crazy person. It was the bad school photos all over again—but I couldn’t tear up all those magazines.
When I started acting, my hairstyle determined how people saw and cast me. I played a teenager for a hundred years, so I kept a flip. That flip said “All-American Nice Girl from the Right Side of the Tracks.” As I was booking more jobs and meeting more and more hair and makeup people who didn’t know what they were doing, I made a choice to grow out my relaxer. Now, the trope in African American hair-story narratives is that this is when I became “woke.” It’s not. I grew out my relaxer because my hair was so badly damaged, it was split to the scalp. If you’re on a production that does not believe in diversity in the hair and makeup trailer, it’s a lot easier to let them style a weave than let them touch your real hair. I was also then getting a lot of attention from the type of black men that every black woman is supposed to covet, and a good number of those particular men had been conditioned to love long hair. These two things went hand in hand—I was being chosen and validated.
I stopped using my own hair probably after 7th Heaven, in the nineties. I have always had very good weaves, so when I cut my weave for Daddy’s Little Girls and Breakin’ All the Rules, people thought I was just “crazy experimental with my hair.” No, I am just crazy experimental with hair that I can purchase. After a certain point, when my natural hair was long and healthy, I just put it up in a bun. I didn’t politicize my choice. It was another option, that’s it.
Then, because of work, wigs became so much easier to use and offered me more flexibility. My hair is braided down underneath, and every night I pop the wig off. Sometimes I leave the set rocking my own braids like Cleo from Set It Off. I still wash my hair and rebraid it. Then I can pop that wig back on and go to work. The less time I have to be in hair and makeup, the better.
Still, I struggle with the questions: Does this wig mean I’m not comfortable in my blackness? If I wear my hair natural, do I somehow become more enlightened? It is interesting to see the qualities ascribed to women who wear their hair in braids or in natural hairstyles, even among black people. We have so internalized the self-hatred and the demands of assimilation that we ourselves don’t know how to feel about what naturally grows out of our head.
Being in an all-black production is no guarantee that your hair won’t be a source of drama. Recently, I was in one and there was pushback about getting a natural no-heat hairstyle. I thought it would be an interesting option for my character.
“Well, we want her to be like, really pretty . . .”
“Honey, my face is where the action is,” I said. “Natural hair is pretty, but my face is the moneymaker.”
When I did Top Five with Chris Rock, the character needed to have her hair blond. I knew that if there were paparazzi photos from the set posted online, it would start an avalanche of “Gabrielle Wants to Be White” blog posts. So I got in front of it and posted a selfie on Instagram captioned, “New day, new job . . . new do.” I thought the message was clear: This is for a role. Don’t come at me with your @’s. I pressed Share and that was that.
Well, that didn’t work. “Why did you do this?” was written over and over again. I felt judged. A person I never met wrote, “What happened to my baby?” I felt completely outside myself in a way that was not comfortable at all. There is an idea that if you choose to have blond hair as a black woman, you are morally deficient. I didn’t just have to read it on social media, I could feel it in interactions I had away from the set.
It would be naïve of me to say that hair is just an accessory. I recognize that black hair has been politicized, and not by us. We have since reclaimed that politicization. We have ascribed certain characteristics to people who rock a natural look versus weaves and wigs. If you choose to have natural hair, or even