Afro State of Mind:
Memories of a Nappy Headed Black Girl
About the Book
Afro State of Mind: Memories of a Nappy Headed Black Girl is a coming of age story about a Black girl trying to find her place in a world where her hair and skin color simply do not fit the norm. The book uses Black hair as a metaphor to analyze the issues of race, culture, history and identity.
Lurie is a young woman wrestling with the “problem” of “bad” hair. She knows that the predominant standard of beauty has explicitly and intentionally excluded Black women with hair like hers and like most in her community she buys into that way of thinking.
Forced to come to grips with the fact that she’ll never have “good” hair, Lurie begins the process of learning to embrace the hair and features she has and by extension learns to love herself and her community.
In the decades after slavery, many women of African descent like Lurie tried to squeeze, manipulate and contort their bodies in an attempt to fit into a beauty model that was never designed for them. This struggle for acceptance is arguably seen most powerfully when analyzing issues of Black hair and colorism.
Afro State of Mind: Memories of a Nappy Headed Black Girl explores the legacy of nappiness (or “bad” hair), prevailing concepts of beauty and how those concepts impact the self-esteem and psychological development of women and girls of color both in the United States and abroad.
Afro State of Mind is available now
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