The Ultimate Guide to Black Men’s Hair
The Untapped Power of a Black Man’s Long Hair
After a life of stressing my hairline and waves, I found liberation and power in its unapologetic Blackness
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
You never forget that first pang of rejection. It’s a feeling akin to taking a medicine ball to the chest, a slap of rubbing alcohol on a freshly cut neckline. You know the vibes. And if you’d regularly rode the yellow bus to my elementary school back in ’92, you would’ve had a front-row seat for my earliest humbling.
Her name was Cassie. Like me, she made a daily commute from a not-so-great school district in Queens, New York, to one with enough textbooks for every student. Our ride was 45 minutes each way — just enough time for some deep dialogues about cartoons or crayons or whatever the hell second graders talk about. One morning, another passenger popped over an adjacent green seat and teased about whether we “liked” each other. Sure, seven-year-old me was crushing hard, but Cassie set the record straight.
“I mean, you’re kind of cute,” she said, as nonchalantly as if I were on an entirely different bus. Then, her top lip recoiled — a facial expression Kerry Washington brings to every one of her roles — before she finished her assessment with emphasis. “But only when your hair is cut.” Which was to say, it wasn’t my day: Curly naps had taken over my head and my hairline was channeling Mickey Mouse. She went right back to coloring; I spent the following 25 years obsessing over shape-ups.
What I hadn’t anticipated, though, is how seeing those curls and coils sprout fed a sense of identity — especially while working at a fancy startup where diversity was an ideal, but not entirely a reality. My hair asserted who I was at the time: A Black man living in America when police brutality was rampant and we were mere months away from swearing in a…
