Radicalization: History & Perspective | Hair & Politics | (H&P)^2
I remember I was at home for the holidays not too long ago. Coming from a Nigerian household, I find that my hair, which I’m growing out, frequently comes up in conversation. For context, there are no exotic dyes or hairstyles here. It’s just an afro… kind of boring, all things considered. For the most part, comments are light-hearted and playful, which I appreciate. There was one comment, however, that rubbed me the wrong way. In a moment of seriousness, one family member in particular was expressing concern about my hair, which they weren’t especially fond of. “Just be careful”, the person said. “You don’t want your colleagues thinking you’re some type of radical.”
That comment bothered me. A lot, actually. Being the introspective person that I am, I’m always more in touch with what I think than what I feel, but I took some time to ponder it further throughout the day, just to make sure I wasn’t being moody or unreasonable. My conclusion: I’m not being moody or unreasonable. And the more I thought about it, the more it bothered me.
This family member and I tend to have very different philosophies on life… I think that’s ultimately what this comes down to. This is what gets me: in addition to all the other plight that comes with being a person of color in America, now I have to worry about my hair being perceived as a political statement? Not to even say having an afro is unprofessional, won’t be well received in interviews, etc. That’s a conversation we can have… sure. But we’re talking about hair and POLITICS? You can’t just want to grow your hair out… me having an afro means I prescribe to Malcolm X, violent, Neo Black Panther ideologies, or some type of notion of separatism or black supremacy? Heck, you can probably run a regression and predict my voting patterns based on the length of my afro, too… and if I have dreads, you already know what time it is, fam. My biggest frustration in all of this is that this person doesn’t seem to see that thinking as problematic. Rather, they’re more interested in how people will assume my politics based on my HAIR. We’re really out here trying to map a correlation between a black person’s politics and their HAIR. Get the heck out of here with that stuff, man.
I can’t help but notice the characterization of black people with afros (mind you, this person is black). “You don’t want your colleagues to think you’re some type of radical.” So, let’s talk about that. I’m in higher education. In general, that means colleagues are old, white men. Well, I’m in a business school, so there’s a large contingency of Asian men as well, but let’s focus on the former for a second. Why am I the radical? For several centuries, scores of white people were radical in their conceptualization of themselves and black people, too (even to the extent of white supremacy, which did not start or end with the KKK or the Nazis). Centuries. And in general, barring a few well documented exceptions, we tend not to call that radical… we just call it history. On occasion, we’ll call it racism, depending on the topic (that’s a recent development, given we’re talking about 400 years of history). But rarely do we ever call it radical.
Christopher Columbus showed up in the Americas and duped the Native Americans out of the land they’d called home long before he arrived, and even then, on his very first day, he keenly noted the Natives would make ‘good servants’. Explorers from Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Portugal sailed around the world for the purpose of expanding their empire, pursuing more wealth, and sealing their legacy as the most prominent and esteemed countries in the history of mankind. The monarchy of England staked a claim to 60 different nations and made them part of the British Empire. There are 60 different countries in the world, the United States included, that cannot tell their history without talking about British colonial rule (If the goal was legacy, mission accomplished). The Europeans showed up on the shores of Africa and started telling people they were doomed to hell because black people are more like Satan and white people are more like God. After that, these primitive folk were kidnapped and forced to work, for free, in a foreign country, because paying them would have been too expensive.
America took 247 years before they reached the consensus that those of the darker variety are human, too, and you can’t own people. The South launched a campaign to incarcerate blacks if for no other reason than to be spiteful, reinstitute slavery via prisoner leasing, and rebuild the infrastructure of a region of America that fought and lost the Civil War. One of the earliest forms of Eugenics in the United States was state-sanctioned birth control and mass sterilization campaigns, to control the reproduction of ‘undesirable’ populations within the US, including but not limited to black people. And then there was Jim Crow. In spite of the fact our pledge claims liberty and justice for all, for another 100 years following the emancipation of slaves, we somehow found a way to persist in the systematic oppression of black people. And segregation. Separate schools, water fountains, and seating areas in buses and restaurants. Heck, our urine wasn’t even considered fit to swim in the same toilet… we had separate bathrooms. And predatory lending. For 30+ years, the capital markets excluded (or penalized) black investors and black families, because bankers felt investing in black communities wasn’t worthwhile, and lending money to black people was thought to be far too risky. And public health. For 40 years, the US Public Health Service conducted a study where they chose not to disclose to 400+ black men that they had syphilis, withheld information from them about medication, and prevented them from getting treatment, to advance the study of untreated syphilis.
The FBI used taxpayers’ money to launch an investigation of a leader that was primarily interested in racial equity and civil rights. The war on drugs, introduced in the 70’s, was basically code for a domestic war on black people. Negros were expected to fight a war in Vietnam, knowing that when they got back on US soil, they would be treated like second class citizens. In the 80’s, the police were militarized to neutralize the threat of drugs in America, but in hindsight, there’s a case for saying that black drug users and white drug users were treated differently in the court of law, because 2 drugs that were almost identical received very different sentencing. I can mention Clinton and her comments on superpredators, but to be fair, she never explicitly said anything about black people. Still, her husband signed the crime bill in the 90’s, something he admits having regrets about. I digress. But how about apartheid in South Africa? These jokers basically had Jim Crow up until 1991. Up until, literally, a year before I was born, the British refused to surrender control of South Africa, and the policies put forth by the government was very much intended to favor the minority ruling elite, white South Africans. Even when white people are in the minority, white supremacy is still jarringly powerful. As late as 1991, you had people who thought they were superior, if for no other reason than the color of their skin. And these aren’t uneducated, uncultured people. These are wealthy, well-traveled, cosmopolitan men and women, presumably still with strong ties to Britain but living in South Africa. Maybe I’ve made my point.
**Let me be clear on what I’m NOT doing. I’m NOT building an argument that white people are any better or any worse than anybody else. I could perform a similar exercise of almost any geopolitical region of the world, over any stretch of history, because we’re all jacked up people and we all do jacked up things on a fairly regular basis. That’s not exclusive to any group or race of people, albeit I think we may be more inclined to overlook shady behavior for some groups/races than others.
See, this is how the story goes. Most of us have heard about a lot of this, so much so that we just become numb to it and it becomes accepted as commonplace. It’s just accepted as normal. It’s accepted as history. The one thing that never comes to mind for any of this is RADICAL. ALL of this is radical. It’s EXTREMELY radical. But it’s normalized, too. But when we have people, black people or otherwise, like an MLK, like a Muhammad Ali, like a Malcolm X, that actually have something to say about how history has unfolded in unfavorable ways, and how systems of oppression or toxic patterns of thinking are emerging again in different forms, these people are the ones with a problem. These are the radicals. Never mind 400 years of history that tells us all about exploitation, oppression, prejudice, racism, and the like… let’s just talk about the radical black guy with the afro. What’s his problem? The irony of all this is that we’re talking about HAIR, people. My hair makes me look too much like a black radical.
To be fair, there was a black power movement in the 1950’s to the 1970’s, where hair actually was somewhat of a political statement… I’m not ignorant of that. Still, I don’t think this is a good comparison. If a guy like Malcolm X is considered radical for his separatist ideologies, why isn’t the monarchy of England, for colonizing 20% (that’s 1 in 5 people, to be clear) of the global population in the early 20th century? If a guy like Muhammad Ali is considered radical, for refusing to fight in the Vietnam War, why don’t we think of the American government as radical for expecting people to fight and defend a country where they were explicitly recognized and treated as second class citizens? If the Black Panther Party is seen as radical for being militant in resisting authority, why aren’t the police seen as radical for beating the trash out of women and children during the Civil Rights Movement? My humble opinion: all of this is radical. But let’s face it; when we talk about American history, that just isn’t the historical narrative. That’s not how the story is read, and that’s not how the story is written. Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and the Black Panthers are radical. And I should be mindful of how I wear my hair in a mostly non-black workspace, lest my name be added to that list, too.
There’s a bigger issue with this though. I think the bigger issue is being described as radical is RARELY a good thing. Literally, this family member did not want me to be thought of as radical, because that would be considered a very unfavorable turn of events. Personally, I’m of the school of thought that radical people are stigmatized and marginalized, because their views are thought to be too far off for the common man or woman to connect and vibe with. Case and Point: Bernie Sanders. Bernie was labeled as a radical during the 2016 election… we all saw how that worked out for him. I very much think we can identify that as the primary (or singular) mechanism that resulted in his defeat. “Maybe his plans would work in Norway or Sweden, but they could never work here! Take a seat, you senile, old man!” Think about that… if I can convince you that somebody is radical, what they say following that is actually of very little importance. Because they’re radical. I just marginalized them. I just stigmatized them… and no matter what platform they have, they’ve effectively been silenced. I don’t mean to oversimplify the complexity of political science, but come on, you have to admit that radicalization played a part in how things went down for Sanders.
I’ll be honest, personally, I think that stigmatization is even greater in the church. We stigmatize people that we think are “too radical”. Not radical in the “spiritual” or “religious” sense… by definition, Jesus was radical. I more so mean when people are “too opinionated” or “too outspoken” about issues. Or their views are “too strong”. Or their views on a social issue differ “too much” from the rest of the church. I use quotations, because I think all of those are somewhat interpretive. That, and, I think there’s a natural negative bias in our response when a topic makes us feel uncomfortable. Either way, being labeled as radical is risky business, people. Your integrity is at stake. If I’m part of a church, and people think I’m “radical” in how I think about race relations in America, it greatly increases the likelihood of being marginalized or stigmatized. If I’m part of a church, and my opinions on race relations diverge too much from everyone else’s, I’m at risk of being marginalized or stigmatized.
So, you’ll have to forgive me if I’m not particularly receptive of the label “radical”. I didn’t ask for all that… I just wanted to rock my little afro, manage my little blog, get my little PhD, accept my little gig as an assistant professor at a dope school, and continue about my business… but that’s kind of a perfect storm, isn’t it? A blog on race? And he’s a well read, intelligent black man? And he has an afro? “Oh, yeah, he’s totally neo black panther.” I’m really not though. To take a page out of Trump’s book, “I’m the least radical person you know! Nobody’s better at being moderate than me.” I couldn’t even type that with a straight face… I don’t know how Trump says the stuff he does. Politics aside, if you label me as radical, my contribution to any discussion, race or otherwise, now goes out of the window, because I’m too much. I’m too over the top. I’m too… black? Yeah, I think that might be it.
Suffice to say I’m NOT a fan of being described as a radical, especially because of hair of all reasons. I’m enrolled in a PhD program at one of the most prestigious institutions for higher education in the country… but you got me out here feeling like I’m a hot boy (drug dealer), because my hair may make people feel like I don’t prescribe to white ideals. Never mind that we can have a great conversation about American history. Or colonial history. Or Nigerian history. Or African history. Or various social structures used throughout history to oppress various populations of people, particularly black people. Things like Apartheid, Jim Crow, redlining, segregation, law enforcement, the criminal justice system, etc. Never mind that we can have a great conversation about the classism that exists in higher education or the racial biases that exists in higher education. Never mind that we can have a great discussion and each learn something new. The only thing, apparently, that’s important is wearing my hair in a way that will make some of my white classmates and colleagues know with confidence that Nnamdi is not “some type of radical”. The good news: I’m not radical, so it doesn’t actually matter. The bad news: Just because I didn’t like the comment doesn’t mean I entirely disagreed with it. I had some major identity crises the first 18 months or so of growing my hair out… but that’s a story for another time.
Radicalization: History & Perspective | Hair & Politics | (H&P)^2
Nnamdi