On Curly [natural] Hair (taken from my Tumblr)

The post I was going to write was about the fact that it’s really hard to maintain this look because there are little to no positive images of curly (or “natural hair”) at all. I’m a huge magazine collector and how dumb of me to think that at least one magazine I collect, only one, would have tips for girls without straight/wavy hair besides to straighten it. Oh, or make the curl look better by first straightening it and then curling it through various methods.

How about no? How about I revel in all my glorious frizzy ringlets that stand on end and fall awkwardly when I throw them in a direction they’re not used to. I can hardly find pictures without straight or processed to be straight (or wavy) hair. Fuck that, I guess I’ve been reading the wrong magazines my whole life because these obviously don’t fit me. I’m not a girl on any one of these pages besides in the article in one of my magazines has about mixed girls and their societal appeal recently. They have so much societal appeal in fact that they have surpassed the ol’ blond hair, blue eyes. Yeah?

Our beauty precedes them now, but only as a spectacle or only when we give in to their standards of beauty. So, (I speak for) we, specifically my Dominican woman although others can most definitely relate, relax our hair to make it “better”. Our thick, luscious curls are too much for them, yeah? Mixed girls have so much more appeal because ‘they’re different’, eh? What’s in right now is the weird, the abnormal, and the different, but what makes us these things? Our hair has always been this way, our features, though a mixture of different cultures, are still the features of those cultures, and our look is only weird because it’s not their ideal. We’re only different because they’d normally shun us and our features, but since we’re in for the moment it’s okay to be us… to a point.

As much as I’d like to be happy for the acceptance, I can’t. It’s not genuine, it’s only curiosity and I’m nobody’s spectacle. Please show me the place where we’re actually accepted and supported. Show me my rightful place because it’s not up on some shelf for all to look at and wonder. I’m not different. I’m just the same. However, the same treatment is too much to ask for. I want it all, I won’t run with some. I am not satisfied with some.