For a while, people didn't even know what Jay-Z and Beyoncé's
2-year-old daughter Blue Ivy Carter looked like. The power couple's
child often had her face covered in a veil. Now that the internet has
caught their first glimpse of the baby girl, it seems like keeping her
hidden was a good idea.
New images of Blue Ivy are surfacing, and the first thing many are
noticing is not the Blue's cuteness, but her un-styled hair. This has
led to a flood of ridiculously mean-spirited and hypercritical tweets.
But this isn't just the world's Beyoncé obsession talking. Black hair —
particularly black female hair — is serious business. Chris Rock's
documentary Good Hair
speaks to the complexities of how black female hair is kept, styled and
maintained, giving voice to the burden of living in a society that
doesn't appreciate or understand black hair. However, it's easy to see
how this burden is exacerbated when an infant is subject to intense
scrutiny for something out of her control. What's more, Blue Ivy's hair
hasn't even completely grown in yet. She's being judged on something
that, like her introduction to completely unnecessary and offensive
public scrutiny, is still unfolding.
We've seen it with Olympian Gabby Douglas and Oscar-nominated actress Quvenzhané Wallis.
These are young black women who are in the public eye in the fields
with little to no diversity. Yet everybody obsesses over their hair —
and especially whether these black women in the public eye are
representing the race positively. Through their hair.
But all politics aside, this is a 2-year-old girl. Hair hate is not
parenting advice (nor is it any kind of rational opinion) and the good
people of Twitter are not Blue Ivy's parents. That job is left to the
most talented couple in the world. They can handle it.
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