Recently, Sexyy Red shared an Instagram video of her natural hair, using the moment to shade Black women with coarser hair.
She captioned her video with, “You carpet hair beanie neck haux could never.”
Now, without the caption, the video was meek in nature. The rapper was simply showing that beneath her signature red wigs, she has maintained the health of her natural hair. But where she lost the plot was in her colorful commentary that left Black women, her presumed core audience, catching strays when she said that us “carpet hair, beanie neck hauxs” could never.
The implication was that we, as Black women, cannot grow the same type of hair that grows out of her head.
This issue is a lot bigger than Sexyy Red, who is just perpetuating a long-held system of beliefs that prioritize proximity to whiteness by way of longer hair. But it strikes as particularly odd that Sexyy Red, someone who has benefited — or depending on who you ask exploited some aspects of the Black experience for her career — is now taking shots at the very women who have lauded her into her current stardom.
Some may argue that the post was nothing more than a harmless joke that wasn’t meant to be looked at too deeply. While it may be true that the post was not written with ill intent, when you joke about something as contentious as the relationship between Black women and their hair when you already have questionable political views that lend you toward a more conservative bias, people are reasonably displeased with the comments.
No matter how many club bops she puts out, the post was undeniably texturist. Texturism refers to the discrimination experienced by people with coarser hair. It has been plaguing the Black community for centuries, compromising the health of Black women everywhere as we have been driven to toxic methods of straightening our hair through chemical relaxers.
Beyond the Sexyy Red of it all, though, we must establish clear language to express why texturism is more than just an aesthetic dig. It is an agent of white supremacy used for othering Black people, specifically Black women, due to the ties between the length of one’s hair and femininity.
Frankly, seeing another Black woman perpetuating the anti-Black wiles of the same system that demonizes her very aesthetic with grotesque regularity just sucks.
