Book by Peggy Brooks-Bertram

Uncrowned Queens:  African American Community Builders  /  Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire (Book II)

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Nappy Headed Women

A Response to Don Imus' Verbal Attack

on Rutgers Black Female Athletes

I learned about being "nappy headed" when I was born.  I still have nappy hair.  I have never worn extensions, never dyed my hair and never had a perm.  I am a nappy headed woman to the grave.  This is further endorsed by the fact that I lost most of my hair in my teens from genetics and have worn beautiful headwraps and wigs most of my adult life.  I wear lovely wigs that I structure/reconstruct to suit my face. 

A few years ago I shaved my head and went completely bald for about 5 years.  That drove most people crazy, especially black women in the church.  Then I started wearing wigs again because my head got cold in air conditioning.  And the saga goes on.  But the gist of the "nappy" headed concept is that its roots are in the enslavement of black people and the subsequent enslavement of their psyche about their natural essence: permanent "naps."  Whites had to enslave our people entirely, and so thoroughly that they had to attack the very roots as they left the scalp. 

Black women spend a lifetime trying to "control" and "straighten" the naps.  If they were not "blessed" with "good hair,"  they had to get as close to the "good stuff" as possible.  Beginning in childhood, they faced the sometimes "red hot" comb; scabbed up ears; hot combs falling down their backs and later potential cancer causing chemicals all in the name of "busting the naps."  Today, young black girls learn that to be socially acceptable, first among other black people, you must "bust the naps."  You do that today by starting early to poison oneself with "permanents" that again attack the psyche at the "root" trying to tame that African heritage at the source: "the root."  

Finally, after years of "keeping the hair from going back--to the root" Black women walk around with a muddy colored dead protein that is lifeless, brittle, and downright ugly.  And, all in the name of having the "good stuff."   This is what white America requires if you are going to hang out with them.  Hollywood sets the example.  Black women in the arts with waist length, blond hair glued to the head.  Where?  At the root!  There is no end to this madness.  Black women, in the main,—not everyone is so crazy—have been driven crazy.  They are also driving their young children crazy about taming the "naps." 

Black girls do not want to go swimming in school because their hair will "go back"  Where?  To the root.  You have to destroy the root if you want to be accepted.  Ironically, it appeared that all of the black women on the basketball team, were pretty skilled in "busting their naps."  I did not see any real "naps" anywhere.  They had all been busted even before the press conference where they all had their naps under "social control."  So what about Don Imus?  He did not know what the heck he was stepping into—not to mention he is racist and is paid well to be so.

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Peggy Brooks-Bertram is a playwright, poet, and dramatist. Her creative writing includes five children’s books entitled, African On My Stairs. Illustrations from this series hang in the Rev. Bennett W. Smith Family Life Center at St. John Baptist Church. In 1988, her play, Dynasties of Kush, was selected to be included in the University at Buffalo, First International Women's Playwright Conference.  It was enacted at the Langston Hughes Institute. Brooks-Bertram Bio

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Editorial Response

I'm still plowing through Theodore White's Introduction to the Invention of the White Race. After disposing of  the psycho-cultural thesis of Winthrop D. Jordan's  in White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1968) and Carl N. Degler's in Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (1971) that essentially whites are naturally racist, he takes up the socio-economic proponents. He considers Lerone Bennett solid with regard to the source and the use of "race" and "racism" in America.

Of Bennett's theses, White writes:

So my point again our thrust should not be merely against stooges like Don Imus, but rather against those corporate interests (21st century plantation owners) who make use of such "newsmen" and "commentators" as Imus and Bret Hume and that ilk to keep us stirred up against one another, comfortable blacks against poor blacks, women against all men, and middle-class and poor whites against us all. We must do our best, all of us, to uncover the scheme of the social control game that is played against all of us. While the wealthy escape with the loot, we all suffer, civility goes down the tube, work and prosperity and solidarity evaporate.

Of course, we as blacks have special work to do. For it is we who must carry the horse of racism on our backs, primarily, however runious the social control race game is to our fellow Americans. In this regard, Dr. Bertram's comments are a positive statement on this entire affair. I encourage you to pass it along. Note too in her piece that her emphasis is on the social control uses of anti-black racism, that is, of keeping Negroes in their place and keeping the laboring classes at each others throats.

I also encourage people to check out what she is doing with her website Uncrowned Queens  http://wings.buffalo.edu/uncrownedqueens. Check out to the files we have here on ChickenBones—Peggy Brooks-Bertram  Barbara Ann Seals Nevergold  Uncrowned Queens Project  Uncrowned Queens: African American Women (The Book) —Rudy 

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posted 10 April 2007