Gabrielle Union’s Hair

By Hettie V. Williams

There has been a recent incident over race and hair. Gabrielle Union’s hair. Union apparently wore too many different hairstyles while she was a judge on the NBC show America’s Got Talent (AGT). She was also vocal about racial equality in the AGT workplace according to Variety, and reportedly branded difficult on set as a result. AGT decided to subsequently release her from the show following a series of alleged incidents involving racial bias. Union was also informed that her many hairstyle changes were also problematic when she was released from the show. This seems outrageous in 2019 but it is not a new form of surveillance. African American women in the United States (U.S.) have endured this type of policing for quite some time.

Black hair has a history. This sometimes has been manifested in edicts used to control black hair and black bodies. Tignon Laws were used to control black women’s bodies in Colonial North America. A tignon or tiyon is a type of scarf used to conceal or hide one’s hair. This measure was deployed beginning in the 1700s in places such as New Orleans, Louisiana to force black women from showing their natural hair in public and to signify their status as an enslaved person. Both free and enslaved women were required to wear this head covering in New Orleans by 1786. In the late nineteenth century, the practice of using a straightening comb became…