Race and Roughness

As racism causes his life to unravel despite his attempts to play by the rules, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man walks the streets of Harlem reduced to humiliating overalls and penury. As an act of both rebellion and resignation, he publicly eats yams dripping with butter and thinks: “What a group of people we were. You could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.”

Another way to humiliate black Americans is by confronting them with an obvious element of black physiognomy, like hair texture. A white docent at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles recently did just that when she rubbed two young black students’ heads to illustrate rough textures in a comparison between rough and smooth.

So far, the museum’s florid apologies and newly hired sensitivity trainers have not sufficed; smart money says that “Mary,” the otherwise unidentified docent, shall not long grace the Getty’s sinuous, and probably quite smooth, walls. But one may legitimately wonder whether it is necessarily racist to talk about the calibrations between superficial differences in racial physiognomy. Wise? Certainly not. But racist?

Wouldn’t we need to know whether the students’ hair actually was rough or not? Protesters have charged the Getty with “invoking racial stereotypes” -- a charge, it would seem, that could be settled by inspection of the children themselves. If their hair was not, in fact, “rough,” then Mary has no defense; she’s guilty of stereotyping. (Often, unprocessed black hair that looks rough is quite soft. And many blacks, from a very young age, religiously employ hair care products precisely to avoid the condition in question.)

But what if their hair was rough? In a more mature society, commenting (as black comedians routinely do) that some blacks have rough hair ought to be about as controversial as noticing that the NBA is extremely well integrated.

Certainly, strangers should rarely single out children or touch them without permission and oversight, admonitions that take on greater weight across cultures. Also, what planet is Mary from that she doesn’t know that it is never appropriate for whites to touch blacks’ heads? It’s patronizing, juvenilizing and harks back to the bad old days of Jim Crow; pat the average black person on the head and you’ll draw back a nub. Still, one wonders whether Mary shouldn’t skip the racial reeducation camp the protesters have in store for her and instead tour a few museums herself -- black history institutions where she might learn something about the effort her race put into making others’ self-conscious, self-hating and unsure of themselves. After that, charm school.

But though she is no doubt a clueless clod, there’s no reason to suspect Mary is a racist capable of “ripping the students’ spirit out,” as their teacher claimed. On the contrary, it is much more likely that the well-intentioned overreaction of the parents and school district has accomplished that by teaching the children to crumble psychologically at the slightest perception of racial insult or ill-mannered comment.

Rather than give in to racial apoplexy, the teacher in attendance could have turned a potential disaster into a teachable moment with an impromptu lesson on the dermatology of racial hair types (something someone with such a racial hair trigger should know) as well as on the etiquette of interaction between strangers. Instead, she helped teach her charges to be self-conscious, self-hating and unsure of themselves because, in the protesters’ scenario, only whites need look in the mirror. The unspoken message to blacks is to be afraid to.

For too many blacks, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud” is, alas, just a song lyric, something to scream at whites and hope they believe it (even if the blacks themselves do not). If black truly were beautiful, if blacks truly loved their wide-hipped, big-lipped, nappy-headed selves, the issue at the Getty would have been boorishness, not racism.

For the sake of symmetry, let’s end with a quote that blacks love to invoke because it “proves” that Jesus was black: Revelations 1, 14-15: “His head and his hairs were white like wool, ... and his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.” Hair of wool? Feet like brass? Great voice? Sounds like James Earl Jones to me. Still, it’s going to be hard to get the world to accept that Jesus was a brother if we can’t admit that his hair, in the millenniums before moisturizers, might have been “rough.”

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Debra J. Dickerson is the author of “The End of Blackness” (Pantheon, 2004). She can be reached at debradickerson.com.