A Hairy Conversation
Apr 26th, 2006 at 1:04 pm by Susie
I read this all over the liberal internets this morning, and so when my best friend called me on my way to work, I asked what she thought, being as hair is such a Major Thing in a black woman’s life. She snorted.
“Oh, please. See, this kind of shit is what makes liberals look so fucking stupid. Yes, black hair takes longer to work on, and they should charge accordingly,” she said.
“I mean, it depends on the woman, but in general, it’s true. My mother’s hair is so short, her hair is cheap because she’s done in a half hour. My hair, as you know, is an all-day project. It has to be partially straightened and conditioned… it takes four hours. Is someone seriously going to argue that should be the same price?
“If I had a salon, I’d only want to work on white men with short, straight hair because it would have the fastest turnover. But you know what’s the real shame of an argument like this?”
“What?” I said.
“It’s that they’re arguing about this instead of the fact that there aren’t any decent jobs. This is just stupid.”
Speaking as a white man with short hair (partly due to nature’s ravages), I can vouch for the time involved in cutting it. 20 minutes, max.
I think your friend is being a bit dense.
Sure *procedures* that take longer should be priced accordingly — chemical hair relaxers, hot combs, careful washing of treated hair — but assuming all black women’s hair procedures are so different that they should cost more than all caucasian women’s hair services is flat out discrimination. Just spell all services out, on an ‘a la carte’ menu, and let the customer decide if the prices are right.
One big issue your friend overlooks: Caucasian-staffed and owned hair salons can employ stylists untrained in styling any other type of hair than their own — that’s where a lot of the ignorance comes from, in that a new black customer has to give on-the-job training to a stylist ‘briefed’ that black hair is more fragile and hard to work with. For the love of Pete, if black hair’s so fragile, how come it can stand being fried, dyed and tied to the side? How come women can stand getting scalp burns from the hot comb or sodium thioglycolate?
The point is not that black hair is fragile and complicated, it’s that so many hair treatments have evolved to let black hair mimic caucasian hair (and just become works of complicated art) that even black-owned and operated salons have a hard time, keeping up.
Having said that, there should be no shame in a salon of any stripe coming clean and saying their stylists aren’t experienced or certified in styling black hair — just say it up front, so no one’s disappointed, and it’d be nice for a good black hair salon referral to be in the Rolodex. I’d like to be a girl who can stroll into a Great Clips and get a $9 wash and set, but my hair’s not like that. Most mainstream salons are cost-optimized for caucasian hair; black hair salons will get cheaper once nationwide chains see fit to exploit that market.