Afro Hair in the Time of Slavery

Abstract

Treatment of European and African hair radically differed in the time of slavery: the former sentimentally preserved in mourning jewellery and keepsakes, the latter shaved off in preparation for the slave-ship hold. This essay considers some examples of how hair functioned as a racial marker. While hair texture was used to establish boundaries between races, hair styling emerged a site of racial contamination where these boundaries threatened to dissolve as white people “frizzled” their hair to make it curly, while Black people shaped their Afro hair so as to mimic the aristocratic hairstyles of white Europeans.