"I absolutely love her natural hair and how she wore it so freely, gotta love Minnie!"
Excerpt from natural hair Bloggeer Nu Kink in her homage to the late singer Minnie Riperton.
The pictures of Minnie Riperton
bring back so many memories of such a talented and beautiful lady. She wore her hair so freely as you say because during that time was the height of the "Black Is Beautiful Era" and "The Black Pride Era" and the majority of us wore our natural hair without shame or embarrassment. Every black woman who had a small Afro copied her style when should put those Baby Breath flowers in her hair to make that halo, including me. Not only was she a beautiful singer, but she had the voice of an Angel.I guess after the 70's with the enforcement of desegregation laws and black people entering mainstream society at a higher rate, the idea of fitting in took hold where most felt the need to change their appearance in order to be more acceptable without realizing this changed their whole outlook on their own identity. We've had to fight with the Euro-Standard of beauty ever since they stepped foot on the African Continent and still much hasn't changed in regards to our identity because we keep letting everyone else decide it for us but us. Until we do then most people will forever have a problem exposing their ROOTS.
The black man had no problem with it because there wasn't much he had to do other than trim his hair which became a problem for them if their Afro was huge because to some people it was a threatening. It was the black woman who suffered the more damaging aspects of it because of the advertisements and ideology which came after telling us we didn't measure up or weren't considered as beautiful or pretty enough if we didn't look a certain way and many women bought into this mind-set who then passed it on to their children, and so on and so on ending up with the results we have today.
We've still got a long way to go in to reclaim our own standards of beauty and the reality is strictly up to us to dismantle every stereotype known to man that tells any human being on the earth that they don't measure up or are in some way inferior.
Warning! This is not a trend, it's a way of life!
