Who Decided Black Hair Is So Offensive Anyway?

But for all its glory, the Afro was also politicized and seen as “militant”—a stereotype that’s stuck around for decades. For example, civil rights activist Angela Davis, who sported an Afro during the ’70s, has said the movement for equality for Black people during that era is often reduced to simply a hairstyle. “I am remembered as a hairdo,” she said in 1994. “It is humiliating because it reduces a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion.”

Still, as the 1970s rolled on, celebrities like Diana Ross, members of the Jackson 5, and Blaxploitation movie queen Pam Grier continued to popularize the ’fro—making its associations more mainstream.

The ’80s and ’90s: Products take over

“The Afro came, and then it went. Then it was really hard after the Afro to find anyone with natural hair,” Byrd says of the 1980s, which moved away from the natural, less-is-more look of the decade prior. “Afros really hurt the beauty industry, bottom line,” Byrd says. “Relaxer sales dipped. They weren’t decimated, but it was the first time that relaxer sales really dipped. Beauty salons were losing business because of Afros.”

Then came the Jheri curl, which was actually invented by a white man. The look took over as the style of the moment for Black people who wanted to sport bouncy, shiny curls. “The Jheri curl was really a way that product makers could recoup a lot of the money they’d lost from the Afro. A Jheri curl takes more products than almost anything,” Byrd says of the style.

The ’80s also marked a pivotal time in America’s tangled history with Black hair: The beginning of discrimination lawsuits over grooming policies at work. In 1981, Renee Rogers, a Black ticket agent for a popular airline, sued her employer after coming to work with her hair in cornrows, which at the time was against corporate rules. A federal judge sided with the company, saying the policy was applied equally among all employees, regardless of race, and even posited that Rogers had adopted the style of white actress Bo Derek—never mind the fact that the style Derek “popularized” was Fulani braids, a look that originated centuries ago in West Africa. (If this sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Kim Kardashian was called out for cultural appropriation in 2018 after wearing Fulani braids and calling them “Bo Derek braids.”)

Still, women continued to reclaim protective styles like box braids in the ’80s and ’90s, as pivotal pop culture influences—like Janet Jackson and Brandy—wore them, says Byrd.

The Aughts: Flatirons and weaves reign supreme

This doesn’t exactly need a history lesson given that most of us lived through the aughts and have the middle school pictures (and the smell of relaxer burned into our memories) to prove it: But in the early 2000s, long, straight, silky hair ruled yet again. This time, however, pin-straight hair rocked by celebrities on red carpets often had the assistance of weaves and clip-in extensions.