The Girl with the the Golden Hair

“Mom,” my daughter said to me a few weeks ago, “I’m singing this song at school where I have to say, “I’m grateful I’m the girl with the golden hair.” Hmmm, I thought. What the heck do I do now? See the problem is, my girl will never have golden hair and this is particularly obvious because she is half African American and one quarter Chinese and one quarter Caucasian. While her maternal grandmother DID have golden hair as a child, it’s now gone pretty white. Looking at her long, ringletty ponytail, the one she likes to leave in for say about a week without actually combing it much so that it becomes one giant dred, I said, “well, just say ‘curly.”

Turns out it was the Abba song “Girl with the Golden Hair” that she was singing. But as far as I’m concerned it’s still not much of an excuse. (Technically, the line goes “I have been lucky/I’m the girl with the golden hair.) Having to sing the line, whatever it was exactly, certainly was something my daughter was thinking about and it wasn’t hard to imagine why this line stuck with her, given that she’d also said she’d been getting teased about her hair in school.

I already knew that bringing it up at her school was likely to be not only thankless but actively deflected. Last year, when my daughter expressed some discomfort with not having taken part in a Lunar New Year Celebration, something that she felt had happened because people perceive her as black and not asian, and therefore not eligible to participate, I was first told I couldn’t meet with the principal to ask her about what had taken place. As this was unacceptable, I emailed her and described my concerns. Rather than meeting with me as a first response, what happened is that my questions were framed as an accusation that was then emailed to the school administrative staff. Why my private communication to the principal needed to passed on to the staff is unclear, except to warn them, I suppose, that I was, as far as they were concerned, a loose cannon for wanting to find out why my kid seemed bummed that she couldn’t participate in the Lunar New year celebration. So much for trying to address diversity issues in a mutually respectful fashion. This in a school where, as far as I can tell, all the teaching staff is white and asian, the support staff is black and latino, and the janitorial staff is black.

This is the everyday way in which racism scrapes away at us. My kid has to sing this stupid line, a line that could only reasonably apply to white kids, and if I go to her school to register discomfort, the answer I can predict is something along the lines of why are you so upset over a little thing and by the way you’re making me unfomfortable which is certainly inappropriate and in fact I think you’re something of a troublemaker and you should really stop acting like this. After all it’s only a little thing. But what if, for instance, the line went “I’m lucky/I’m the girl with the cornrowed hair” or the dredlocked hair, or the nappy hair? Call me crazy, but I don’t imagine my daughter’s nice little school would make white kids sing that line without thinking twice.

That ‘little thing’ was one I decided to address with a big old visit to my hairstylist, who along with everybody else in her shop, all four of them, lovingly washed, conditioned and combed my child’s waist length twirling hair, trimmed it, and showed me how to allow it to dry into gorgeous, springy, shiny ringlets. They told her how beautiful her hair is, how special it is, and she basked in the warmth they showered upon her. Later that night, in her hula class, her friends ran up to her to tell her how nice her hair looked and she beamed all over again. (Hula class is another – wonderful – story: the girls are black and brown and asian and white and latino and all the kinds of beauty they possess are refracted in and through the network of families and friendships we have forged together over the years.) It’s this lovingess that she needed, the warm lovingness of others, because no matter how many times I tell her she’s got the hair I always wanted, it just cannot make her feel so good and right as when the rest of the world tells her so, or at least a few of those who are out there in the world.

I am grateful she’s the child with the curly hair. I’m grateful she’s everything she is, but I am not grateful that she society we live in too often makes my child regret the glory that is her hair, her skin, her vivid imagination and her raucous vocabulary, and all because she is not white.