"Hair Nah:" The Exhibition of the "Black Aesthetic"

Black males, black females, long hair and short have all experienced the invasive action that is a white person touching our hair. A new game created by Momo Pixel called “Hair Nah” aimed to make light of but also seriously comment on this irritating action. The game features the head of a black woman and several white hands trying to grab at her hair. The objective: swat away the hands before they can touch the woman’s head. While you’re doing this, a voice in the background will say “Can I touch it” or “Is it attached to your head.” The game itself is a funny take on the well known issue; however, we cannot forget that it is just that, an issue.

When discussing this topic with one of my roommates I was able to accurately describe what it feels like when a white person asks to touch our hair. His sister was adopted from China so he’d been to China before; he had mentioned that when in China many of the locals would touch his hair and ogle at him, one of the very few white people with blonde hair they had ever seen. As I explained what it was like to have a white person ask to touch my hair and related it to his experience of being a spectacle in China, he was able to understand where I was coming from.

When you ask to touch our hair, you’re not simply interested in seeing how we do our hair. The way you ask, the words you choose to you, they make us a spectacle, something to be observed. Being treated as a spectacle further isolates us in a society where we already feel, and definitely are, an out group. Our culture isn’t something to be ogled at and fetishized. We are proud of our hair, our skin, and our culture; so, when you question its nature, naïvely wondering how it got the way it is, you are making us an alien, making us feel alone in our own skin.

The problem is that when we explain this fact, many white people do not understand where we’re coming from. They “simply want to know how our hair got like that.” It didn’t “get like that” it naturally is like this. There’s a distinction between being interested in how black men and women do their hair and being fascinated and awestruck by it. I will admit much of this is in the language used and it is difficult to find the “correct” words to express your interest. However, if you’re interested, please, for your sake and mine, don’t use those five words that every black person hates to hear: “Can I touch your hair.”