Personal Narrative: My Journey To Go Natural

For as long as I can remember, hair has been a significant part of my life. The many women in my family have always strived to “look good” and the way ones hairstyle was seemed to define if they actually in fact looked good or not. When I was a child, my entire day was solely determined by the state of my hair and as I have grown up, I’ve always believed that “if my hair looks good, then I feel good” this mentality has followed me to this point in my life. About seven years ago, I decided to “Go Natural” but I didn’t really know what it meant to actually be natural, I just figured that it would allow me to have longer hair like the girls on television. Before I began the journey to natural hair, I did some research on what I was getting myself into. In my research, I discovered a large social issue in the black community. It is often said that African American women all over the country have issues with living up to the standard of feeling beautiful. Within the past decades, women have been excluded, oppressed and ostracized by their choice to wear their hair naturally. In this piece I will express the beauty of going …show more content…
all of these statements are false. Author Tracey Owens Patton states in her article Hey Girl, Am I More than my Hair?: African American Women and their Struggles with beauty, body image and hair, “the continuance of the hegemonically defined standard of beauty is not only reify white European standard of beauty in the united states, but also that the marginalization of certain types of beauty deviate from the “norm” are devastating to all women” (Patton 1) In other words, Patton argues, the dominate definition of “normal” that the white Europeans say beautiful is, is not only changing the united states, but it is influencing people that the certain type of women is beautiful, and this is hurting more women than ever