During one of the first moments I knew I might love a man (let’s call him Adam), he had a pair of scissors pointed at my head. Moving cautiously, with almost surgical precision, Adam helped snip the tiny threads that attached 14-inch wefts of “kinky straight” Malaysian weaving hair to my own cornrows underneath. Standing in my dorm room, the two of us removed my sew-in weave.



I have been black for 24 years, and I’ve only known what to do with my kinky, coily, decidedly black hair for six of them. Adam’s help with my de-weaving came toward the beginning of the first Year of Hair Knowledge, only a few months after I’d chopped off the remnants of my chemically relaxed hair. At the time, my thick, coarse natural hair only came to ear length when straightened. With a weave, it looked like a less damaged version of the shoulder-length hair I’d abandoned in search of healthier tresses. And because the weave’s texture matched mine, no one knew I’d cut my own hair so short. It felt like the perfect compromise, a convenient way to ease into my natural hair journey while I continued to learn more about my hair’s needs.



Soon after Adam helped me take that sew-in out, I put a new one back in. And so on and so forth. My weave, like the box braids or Senegalese twists I’d had before, wasn’t a secret or a source of shame; it was simply one of many things I did with my hair. The moment with Adam was certainly tender, but it wasn’t transformative or symbolic. I was just grateful for his help with the difficult, delicate task of cutting hair at the back of my head (and his willingness to wade through the maze of my two-month-old cornrows underneath).

But in the time since then, I’ve begun to notice pop culture’s peculiar obsession with weaves as coded personality traits of their own. For black women, hair is never just hair. Yet from movies to Top 40, this style in particular is so often used to speedily connote a (black woman) character’s inauthenticity. Weaves are de facto visual cues for shame in Hollywood’s imagination, less an aesthetic choice and more a marker of a black woman’s inability to Love Herself and Cherish Her Roots™. To have a weave, we’re supposed to conclude, is to be hiding from one’s true self; to be running away from blackness.