I remember being 13 and sleeping over at a friend’s house. I use the term “friend” loosely because, years later, I realised that most of these girls were never really my friends. Making her bed in the morning, my host reached down and plucked something from the pillow.

“Ugh, ugh, ugh! Gross!” she shrieked.

“OMG! What is it?” we all yelled.

“Eugh! There are pubes in my bed.”

“Ugh, gross.”

“No, hang on, it’s just Emma’s hair.”

Cue squeals of laughter.

I wanted to die. The sensation was sharpened by the disparity between my own hair and my host’s – hair that I secretly coveted. It was dead straight, a luminously shiny black, and hung the whole way down her back; she was complimented on it all the time. Her hair framed almost cartoonishly blue eyes, a particular blue that exists in Ireland.

Until the late 1990s, being black and Irish was to have almost unicorn status – except everybody loves unicorns. Many mixed-race people I met, certainly those who were older than me, had grown up in institutions. They were often the “illegitimate” offspring of Irish women and African students. Not to put too fine a point on it, unmarried mothers were generally, in Ireland, treated like scum. Add the disgrace of a black child and you couldn’t really sink much lower. While this wasn’t my experience, there was still a strong stigma associated with blackness. As a black child with tight coils, growing up in a white, homogeneous, socially conservative country, my hair was a constant source of shame. I became fixated on it, imagining that, if it just looked “normal”, I, too, might be normal. I wept myself to sleep most nights between the ages of eight and 10, desperately imploring the night-time to work its magic and transform my “picky” curls into the headful of limp, straight hair I rightly deserved.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest In Dublin, age five. Photograph: Photo courtesy Emma Dabiri

I remember being told in my mid-teens that I was “lucky I was pretty”, which meant I could “almost get away with being black”. I still got the jokes about needing a flash to take a photograph of me, or the classic likening of my complexion to dirt, but it was my hair that remained unforgivable. Anything that could be done on my part to disguise it, to manipulate and mutilate it, was up for consideration. The concept of leaving it the way it grew was inconceivable.

The world around us fuels a powerful narrative about hair and femininity. From fairytales to advertisements, movies and music videos, our icons tend to be lusciously locked. For a long time, long flowing hair has been one of the most powerful markers of being a woman.

But that is not how afro hair grows; generally, it grows up. Of course, femininity – like beauty – remains a culturally specific project, and certainly not one designed with black women in mind. Nonetheless, we are expected to conform to these standards, and woe betide us if we cannot.

Growing up, I rarely saw black women on TV (or anywhere, for that matter), but there were a few exceptions: Neneh Cherry, and Hilary and Ashley Banks of The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air fame. Cherry, in particular, I tried to emulate, but her big black curls, which grew down over her shoulders, as well as Hilary’s brown bouncy hair and Ashley’s super-sleek jet-black locks, only made me feel worse. These women had hair that seemed as unachievable for me as that of my white counterparts.

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The pressure to conform to European standards of beauty is far more than a “grass‑is‑always-greener” type of vanity. Barely a month seems to go by without there being another news story about a black child being excluded from school for wearing their hair in its natural form. In 2016, protests broke out after girls at Pretoria high school in South Africa chose to defy rules that maintained their natural hair was “messy”. Two weeks later, a US federal court ruled that it was legal to fire a female employee for having dreadlocks, deeming them “unprofessional”.

And while it may seem unimaginable that an adult would cosset or indeed be abusive to a child depending on their hair texture, it happens more often than you might think. Consider Blue Ivy, the first-born daughter of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, and the subject of countless memes and social media posts branding her “ugly”. Why? Blue Ivy’s biggest crime seems to be that she wasn’t born with hair that has the texture of one of her mother’s weaves. She has the audacity to have tightly coiled hair, hair that is uniquely black. But some people were so incensed by Blue’s hair that a petition called “Comb Her Hair” was launched when she was two years old.

When you look at the way Blue Ivy and North West, the daughter of Kanye West and Kim Kardashian, are pitted against each other in these conversations, the whole thing becomes more sinister. Both children are light-skinned. However, North is declared infinitely superior by grown men and women, partly because of her ambiguous racial features but mostly because of her hair: a very loose curl that can achieve a long, straight look with ease. In a 2015 article entitled How North West’s curly styles are inspiring a generation of natural hair girls, American Vogue declared the then two-year-old a natural hair “icon”.

Unless one of my mum's black female friends cornrowed my hair or texturised it, it was a mess

The phenomenon that we call colourism is about more than complexion: hair texture and other features play a role in determining who has proximity to whiteness and who does not. But plenty of people with “good” hair, the looser curl associated with mixed ancestry, have experienced the pain of not knowing how to care for it properly, especially those with a white primary caregiver. All black hair requires knowledge, skills and products that are not always easily accessible. Today, in globally connected, multicultural London, I still see mixed-race children with dried-out, matted hair. I’m not talking about hair that is untidy – I am no stickler for precision myself – I mean hair that, like mine as a child, has clearly never been oiled, and rarely untangled.

People often have questions about raising mixed-race kids. One of the most practical pieces of advice I can give is to learn how to oil and comb their damn hair. When I was growing up there was no online information, and no suitable hair products in Ireland. The few I did manage to get my hands on were from my mum’s work trips to the long-gone rag yards of Liverpool’s docklands. She was one of the first people to import secondhand clothes (their status later upgraded to vintage) to Dublin. However, she was white, with little knowledge or experience of black hair care. So unless one of her handful of black female friends – who were emphatically not hairdressers – cornrowed my hair or texturised it, it was pretty much left in a scrunchie bun, a style entirely unsuitable for its texture (ie it was a mess).

Later, my mum often went to great pains to take me to the UK to get my hair done, even though money was tight. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Jheri curl perm I travelled to London for, a 12th birthday gift, puts me in the running as one of the first people to stain the cushions and couches of early 1990s Dublin with my curl activator.

Even my mum’s friends were more used to applying chemicals than caring for hair in its natural state. I remember one particularly traumatic attempt at texturising. A friend of my mum’s had left the solution on longer than recommended to take into account my unusually defiant bounce. The immediate result was long, silky waves. I was ecstatic. By the following morning, it was coming out in handfuls.

Despite chemically relaxing my hair for about 15 years, I knew or cared little about what was going on on my head. Burns were a recurring reality – almost every relaxer would leave a couple of scabs on my scalp. But these were like badges of honour, testimony to the fact that the relaxer had taken. Like most of my peers, I conveniently ignored the reported links between the chemicals used in straighteners and cancer, fertility issues and the development of fibroids. That cognitive dissonance horrifies me now.

***

Around 2010, I discovered a website called Black Girl with Long Hair (BGLH), founded in 2009 by the American writer Leila Noelliste. It was the first time I really saw my texture acknowledged, let alone celebrated – not only shiny, glossy curls but matt, springy naps that can be twisted, stretched, coiled and curled into any and every shape. I was presented with all these beautiful sisters rocking very chic looks with their natural hair. And if they could do it, so could I.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Photograph: Silvana Trevale/The Guardian

Many women insist their decision to go natural is not explicitly political. The fact that they even have to state this shows how far from the norm black hair is still considered to be. But my own decision to stop relaxing my hair was political. I realised that, as a grown woman, I did not know my own hair. I was not familiar with its natural appearance, nor was I remotely in tune with its requirements.

Once you chemically straighten your hair, you cannot unstraighten it – you have to cut it off. But I just wasn’t ready for short hair. The texture was bad enough – but willingly returning to a short afro, conceding victory to a long-vanquished enemy, was unimaginable. So I stopped straightening my hair but let my roots grow for a year before cutting off the straightened ends. The following year (2012) I became pregnant, and finally gave in to the big chop.

I had various motivations. They say your hair grows quickly while you’re pregnant, but it was more than that. I knew that, if I had a daughter, it was crucial she did not grow up with the same warped concept of beauty I’d held. If I had a boy, such enlightenment was just as, if not more, crucial.

Despite those bomb-ass-looking women on BGLH, I still felt natural hair wouldn’t suit me, at least not as much as my long, sleek locks. But, down for the cause, I resigned myself to a future as a frumpy feminist. It is extraordinary for me to remember that, even at this stage, I couldn’t imagine myself as attractive with unstraightened hair.

My reacquaintance with my natural hair and the birth of my son proved that my body was capable of things I had never dreamed possible. Subtly, over time, I moved away from tolerating my hair to enjoying it, to loving it. I wonder if my hair’s newfound freedom, volume and height shifted the energy around me. (It is said that many African groups have associated the height of one’s hair as significant in relation to divine power.)

Until recently, we just did not see natural hair on our TV screens. Textures such as my own remained unseen, forbidden

My hair is now usually braided in some way. Another of the misconceptions about black hair is that, in order for it to be “natural”, it has to be worn in an afro. In traditional African cultures such as Yoruba, which is my paternal ancestry, women rarely left their hair unmoulded; it would usually be braided (irun didi) or threaded (irun kiko). On a practical level, this is because leaving it “out” for too long results in moisture loss and tangling. Not to mention braiding also looks majestic.

No gains are ever absolute, but it does appear that big changes are afoot. Globally, there is a movement of black women saying: we are enough; we want to be accepted for looking like ourselves. Until recently, we just did not see natural hair on our TV screens. Textures such as my own remained unseen, forbidden. Last year’s Black Panther was a feminist milestone in that regard: the female characters were tech geniuses and warrior commanders – and they had tightly coiled afro hair, a first for a major Hollywood production. It showed our hair as beautiful but, more than this, it showed it as normal. If I had grown up seeing women with hair like mine on screen, it would have made me feel proud – and far less alone.

• This is an edited extract from Don’t Touch My Hair by Emma Dabiri (Allen Lane, £16.99). To order a copy for £13.99, plus postage and packing, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846.

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