From Respectability To Authenticity, Here’s How Chelsea Johnson’s New Book Explores The Impact And Evolution Of The Natural Hair Movement – Essence

Many Black women have experienced the ritual of hair straightening, whether through chemical relaxers that caused a familiar tingling sensation signaling it was time to wash the product out or get burned or by using the searing heat of a flat iron to transform kinky curls into pin-straight perfection. For those who may be a bit older, the smell of a hot comb scorching and flattening hair into submission, often singeing an ear in the process, is a vivid memory. In each of these scenarios, Black women’s hair has been subjected to intense heat and strain.

In the new book “Natural: Black Beauty and the Politics of Hair” author Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson explores why that is and how the natural hair movement has redefined what it means to be beautiful as a Black woman. Respectability politicsfigures prominently into why Black women feel the need to straighten their hair for special occasions or at work in order to be taken seriously and move up the ladder professionally, says Johnson. Black men are also subjected to respectability politics with bans on locs and cornrows. However, chemical relaxers that for so long served as a requirement for respectability, particularly in white spaces, have now been shown to increase women’s risk of uterine cancer. For this reason, last fall, Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Rep. Shontel Brown pushed the FDA to ban hair-straightening products that contain formaldehyde and related chemicals. The FDA has yet to introduce the ban.

Black lawmakers have also sought to protect Black people from discrimination due to wearing their natural hair. The CROWN Act, which stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” was designed to prevent hair discrimination based on texture and hairstyles such as locs, braids, twists, and afros in schools and in the workplace. The Act was first introduced in 2019 and was passed in the House but blocked by the Senate, the legislation met the same fate in 2022. It was reintroduced in 2024 but has yet to be passed nationwide. 25 states, including Texas, have passed the Crown Act, but this hasn’t stopped hair discrimination from taking place. 

Over the course of six years, Johnson interviewed 79 women across four continents for “Natural: Black Beauty and the Politics of Hair”, which was released this week. In it, Johnson delves into how many women initially transition to natural hair out of curiosity or as part of a wellness journey, only to later realize the political significance of their choice as they confront both personal insecurities and societal stigma. She also shares her own journey and amplifies the stories of Black women who have helped turn the natural hair movement into a powerful catalyst for social and economic change.

Johnson sat down with ESSENCE to discuss the power of the natural hair movement, how it has evolved, her hopes for the CROWN Act, and more insights from her brand-new book.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

ESSENCE: You open the book with the poem “Wild Crown.” It describes chemical relaxers as a kind of physical and emotional violence. Since you began your natural hair journey and started writing this book in the 2010s, there’s been a clear connection between cancers and use of chemical hair relaxers. So, talk about this idea of relaxing one’s hair, these chemicals, and violence upon the body of Black women?

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: I mentioned that to say, I know there are people who are wearing their hair straight, who relax their hair, who are not experiencing that pain as violence. But as I came to think critically around, why do I feel like when I go to this wedding, or when I go to church, or when I want to show up as my best self, that I need to have straight hair? And that internalized expectation that this style of beauty, or this way of doing beauty is the best way, and that this is what I need to endure to get there, and what that says about how I wake up, how God made me that is I think, the emotional violence that we pass on to our children, often unknowingly. But, you know, since the natural hair movement, a lot of this research around the physical violence and the connection between the chemicals and relaxers and more aggressive forms of breast cancer, of fibroid tumors, of early onset puberty, that research also wasn’t available when I was younger.

So, yeah, there’s so much tied up into it. There’s so much weight that we carry because we think that this is just what it is. Black women just get fibroids, or we just have to have our hair straight to go get married. Like, we just take it for granted. I think the natural hair movement is a really beautiful moment in really forcing people to reflect on why is this the status quo? Why is this the norm? Do I need to experience this sort of pain or even emotional discomfort, showing up as I am?

ESSENCE: You talk about the history of Black women’s natural hair movement over time. And I love how you say that this current iteration of natural hair is kind of a movement from a politics of respectability or Afrocentricity to a politics of authenticity. So talk about how this natural hair care movement is different from what we saw in the 60s and the 70s.

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: A politics of respectability that has been maintained through all of this, it’s sort of an expectation that you need to show yourself as culturally similar to white folks or to people who have power in order to feel or to sort of demonstrate that you belong.

And then in the 1960s and 70s with Black Power that was in reaction to an understanding that we need to show we are just like them in order to be worthy and so embracing your natural hair was one way of doing [defying] that, but it was also a way of connecting Black folks across the African diaspora and to an African homeland.

And that’s really what a politics of Afrocentricity meant in the 1960s and 1970s, so when the natural hair movement of my lifetime, of the 2010s, came to be, I had seen all of these images of Angela Davis and Kathleen Cleaver and what their Afro meant to them, but that was not the story that I was hearing from people, and that also didn’t feel like what I was experiencing. It wasn’t really a super political choice to me.

It was sort of a process of discovery and of just intrigue about yourself, like, this is what my hair looks like? I may be have never seen it or I’ve never seen it as an adult. And so that curiosity, that intrigue of who am I? Just without everything else, without all the tools, without all the rhetoric, without all the expectation. And then once people and myself included, started to see what my natural hair did, what it likes, what worked for me, it was such a journey of exploration. But also, I was showing up in the world differently, so people who are used to seeing me with my weave are like, “Girl, are you sure you’re going to your internship interview looking like that?” And with all of that external pressure and critique, learning to love yourself really forcefully against those messages and against those expectations and against what the mainstream media was also still showing at the time, felt very political for me and for many people; and that desire to just love yourself, your authentic self the way you are, is what I mean when I say a politics of authenticity.

ESSENCE: This book is a snapshot of what it meant to be a Black woman between 2010 and 2020 and we were literally in the Black Lives Matter movement during that time, so describe the connection between the natural hair movement and the Black Lives Matter movement.

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: What was really fascinating to me about that was that the Black Lives Matter movement, in large part, centered the experiences of violence against Black men at the hand of police and vigilantes. So, say her name was an attempt to sort of make space for Black women in a context where Black women were not being centered or seen. And then the natural hair movement and some of the language and discourse was really making space for articulating the violence against Black women that sort of manifests differently, that manifests in interpersonal interactions and in expectations that can still have this emotional and physical harm that is incredibly damaging and thwarting to our livelihoods and life potential. So I found it to be a really interesting companion moment of Black women being able to make their unique intersectional experiences of gendered racism visible. That’s why I felt like the “Don’t touch my hair” phrasing and language was so interesting. And I think also came from two movements growing up at the same time of making space for and claiming bodily autonomy and self-determination in the way that the Black Lives Matter movement was also doing in a different form and with a different focus.

ESSENCE: In the book, you discuss how Facebook groups, YouTube tutorials, and Instagram posts have helped shape the natural hair movement. Do you think the current movement would have been possible in the same way without social media?

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: I think in our physical environments, most people, especially on the early side, were not seeing a breadth of options and role models around them. You went to the store, there were two rows in the ethnic aisle that pretty much just had Just For Me relaxer and Dark and Lovely relaxer and some pink lotion. Yes, your options were narrow. And this is not the case for everyone but this was certainly the case in my world, my mom wore straight hair, when I went to church, folks were showing up as their best respectable selves with their wigs and their hats and their presses. So if it weren’t for the internet connecting geographically distant people all around the world that were sort of experimenting in the privacy of their bathrooms, in their kitchens, and then sharing that across the distance, I and many other people wouldn’t have had those role models. And in the absence of being able to go to your Target or to your CVS or to your Walgreens or even your Black beauty supply store and having products that helped you style your hair naturally or in a curly state, vloggers and bloggers who were like, “Oh, here’s how I make flaxseed gel. Or did you know you could go get coconut oil? Did you know you could use the shea butter mixture?” people were filling gaps in a market that didn’t cater to being able to be in the world in this way and feel confident and successful. So I think if the internet wasn’t here, maybe it would have happened, but it would have taken a lot longer.

ESSENCE: So much research went into this book; over six years, you interviewed 79 people on four continents. You were everywhere: hair shows, conventions, beauty salons, online and I wondered, since we know that anti Blackness, colorism, texturism, is everywhere throughout the African diaspora, did you see any differences in the way that Black women participated and shaped the natural hair movement, depending on where you were?

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: I spend a lot of time in the book, sort of comparing and contrasting South Africa to the United States, and I think they’re such interesting mirror images of each other, these two different countries that experience colonization differently, that experience segregation differently. So, all of the dynamics are similar.

But what I found really fascinating was the racial categorizations in South Africa are very different than in the United States. So here we have a one drop rule where you have one drop of Black blood, you’re considered Black so the range and the spectrum of what it looks like to be Black in the United States is vast. When you move to South Africa, they have sort of four main racial categorizations. They have white people, they have Black people, they have Indian people. And this category that doesn’t exist in the United States called coloured, which refers to sort of the multi-ethnic, multi-racial descendants of Black, Sub-Saharan African Black folks so the tribes that are there: Zulu, Xhosa, etc, the Koisan people, who are the Indigenous group to Southern Africa, Indonesian and Indian folks who were brought to South Africa as laborers and white folks. So, it’s also a very phenotypically diverse group. But if you can tell that someone has a multi-racial background, they’re often interpreted as coloured.

So both Black people and coloured people in South Africa were participating in natural hair spaces. Hair texture is really central to coloured culture as well, because they’re sort of an intermediate group in between whiteness and Blackness, and you could actually petition and legislate yourself to change your race. But that’s why the natural hair movement was so interesting and also really contentious in the South African context, because Black folks were also going through this journey of accepting themselves and the politics of authenticity. All those same things were being experienced and discussed in combination and collaboration with people of African descent all over the world because of the internet, so all these conversations were open and participatory. But because coloured folks were afforded more during apartheid, so lived in different neighborhoods, had access to different schools, went to different prisons, even had different healthcare options that, for some people, seeing coloured women take up space in the natural hair movement felt reminiscent of an idealization of a more like Eurocentric beauty standard and what that meant for all of the other social hierarchies and segregation in that society. So that was a frustration to some Black South Africans. Meanwhile, hair texture means a lot to coloured women and to the coloured community as well so all of that pressure of being in the middle and being in between was really weighty. And so oftentimes, for some of the coloured South African women I interviewed, embracing their natural hair was a way of sort of acknowledging for the first time that you are also Black, which is like, really massive when you think about the boundaries between Blackness and colouredness that was sort of forced upon people in the apartheid context. So being able to acknowledge that ‘I am also Black’ is deconstructing so much socially, so much about your worldview. So it was incredibly powerful and really illuminating for so many coloured women. And that was very different than in the US, where, like, we all think of ourselves as, like, we’re all Black folks, like across different hues and across different textures.

ESSENCE: You highlight in the book, the way that gendered racism really  denigrates and denies the femininity of Black women. We’ve seen this play out with Serena Williams and how she’s been misgendered as a man, same thing with First Lady Michelle Obama, we’ve seen all of the racist memes and comments online. How does the natural hair movement affirm Black femininity?

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: Well, two things, we are seeing all of these images that are celebrating Black women as beautiful, and I think that matters, like what you see celebrated really, really matters when you’re trying to figure out who you are and what you want to be in the world. So, the proliferation of images of counter-hegemonic, resistant Black beauty being spread and also in person being celebrated. When you think about CurlFest and the Taliah Waajid Natural Hair Show, people were coming together and affirming one another and saying, ‘You know, whatever is on the cover of this, that, and the other, I don’t care about that;’ here we are en masse celebrating one another. The natural hair movement did that in a really unique and beautiful way. But also it is that individual work that people did to feel that for themselves, to feel that in their own bedrooms and their own bathrooms and say, ‘Oh, this is how beauty looks to me. I’m going to do my hair this way, and I’m going to explore it this way, and I’m going to find what I feel like works for me.’ It’s sort of both things are eschewing all the larger messages that come at us and really turning our gaze towards ourselves as the curators and the decision makers of what feels beautiful. That, to me, is amazing.

ESSENCE: Even in places where the Crown Act was enacted, Texas, for example, there are cases like Darryl George’s, where the teenager is prohibited from attending school because school officials say his locs are too long. So even though the Crown Act is supposed to prevent hair discrimination, in some instances it’s not. What is the next step in this movement to creating a world where that Black people are not being discriminated against because of their hair?

Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson: I am personally a believer in the potential of the Crown Act. I think cases like the one you just described are moments where you see the cracks in the way that it’s framed, which I think, ideally, we can build upon. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house in the sense that people are always going to try and find loopholes to justify their own discrimination, their own prejudice and their own exclusionary worldviews. At the same time, I think it’s incumbent upon us to continue to build on the momentum and the systems that are starting to give really meaningful protections for some people, and so, we’re going to have to get specific, we’re going to have to go the distance, we’re going to have to go the extra mile. And then we’re also going to have to do the work in our families and our communities with the young people in our lives to tell them and to make sure that they feel that they feel seen and adored and loved, so that when they do run up against people who are challenging their right to take up space, and if they do fail in the court of law, that they don’t walk away thinking that that’s the end of that and that they’re less than and that what the law says is how they should also see themselves. That’s the community work, that’s the cultural work, that’s the love work that we have to do to fill in the gaps when these systems that were not built for us will continue to be challenged and will continue to fail in unexpected ways.

Purchase “Natural: Black Beauty and the Politics of Hair” by Chelsea Mary Elise Johnson here.