Last essay, I promise.
On point! I see too much jacked-up white hair on a daily basis myself. I was looking at people on the buses and trains and at work, in the elevators all day today: I saw ONE "Other" woman past APL. The vast majority were somewhere between SL and APL. I've been noticing this too often lately. What always looked "long" to me on a white person was not even APL. It is a myth that BSL is common for "other" women, if you ask me. Or at least it's that way in Chicago where we all do have to fight the frigid weather and the craptastic water.
I'm sure everyone's hair looks better & retains more in Cali and Hawaii and Mississippi.
My niece is the opposite. She has hair exactly like mine. It was doing just fine until my mom & her mom started straightening it. Why is her hair considered tough to manage? Because it's being fought against. We feel like we have to get a comb through it, we feel like it has to hang instead of stick up (the way it grows), etc. Our hair is naturally more dry than other races, and breakage is tougher for us to avoid-- I would never ever argue against that. But neither of those things have anything to do with the rate it's coming out of the scalp. Maybe your neice actually is getting super-slow growth, but that's still one person with her own individual causes.
Why is it so easy to say that our hair grows slower than every other race when we KNOW how we destroy our (
already fragile) hair just because we do not like the way it looks as a race, on the whole?.
And why do our locked brothers & sisters have no trouble growing hair to great lengths in a reasonable, average amount of time?
Was that 4-year chart saying 6 in a year is average not made by a white person, using a red-haired white person as example? Why do white people say their hair grows 6 inches per year if it's going faster than that, on average? Or are we saying our hair doesn't average that? I think we can prove this wrong with a simple poll looking at the bell curve. I trust that many of the relaxed/dyed ladies here know the difference between their overall length retained at the end of the month vs. how much new growth they have. Because I sure don't trust that a white scientist will take shrinkage of the new growth and retention into account either. I don't even trust that many Black people would know to take this into account either, that's how foreign our own hair has become to us on the whole.
For some, i think it's just easier to throw up hands and say "their hair just grows faster" because if you believe that, then it kind of gives you a "pass". you can then claim to do everything right. Because a lot of us aren't in love with the thought that our hair can only truly be in its optimal condition *ONLY* when locked.
Asian hair is in its optimal condition when it is growing black & straight down their backs--- the way the vast majority of them wear it. And they wear it like that because they deem it beautiful just the way it is by nature.
I don't see many little White and Asian kids with waist length hair. They're usually somewhere between NL and SL, some with APL. Just from what I see on the smallest girls, roughly, every 3 year old black girl has as much hair as her 3 year-old white/Asian counterpart. But then as the black child gets older, her texture might start to get more coily, more textured. And even if it doesn't, you get introduced to Just For Me kits and pressing combs and weave braids soon enough. And that's when the hair starts breaking off. The Asian child isn't getting any of that. The Asian kid's hair is just being left alone. So by the time these two kids reach 6th grade, the black kid's hair has been constantly broken through the years due to the over-styling and abuse. The Asian kid is probably rocking the same hairstyle she had when she was 3: straight down, the way it grows out of her head. And this continues through high school, adulthood. So yes, there's going to be a major length discrepancy when the black person's hair is going through constant changes, over-styling, and abuse and the Asian person's isn't. And it's all because the Asian person's hair, is deemed beautiful
*by them* the way it grows out of their scalps; there's no impetus to alter it or even to style it, really. Just let it hang down. We cannot say the same for ourselves. If we locked at the same rate as you see Asian people wearing it black & straight, I'm positive there would be no noticeable length discrepancy between the races (taking whatever shrinkage into account, still).
. I brought this to the attention of one my friends and he stated that when he thought about it, he had never met many fellow west Africans who were hairy at all, unless they were upper-Sahelian or Berbers
erplexed
.
