Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0807009415
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807009413
- Pub. Date:
- 09/17/1998
- Publisher:
- Beacon Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0807009415
- ISBN-13:
- 9780807009413
- Pub. Date:
- 09/17/1998
- Publisher:
- Beacon Press
Yo' Mama's Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America / Edition 1
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807009413 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Beacon Press |
| Publication date: | 09/17/1998 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 240 |
| Sales rank: | 295,909 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.35(w) x 8.15(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
\ \ CHAPTER ONE \
\
\ LOOKING FOR \ THE "REAL \ NIGGA" \
\ Social Scientists \
\ Construct the Ghetto \
\ Perhaps the supreme irony of black American \ existence is how broadly black people debate \ the question of cultural identity among themselves while \ getting branded as a cultural monolith by those who \ would deny us the complexity and complexion of a \ community, let alone a nation. If Afro-Americans have \ never settled for the racist reductions imposed upon \ them--from chattel slaves to cinematic stereotype to \ sociological myth--it's because the black collective \ conscious not only knew better but also knew more than \ enough ethnic diversity to subsume these fictions. \
\ --GREG TATE, \ Flyboy in the Buttermilk \
\ The biggest difference between us and \ white folks is that we know when we are playing \
\ --ALBERTA ROBERTS, QUOTED IN \ JOHN LANGSTON GWALTNEY, Drylongso \
\ "I think this anthropology is just another way to call me a \ nigger." So observed Othman Sullivan, one of many informants in \ John Langston Gwaltney's classic study of black culture, \ Drylongso. Perhaps a kinder, gentler way to put it is that \ anthropology, not unlike most urban social science, has played a key \ role in marking "blackness" and defining black culture to the \ "outside" world. Beginning with Robert Park and his proteges to the \ War on Poverty-inspired ethnographers, a battery of social scientists \ have significantly shaped the current dialogue on black urban culture. \ Today sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and \ economists compete for huge grants from Ford, Rockefeller, Sage, and \ other foundations to measure everything measurable in order to get a \ handle on the newest internal threat to civilization. With the \ discovery of the so-called underclass, terms like nihilistic, \ dysfunctional, and pathological have become the most common \ adjectives to describe contemporary black urban culture. The \ question they often pose, to use Mr. Othman Sullivan's words, is \ what kind of "niggers" populate the inner cities? \
\ Unfortunately, too much of this rapidly expanding literature on \ the underclass provides less an understanding of the complexity of \ people's lives and cultures than a bad blaxploitation film or an Ernie \ Barnes painting. Many social scientists are not only quick to \ generalize about the black urban poor on the basis of a few \ "representative" examples, but more often than not, they do not let \ the natives speak. A major part of the problem is the way in which \ many mainstream social scientists studying the underclass define \ culture. Relying on a narrowly conceived definition of culture, most \ of the underclass literature uses behavior and culture \ interchangeably. \
\ My purpose, then, is to offer some reflections on how the \ culture concept employed by social scientists has severely \ impoverished contemporary debates over the plight of urban African \ Americans and contributed to the construction of the ghetto as a \ reservoir of pathologies and bad cultural values. Much of this literature \ not only conflates behavior with culture, but when social scientists \ explore "expressive" cultural forms or what has been called "popular \ culture" (such as language, music, and style), most reduce it to \ expressions of pathology, compensatory behavior, or creative \ "coping mechanisms" to deal with racism and poverty. While some \ aspects of black expressive cultures certainly help inner city residents \ deal with and even resist ghetto conditions, most of the literature \ ignores what these cultural forms mean for the practitioners. Few \ scholars acknowledge that what might also be at stake here are \ aesthetics, style, and pleasure. Nor do they recognize black urban \ culture's hybridity and internal differences. Given the common belief \ that inner city communities are more isolated than ever before and \ have completely alien values, the notion that there is one discrete, \ identifiable black urban culture carries a great deal of weight. By \ conceiving black urban culture in the singular, interpreters \ unwittingly reduce their subjects to cardboard typologies who fit \ neatly into their own definition of the "underclass" and render \ invisible a wide array of complex cultural forms and practices. \
\ "IT'S JUST A GHETTO THANG": \ THE PROBLEM OF AUTHENTICITY AND \ THE ETHNOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION \
\ A few years ago Mercer Sullivan decried the disappearance of \ "culture from the study of urban poverty, attributing its demise to the \ fact that "overly vague notions of the culture of poverty brought \ disrepute to the culture concept as a tool for understanding the \ effects of the concentration of poverty among cultural \ minorities." In some respects, Sullivan is right: the conservatives \ who maintain that persistent poverty in the inner city is the result of \ the behavior of the poor, the product of some cultural deficiency, \ have garnered so much opposition from many liberals and radicals \ that few scholars are willing even to discuss culture. Instead, \ opponents of the "culture of poverty" idea tend to focus on \ structural transformations in the U.S. economy, labor force \ composition, and resultant changes in marriage patterns to explain \ the underclass. \
\ However, when viewed from another perspective, culture never \ really disappeared from the underclass debate. On the contrary, it \ has been as central to the work of liberal structuralists and radical \ Marxists as it has been to that of the conservative culturalists. While \ culturalists insist that the behavior of the urban poor explains their \ poverty, the structuralists argue that the economy explains their \ behavior as well as their poverty. For all their differences, there is \ general agreement that a common, debased culture is what defines the \ "underclass," what makes it a threat to the future of America. Most \ interpreters of the "underclass" treat behavior as not only a synonym \ for culture but also as the determinant for class. In simple terms, what \ makes the "underclass" a class is members' common behavior--not \ their income, their poverty level, or the kind of work they do. It is a \ definition of class driven more by moral panic than by systematic \ analysis. A cursory look at the literature reveals that there is no \ consensus as to precisely what behaviors define the underclass. \ Some scholars, like William Julius Wilson, have offered a more spatial \ definition of the underclass by focusing on areas of "concentrated \ poverty," but obvious problems result when observers discover the \ wide range of behavior and attitudes in, say, a single city block. What \ happens to the concept when we find people with jobs engaging in \ illicit activities and some jobless people depending on church \ charity? Or married employed fathers who spend virtually no time \ with their kids and jobless unwed fathers participating and sharing in \ child care responsibilities? How does the concept of underclass \ behavior hold up to Kathryn Edin's findings that many so-called \ welfare-dependent women must also work for wages in order to make \ ends meet? More importantly, how do we fit criminals (many \ first-time offenders), welfare recipients, single mothers, absent \ fathers, alcohol and drug abusers, and gun-toting youth all into one \ "class"? \
\ When we try to apply the same principles to people with higher \ incomes, who are presumed to be "functional" and "normative," we \ ultimately expose the absurdity of it all. Political scientist Charles \ Henry offers the following description of pathological behavior for \ the very folks the underclass is supposed to emulate. This tangle of \ deviant behavior, which he calls the "culture of wealth," is \ characterized by a "rejection or denial of physical attributes" leading \ to "hazardous sessions in tanning parlors" and frequent trips to \ weight-loss salons; rootlessness; antisocial behavior; and "an \ inability to make practical decisions" evidenced by their tendency to \ own several homes, frequent private social and dining clubs, and by \ their vast amount of unnecessary and socially useless possessions. \ "Finally," Henry adds, "the culture of the rich is engulfed in a web of \ crime, sexism, and poor health. Drug use and white collar crime are \ rampant, according to every available index.... In sum, this group is \ engaged in a permanent cycle of divorce, forced child separations \ through boarding schools, and rampant materialism that leads to the \ dreaded Monte Carlo syndrome. Before they can be helped they must \ close tax loopholes, end subsidies, and stop buying influence." \
\ As absurd as Henry's satirical reformulation of the culture of \ poverty might appear, this very instrumentalist way of understanding \ culture is deeply rooted even in the more liberal social science \ approaches to urban poverty. In the mid- to late 1960s, a group of \ progressive social scientists, mostly ethnographers, challenged the \ more conservative culture-of-poverty arguments and insisted that \ black culture was itself a necessary adaptation to racism and poverty, \ a set of coping mechanisms that grew out of the struggle for material \ and psychic survival. Ironically, while this work consciously \ sought to recast ghetto dwellers as active agents rather than passive \ victims, it has nonetheless reinforced monolithic interpretations of \ black urban culture and significantly shaped current articulations of \ the culture concept in social science approaches to poverty. \
\ With the zeal of colonial missionaries, these liberal and often \ radical ethnographers (mostly white men) set out to explore the newly \ discovered concrete jungles. Inspired by the politics of the 1960s and \ mandated by Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, a veritable army of \ anthropologists, sociologists, linguists, and social psychologists set \ up camp in America's ghettos. In the Harlem and Washington Heights \ communities where I grew up in the mid- to late 1960s, even our liberal \ white teachers who were committed to making us into functional \ members of society turned out to be foot soldiers in the new \ ethnographic army. With the overnight success of published \ collections of inner city children's writings like The Me Nobody Knows \ and Caroline Mirthes's Can't You Hear Me Talking to You?, writing \ about the intimate details of our home life seemed like our most \ important assignment. (And we made the most of it by enriching \ our mundane narratives with stories from Mod Squad, Hawaii Five-O, \ and Speed Racer.) \
\ Of course, I do not believe for a minute that most of our teachers \ gave us these kinds of exercises hoping to one day appear on the \ Merv Griffin Show. But, in retrospect at least, the explosion of interest \ in the inner city cannot be easily divorced from the marketplace. \ Although these social scientists came to mine what they believed \ was the "authentic Negro culture," there was real gold in them thar \ ghettos since white America's fascination with the pathological urban \ poor translated into massive book sales. \
\ Unfortunately, most social scientists believed they knew what \ "authentic Negro culture" was before they entered the field. The "real \ Negroes" were the young jobless men hanging out on the corner \ passing the bottle, the brothers with the nastiest verbal repertoire, the \ pimps and hustlers, and the single mothers who raised streetwise kids \ who began cursing before they could walk. Of course, there were \ other characters, like the men and women who went to work every day \ in foundries, hospitals, nursing homes, private homes, police stations, \ sanitation departments, banks, garment factories, assembly plants, \ pawn shops, construction sites, \ loading docks, storefront churches, telephone companies, grocery \ and department stores, public transit, restaurants, welfare offices, \ recreation centers; or the street vendors, the cab drivers, the bus \ drivers, the ice cream truck drivers, the seamstresses, the \ numerologists and fortune tellers, the folks who protected or cleaned \ downtown buildings all night long. These are the kinds of people \ who lived in my neighborhood in West Harlem during the early 1970s, \ but they rarely found their way into the ethnographic text. And when \ they did show up, social scientists tended to reduce them to \ typologies--"lames," strivers,' "mainstreamers," "achievers," or \ "revolutionaries." \
\ Perhaps these urban dwellers were not as interesting, as the \ hard-core ghetto poor, or more likely, they stood at the margins of a \ perceived or invented "authentic" Negro society. A noteworthy \ exception is John Langston Gwaltney's remarkable book, Drylongso: A \ Self-Portrait of Black America (1981). Based on interviews conducted \ during the 1970s with black working-class residents in several \ Northeastern cities, Drylongso is one of the few works on urban \ African Americans by an African American anthropologist that \ appeared during the height of ghetto ethnography. Because \ Gwaltney is blind, he could not rely on the traditional methods of \ observation and interepretation. Instead--and this is the book's \ strength--he allowed his informants to speak for themselves about \ what they see and do. They interpret their own communities, African \ American culture, white society, racism, politics and the state, and \ the very discipline in which Gwaltney was trained--anthropology. \ What the book reveals is that the natives are aware that \ anthropologists are constructing them, and they saw in \ Gwaltney--who relied primarily on family and friends as \ informants--an opportunity to speak back. One, a woman he calls \ Elva Noble, said to him: "I'm not trying to tell you your job, but if you \ ever do write a book about us, then I hope you really do write about \ things the way they really are. I guess that depends on you to some \ extent but you know that there are \ more of us who are going to work every day than there are like the \ people who are git'n over." While his definition of a "core black \ culture" may strike some as essentialist, it emphasizes diversity and \ tolerance for diversity. Gwaltney acknowledges the stylistic \ uniqueness of African American culture, yet he shows that the \ central facet of this core culture is the deep-rooted sense of \ community, common history, and collective recognition that there is \ indeed an African American culture and a "black" way of doing \ things. Regardless of the origins of a particular recipe, or the roots of \ a particular religion or Christian denomination, the cook and the \ congregation have no problem identifying these distinct practices \ and institutions as "black." \
\ Few ghetto ethnographers have understood or developed \ Gwaltney's insights into African American urban culture. Whereas \ Gwaltney's notion of a core culture incorporates a diverse and \ contradictory range of practices, attitudes, and relationships that are \ dynamic, historically situated, and ethnically hybrid, social scientists \ of his generation and after--especially those at the forefront of \ poverty studies--treat culture as if it were a set of behaviors. They \ assume that there is one identifiable ghetto culture, and what they \ observed was it. These assumptions, which continue to shape much \ current social science and most mass media representations of the \ "inner city," can be partly attributed to the way ethnographers are \ trained in the West. As James Clifford observed, anthropologists \ studying non-Western societies are not only compelled to describe \ the communities under interrogation as completely foreign to their \ own society, but if a community is to be worthy of study as a group it \ must posses an identifiable, homogeneous culture. I think, in principle \ at least, the same holds true for interpretations of black urban \ America. Ethnographers can argue that inner city residents, as a \ "foreign" culture, do not share "mainstream" values. Social scientists \ do not treat behavior as situational, an individual response to a \ specific set of circumstances; rather, inner city residents act \ according to their own unique cultural "norms." \
\ For many of these ethnographers, the defining characteristic of \ African American urban culture was relations between men and \ women. Even Charles Keil, whose Urban Blues is one of the few \ ethnographic texts from that period to not only examine aesthetics \ and form in black culture but take "strong exception to the view that \ lower-class Negro life style and its characteristic rituals and \ expressive roles are the products of overcompensation for masculine \ self-doubt," nonetheless concludes that "the battle of the sexes" is \ precisely what characterizes African American urban culture. \ Expressive cultures, then, were not only constructed as adaptive, \ functioning primarily to cope with the horrible conditions of ghetto \ life, but were conceived largely as expressions of masculinity. In fact, \ the linking of men with expressive cultures was so pervasive that the \ pioneering ethnographies focusing on African American women and \ girls--notably the work of Joyce Ladner and Carol Stack--do not \ explore this realm, whether in mixed-gender groupings or all-female \ groups. They concentrated more on sex roles, relationships, and \ family survival rather than expressive cultures. \
\ Two illuminating examples are the debate over the concept of \ "soul" and the verbal art form known to most academics as "the \ dozens." In the ethnographic imagination, "soul" and "the dozens" \ were both examples par excellence of authentic black urban culture as \ well as vehicles for expressing black masculinity. The bias toward \ expressive male culture must be understood within a particular \ historical and political context. In the midst of urban rebellions, the \ masculinist rhetoric of black nationalism, the controversy over the \ Moynihan report, and the uncritical linking of "agency" and \ resistance with men, black men took center stage in poverty \ research. \
\ Soul was so critical to the social science discourse on the \ adaptive culture of the black urban poor that Lee Rainwater edited an \ entire book about it, and Ulf Hannerz structured his study of \ Washington, D.C. on it. According to these authors, soul is the \ expressive lifestyle of black men adapting to economic and political \ marginality. This one word supposedly embraces the entire range of \ "Negro lower class culture"; it constitutes "essential Negroness." \ Only authentic Negroes had soul. In defining soul, Hannerz reduces \ aesthetics, style, and the dynamic struggle over identity to a set of \ coping mechanisms. Among his many attempts to define soul, he \ insists that it is tied to the instability of black male-female \ relationships. He deduced evidence for this from his findings that \ "success with the opposite sex is a focal concern in lower-class Negro \ life," and the fact that a good deal of popular black music--soul \ music--was preoccupied with courting or losing a lover. \
\ Being "cool" is an indispensable component of soul; it is also \ regarded by these ethnographers as a peculiarly black expression of \ masculinity. Indeed, the entire discussion of cool centers entirely on \ black men. Cool as an aesthetic, as a style, as an art form expressed \ through language and the body, is simply not dealt with. Cool, not \ surprisingly, is merely another mechanism to cope with racism and \ poverty. According to Lee Rainwater and David Schulz, it is nothing \ more than a survival technique intended to "make yourself interesting \ and attractive to others so that you are better able to manipulate their \ behavior along lines that will provide some immediate gratification." \ To achieve cool simply entails learning to lie and putting up a front of \ competence and success. But like a lot of adaptive strategies, cool is \ self-limiting. While it helps young black males maintain an image of \ being "in control," according to David Schulz, it can also make \ "intimate relationships" more difficult to achieve. \
\ Hannerz reluctantly admits that no matter how hard he tried, \ none of the "authentic ghetto inhabitants" he had come across could \ define soul. He was certain that soul was "essentially Negro," \ but concluded that it really could not be defined, for to do that would \ be to undermine its meaning: it is something one possesses, a ticket \ into the "in crowd." If you need a definition you do not know what it \ means. It's a black (male) thang; you'll never understand. But Hannerz \ obviously felt confident enough to venture his own definition, based \ on his understanding of African American culture, that soul was little \ more than a survival strategy to cope with the harsh realities of the \ ghetto. Moreover, he felt empowered to determine which black \ people had the right to claim the mantle of authenticity: when LeRoi \ Jones and Lerone Bennett offered their interpretation of soul, \ Hannerz rejected their definitions, in part because they were not, in \ his words, "authentic Negroes." \
\ By constructing the black urban world as a single culture whose \ function is merely to survive the ghetto, Rainwater, Hannerz, and \ most of their colleagues at the time ultimately collapsed a wide range \ of historically specific cultural practices and forms and searched for a \ (the) concept that could bring them all together. Such an \ interpretation of culture makes it impossible for Hannerz and others to \ see soul not as a thing but as a discourse through which African \ Americans, at a particular historical moment, claimed ownership of the \ symbols and practices of their own imagined community. This is why, \ even at the height of the Black Power movement, African American \ urban culture could be so fluid, hybrid, and multinational. In Harlem in \ the 1970s, Nehru suits were as popular and as "black" as dashikis, and \ martial arts films placed Bruce Lee among a pantheon of black heroes \ that included Walt Frazier and John Shaft. As debates over the black \ aesthetic raged, the concept of soul was an assertion that there are \ "black ways" of doing things, even if those ways are contested and \ the boundaries around what is "black,' are fluid. How it manifests \ itself and how it shifts is less important than the fact that the \ boundaries exist in the first place. At the very least, soul was a \ euphemism or a creative way of identifying \ what many believed was a black aesthetic or black style, and it was a \ synonym for black itself or a way to talk about being black without \ reference to color, which is why people of other ethnic groups could \ have soul. \
\ Soul in the 1960s and early 1970s was also about transformation. It \ was almost never conceived by African Americans as an innate, \ genetically derived feature of black life, for it represented a shedding \ of the old "Negro" ways and an embrace of "Black" power and pride. \ The most visible signifier of soul was undoubtedly the Afro. More \ than any other element of style, the Afro put the issue of hair \ squarely on the black political agenda, where it has been ever since. \ The current debates over hair and its relationship to political \ consciousness really have their roots in the Afro. Not surprisingly, \ social scientists at the time viewed the Afro through the limited lens \ of Black Power politics, urban uprisings, and an overarching \ discourse of authenticity. And given their almost exclusive interest in \ young men, their perspective on the Afro was strongly influenced by \ the rhetoric and iconography of a movement that flouted black \ masculinity. Yet, once we look beyond the presumably male-occupied \ ghetto streets that dominated the ethnographic imagination at the \ time, the story of the Afro's origins and meaning complicates the link \ to soul culture. \
\ First, the Afro powerfully demonstrates the degree to which \ soul was deeply implicated in the marketplace. What passed as \ "authentic" ghetto culture was as much a product of market forces \ and the commercial appropriation of urban styles as experience and \ individual creativity. And very few black urban residents/consumers \ viewed their own participation in the marketplace as undermining \ their own authenticity as bearers of black culture. Even before the \ Afro reached its height of popularity, the hair care industry stepped \ in and began producing a vast array of chemicals to make one's \ "natural" more natural. One could pick up Raveen Hair Sheen, Afro \ Sheen, Ultra Sheen, Head Start vitamin and mineral capsules, to \ name a few. The Clairol Corporation (whose CEO supported the \ Philadelphia Black Power Conference in 1967) did not hesitate to enter \ the "natural" business. Listen to this Clairol ad published in \ Essence Magazine (November 1970): \
\ No matter what they say ... Nature Can't Do It Alone! Nothing \ pretties up a face like a beautiful head of hair, but even hair that's \ born this beautiful needs a little help along the way.... A little \ brightening, a little heightening of color, a little extra sheen to \ liven up the look. And because that wonderful natural look is still \ the most wanted look ... the most fashionable, the most \ satisfying look you can have at any age ... anything you do must \ look natural, natural, natural. And this indeed is the art of Miss \ Clairol.\
\ Depending on the particular style, the Afro could require almost as \ much maintenance as chemically straightened hair. And for those \ women (and some men) whose hair simply would not cooperate or \ who wanted the flexibility to shift from straight to nappy, there was \ always the Afro wig. For nine or ten dollars, one could purchase a \ variety of different wig styles, ranging from the "Soul-Light \ Freedom" wigs to the "Honey Bee Afro Shag," made from cleverly \ labeled synthetic materials such as "Afrylic" or "Afrilon." \
\ Secondly, the Afro's roots really go back to the bourgeois high \ fashion circles in the late 1950s. The Afro was seen by the black and \ white elite as a kind of new female exotica. Even though its intention, \ among some circles at least, was to achieve healthier hair and express \ solidarity with newly independent African nations, the Afro entered \ public consciousness as a mod fashion statement that was not only \ palatable to bourgeois whites but, in some circles, celebrated. There \ were people like Lois Liberty Jones, a consultant, beauty culturist, \ and lecturer, who claimed to have pioneered the natural as early as \ 1952! She originated "Coiffures Aframericana" concepts of hair \ styling which she practiced in Harlem for several years from the early \ 1960s. More importantly, it was the early, not \ the late, 1960s, when performers like Odetta, Miriam Makeba, Abby \ Lincoln, Nina Simone, and the artist Margaret Burroughs began \ wearing the "au naturelle" style--medium to short Afros. Writer \ Andrea Benton Rushing has vivid memories of seeing Odetta at the \ Village Gate long before Black Power entered the national lexicon. "I \ was mesmerized by her stunning frame," she recalled, "in its short \ kinky halo. She had a regal poise and power that I had never seen in a \ 'Negro' (as we called ourselves back then) woman before--no matter \ how naturally 'good' or diligently straightened her hair was." Many \ other black women in New York, particularly those who ran in the \ interracial world of Manhattan sophisticates, were first introduced to \ the natural through high fashion models in au naturelle shows, which \ were the rage at the time. \
\ Helen Hayes King, associate editor of Jet, came in contact with \ the au naturelle style at an art show in New York, in the late 1950s. A \ couple of years later, she heard Abby Lincoln speak about her own \ decision to go natural at one of these shows and, with prompting \ from her husband, decided to go forth to adopt the 'fro. Ironically, \ one of the few salons in Chicago specializing in the au naturelle look \ was run by a white male hairdresser in the exclusive Northside \ community. He actually lectured King on the virtues of natural hair: "I \ don't know why Negro women with delicate hair like yours burn and \ process all the life out of it.... If you'd just wash it, oil it and take care \ of it, it would be so much healthier.... I don't know how all this \ straightening foolishness started anyhow." When she returned home \ to the Southside, however, instead of compliments she received \ strange looks from her neighbors. Despite criticism and ridicule by \ her co-workers and friends, she stuck with her au naturelle, not \ because she was trying to make a political statement or demonstrate \ her solidarity with African independence movements. "I'm not so \ involved in the neo-African aspects of the 'au naturelle' look," she \ wrote, "nor in the get-back-to-your-heritage bit." Her explanation was \ simple: the style was chic and elegant and in the end she was \ pleased with the feel of her hair. It is fitting to note that most of \ the compliments came from whites. \
\ What is also interesting about King's narrative is that it \ appeared in the context of a debate with Nigerian writer Theresa \ Ogunbiyi over whether black women should straighten their hair or \ not, which appeared in a 1963 issue of Negro Digest. In particular, \ Ogunbiyi defended the right of a Lagos firm to forbid employees to \ plait their hair; women were required to wear straight hair. She \ rejected the idea that straightening hair destroys national custom and \ heritage: "I think we carry this national pride a bit too far at times, \ even to the detriment of our country's progress." Her point was that \ breaking with tradition is progress, especially since Western dress \ and hairstyles are more comfortable and easier to work in. "When I \ wear the Yoruba costume, I find that I spend more time than I can \ afford, re-tying the headtie and the bulky wrapper round my waist. \ And have you tried typing in an 'Agbada'? I am all for nationalisation \ but give it to me with some comfort and improvement." \
\ Andrea Benton Rushing's story is a slight variation on King's \ experience. She, too, was a premature natural hair advocate. When \ she stepped out of the house sporting her first Afro, perhaps \ inspired by Odetta or prompted by plain curiosity, her "relatives \ thought I'd lost my mind and, of course, my teachers at Juilliard stole \ sideways looks at me and talked about the importance of appearance \ in auditions and concerts." Yet, while the white Juilliard faculty and \ her closest family members found the new style strange and \ inappropriate, brothers on the block in her New York City \ neighborhood greeted her with praise: "'Looking good, sister,' 'Watch \ out, African queen!'" She, too, found it ironic that middle-class \ African woman on the continent chose to straighten their hair. \ During a trip to Ghana years later, she recalled the irony of having her \ Afro braided in an Accra beauty parlor while "three Ghanaians \ (two Akan-speaking government workers and one Ewe \ microbiologist) ... were having their chemically-straightened hair \ washed, set, combed out, and sprayed in place." \
\