utters, “he 
shall be holy, and shall let the locks of 
the hair of his head grow.” We know, 
now, the evolutionary basis for tight 
curls, as author Bill Bryson describes 
in “The Body,” “being the most effi-
cient kind because it increases the 

thickness of the space between the 
surface of the hair and scalp allowing 
the air to blow.” Though the earliest of 
peoples were right to think that these 
kinks and curls unfurl into something 
greater than mere a biological buf-
fer. Our hair is an antenna. Its spiral 
energies, swirling at great speeds, 
indeed, acts as a magnetic mechanism 
for spiritual ascension. And the culti-
vation of these coarse spirals surely 
grants one growth in their spiritual 
facilities. 
How else would a people enslaved, 
abused and brutalized, tortured and 
tormented, mistreated and beaten 
find the means to see and be beyond 
material circumstances? The collec-

tive spirit of Blackness is one that 
defies such impossible odds. This is 
a spirit that moves towards harmony, 
remains rich in rhythm and valiant 
in verve, unmoved by the matrices of 
mass control, the white power struc-
ture and Western hegemony. And 
nowhere better is this extraordinary 
persistence exemplified than in the 
hallowed hairs of Black people. 
Fade in on The Black Hair Series. 
Hello! It’s time to dutifully de-condi-
tion. Moisturize our soul. Reclaim the 
harmed parts of ourselves that, once 
healed, make us whole.

Read the rest of the interviews at 
mic.michigandaily.com/black-hair-series.

K
A
R
I
S
KALAMAZOO, MICHIGAN

B
y Akash Dewan, Udoka N
wansi and Karis Clar
k

