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When is hair “just hair” and when is it not “just hair”? Documenting the politics of African American women's hair, this book explores everyday interaction in beauty parlors, Internet discussions, comedy clubs, and other contexts to illuminate how and why hair matters in African American women's day-to-day experiences. It draws inspiration from early scholarship on both black and white women's language use while laying out a wholly new direction of inquiry grounded in multi-sited ethnography, discourse analysis, and the investigation of embodied social practice. Recognizing that, next to language itself, hair is the most complex signifier that African American women and girls use to display their identities, the book examines how hair and hair care take on situated social meanings among African American women in varied linguistic interactions—whether with one another, with African American men, or with European American women. Its use of a multifaceted approach comprehensively documents exactly how and why hair comes to matter so much in African American women's construction of their identities, and how language both mediates and produces these social meanings. The book demonstrates the symbolic and social significance of hair among African Americans in constructing race, gender, and other dimensions of identity.

IT'S 8 P.M. AND TWO THOUSAND PIERCED AND TATTOOED YOUNG KIDS--AND SOME middle-aged ones too--are shouting, \"Let's Go Murphys, Let's Go Murphys\" at The Nation, a popular alternative rock club in Washington, D.C. They're waiting restlessly to hear the Dropkick Murphys, a Boston-based Irish alternative punk-rock band. The opening acts have finished and everyone gets quiet when a tune blares over the sound system to signal that the curtain will open in a few minutes. The tune? Billy Bragg's \"There Is Power In a Union.\" Once on stage, Dropkick Murphys launches into cuts from the band's newest CD, Sing Loud Sing Proud, and the fans begin body surfing the mosh pits to \"Which Side Are You On.\" The band follows with originals that attest to their Boston working-class and immigrant roots like, \"Boys On The Docks,\" in which they sing: MESSAGES OF PROTEST HAVE LONG permeated our culture, and at some level, the history of popular music is a history of progressive social change. Rolling Stone magazine printed a painting titled \"The History of Rock n' Roll--[Woody Guthrie]'s Home Room.\" Guthrie is teaching a classroom with very young, childlike pupils Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, and Bob Dylan. More than fifty years ago Guthrie stated his philosophy of song writing: \"I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing... I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world... I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.\" And Guthrie's message has reached more and more pupils. In the same spirit--and more pithy terms--Kathleen Hanna, of the cutting-edge \"Riot Grrrl\" movement in the contemporary punk scene and of the band Bikini Kill, said, \"Being told you are a worthless piece of shit and not believing it is a form of resistance.\" Similarly, Bono, the leader of the famous Irish rock band U2, had another take: \"There's a lie that's very popular right now which is that you can't make a difference, you can't change our world. A lot of the songs we hear on the radio perpetuate that lie. It puts people in this big sleep.\" A couple of years ago, I was attending an AFL-CIO conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, and several of us were gathering a group for dinner. One member of the group said that his son would be joining us and that we should be forewarned about his spiked, multicolored hair, and different clothing. The boy arrived wearing a Rancid T-shirt. Rancid is a San Francisco-based band that has been at the forefront of the punk movement. I turned the boy around and pointed to the back of the shirt, where a listing of the band's songs appeared: among them \"Harry Bridges,\" a tribute to the West Coast Longshoreman's Union leader, and \"Black Lung,\" about health and safety on the job, as well as \"Solidarity,\" \"Untitled (Union Blood),\" and \"Roots Radical.\" It seems the son was more pro-labor and hip than his dad.