It’s Time to Retire the Black Woman Hair Trope in Film and TV

This post contains spoilers for The Other Black Girl.

The new series The Other Black Girl, which premieres on Hulu this Wednesday, is the latest in a line of film and TV ruminations on Blackness through the genre of horror. The mystery thriller, an adaptation of Zakiya Dalila Harris’ 2021 novel of the same name, follows Nella (Sinclair Daniel), an editorial assistant at a book publishing house, who is excited to no longer be the only Black woman at the company when newcomer Hazel (Ashleigh Murray) is hired. Naturally, things start to go eerily awry upon Hazel’s arrival, making Nella suspect that the new girl isn’t who, or what, she claims to be.

If all of this sounds rather familiar, it’s because the series—and the book it’s based on—pulls from the same bag of tricks that has defined much of Black horror these past few years: the dangers of whiteness, the protagonist’s dawning realization that “I got what I wanted, but it wasn’t what I thought it would be.” But, of all the tropes, The Other Black Girl hinges upon one that is particularly old hat: Black women’s hair as a tortured metaphor for racial assimilation.

The series doesn’t concern itself with hairstyle so much as hair products, one source of debate in the Black hair community—the pros and cons of using natural products versus products with synthetic ingredients. In one instance, Hazel invites Nella to a hair party at her place, where Hazel attempts to use an unidentified hair product on Nella’s scalp. Nella’s best friend Malaika (Brittany Adebumola) intervenes, chiding, “Girl, I taught you better than that. You are on a hair care journey, and you’re gonna throw it out the window for some unknown ingredients?” Smart move, as it turns out that Nella’s literary idol—Diana Gordon (Shakirah DeMesier), who wrote Nella’s favorite book, Burning Heart—has created a cult of Black women who use magical, mind-numbing hair grease to help them “compromise” in order to achieve their career goals, and Hazel was sent to recruit Nella as a part of that initiative. What “compromise” means in the show’s context is a little murky, but the gist is mostly explained in Hazel’s monologue in the finale: The only way that Black women can achieve what they want in systems designed for them to fail is by desensitizing themselves to the oppressive plight of Black people in America and letting microaggressions and racism in the workplace roll off their backs. As Hazel puts it, the hair grease “just makes it so it doesn’t hurt so much.”

It’s hard to overstate how important—and fraught—hair is to the Black community, and particularly to Black women. There is deep trauma and anxiety in those roots, particularly stemming from the way natural Black hair has been put down as unprofessional or unclean, or regarded as inherently making a political statement, since the dawn of time. In turn, a pro-Black movement inspired a denouncement of non-natural hair care methods. But profound beauty and culture and stories are also wrapped up in those strands. It’s a complex subject, one that has been flattened into caricature on the screen, with most portrayals suggesting the same thing: that Black women who relax, straighten, or install weaves in their hair are chasing some idea of whiteness.

More than a decade ago, Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair sought to explore the delicate history of Black women’s hair journey. While that effort was successful in some ways, it fell short in others, specifically in its questionable conclusion that Black women who treat their hair in specific ways actually just want to be white. (Really, as the writer Alynda Wheat put it in a review for Entertainment Weekly, the true takeaway should be: A Black woman’s personal hairstory is none of your business. Interestingly, this is a lesson Rock himself notably didn’t learn when he infamously commented on Jada Pinkett-Smith’s hair during the 2022 Oscars.) This flavor of clumsy pathologizing refused to die, resurfacing in the 2020 horror film Bad Hair, in which a young woman gets a weave to improve her professional mobility, only to discover the weave is trying to kill her. It’s the same, tired idea of Black women’s hair as a stand-in for forced assimilation and aspirational whiteness.

It’s not that this dynamic of Black women and hair is entirely unmentionable on screen. Vulture’s Angelica Jade Bastién, in a critical review of Bad Hair, suggests that a campy horror about this fundamental relationship in the Black experience could translate to the screen, but only in the hands of a savvy creator with a defined vision. They Cloned Tyrone, a Black surrealist film that was released earlier this year, comes close with its depiction of—spoiler alert—a manipulated brand of relaxer that brainwashes those who use it. It nearly works—after all, the entire film is an inversion of Black stereotypes—but I find Black satirical horror’s continued reliance on the trope exhausting at this point. For works that seek to challenge established norms, they all fall into a pattern of perpetuating the myth of “good” and “bad” hair. Or, equally disappointing, make assumptions about why Black women choose to remain natural, chemically treat their hair, or use protective styles like braids and weaves, which is a personal decision that differs between individuals.

Beyond the misogynoir inherent in this repeated shaming of a Black hair care method, it’s just boring. Ask different questions, like: Why do we hyperfixate on Black women’s hair and then shame them for making a choice, as if we’re the only group using these methods? Or: Why do Black creators seem to focus exclusively on the trauma involved in Black hair care, rather than the beauty we create with it? Maybe my hair and my choices don’t need to be a plotline in your horror story. Maybe, just maybe, you need to remember the eternal wisdom: Mind your business.