Othering

This weeks topic was very interesting to me. I have always had very curly, unruly hair from the time I was a little girl but growing up I would straighten it all the time and I still do till this day. It wasn’t until this year that people started asking me why I didn’t wear my hair curly that I decided to give it a try. I have noticed that the very few times I wear my hair curly people always want to talk about it or touch it, not because they have never seen curly hair before, but because they are not used to me with curly hair. I have tried almost every hair product out there and many of them do not work for my hair and one day at the store I started to browse the “ethnic hair care,” section. Thinking about this in terms of this week and the Keywords term “othering” this hair care section is differentiating individuals based on socially constructed categories. I am a white girl who sometimes uses hair products in the ethnic care line but to our society I would not be considered “ethnic.” The Keywords book states, “The category ethnic is a form of differentiating in-group and out-group within any given population, and thus its very uttering performs othering.” The ethnic aisle should be included with the beauty aisle and should not be labeled into its own section. The clips I included in my movie are black woman discussing how they hate getting their hair touched and a lot of times the reason it gets touched is because the hairstyles they have may be different than the common straight or wavy hair look. The song in the beginning is called “Don’t Touch My Hair,” by Solange and the picture I included is of a black woman exposing her natural curly locks.