Akosua Osei

Writing for the Social Sciences 210002

Alyssa Yankwitt

2/28/22

Waves

They say that hair completes a person. Of course, your clothes matter, the shoes you wear, added accessories like necklaces, rings, bracelets, watches, and the clearness/brightness of your skin, but what makes someone’s outfit, their being, who they are, is their hair. For years, I’ve been insecure about my hair which I think is normal for every girl but as a person of color, as a Ghanaian American, the pressure was and still can be immense. But one of the best decisions I have made in my life was to cut my hair and do finger waves.

When I was a kid, I was used to “texturizing” my hair. The “texturizing” is in quotes because I was taught that it was supposed to “make your hair easier to maintain and pretty” and would compare texturizing to “making your hair like white people’s hair: soft, silky, and most importantly, straight. Going to Ghana frequently, the media would portray light-skinned women with their long, permed hair as desirable whilst the dark-skinned woman with natural hair would be seen as undesirable since she hadn’t permed her hair. Being a Ghanaian American, I saw countless girls my age and women with luscious 4c hair: a natural hair type in which the person’s hair is very kinky and thick, go and texturize their hair into the permed hair, what seemed like a ticket was given to society to be seen as a woman, to be seen as a whole, to seem desirable. In America, my second home, I would also see women with similar skin as mine do the same thing that women back at home would do. Not falling to this immeasurable peer pressure, my mom had decided to stop texturizing our hair.