How Michelle Obama subverted respectability politics with a ponytail

Respectability politics died the day Michelle Obama showed up at her last official engagement as First Lady with a thrown-together ponytail-bun combination and a facial expression fit for a funeral. She looked flawless as always. She also looked fed up and ready to go. Respectability politics—the belief that black people can overcome many of the everyday, acute impacts of racism by dressing properly and having education and social comportment—is, first and foremost, performed as a kind of sartorial prerogative. What I mean is that your fashion choices are subject to great scrutiny. Black people are taught to care about how they look and how their children look. If you see a little black girl out in public with her hair unkempt—her parts unintentionally jagged, her edges unsmoothed, her ponytails askew, or her hair ornaments not in their proper place—you can be assured that there is some black woman somewhere asking, “Who does that baby belong to?”

Black women’s hairstyles are their own cultural vocabulary, which changes depending on mood, life circumstance, and who exactly will be seeing us on any given day. Mrs. Obama’s hairstyle was the kind you put together after you’d been up all night packing and it’s time to get your shit, leave the keys on the counter, and go. It’s not public hair. It is not hair given to inaugural pomp and circumstance. It is everyday black-girl hair. We learn this complex hair vocabulary as we sit perched, often for hours, between the knees of mothers, aunties, and hairstylists, trained and untrained, from babyhood forward.

Every night, my mother painstakingly parted and greased my scalp and then plaited or rolled my hair, for ease of styling in the morning. A few hours later, I would sit between her legs while she parted my hair into three or four neat sections, affixed rubber bands to the tops of each section, and then twisted my ponytails. She finished by tying ribbons at the tops and snapping barrettes on the ends. At the end of each day, she would fuss and scold when I came home with those same barrettes missing and ponytails askew and unraveled, after “ripping and running and not being careful” at recess. At age 12, when my mother finally decided it was time for me to get a perm, my hairdresser, Mrs. Earline, asked my mother, “Are you sure?” And later, when Mom came to pick me up with my newly permed, silky tresses, Mrs. Earline said, “I prayed over this baby’s head. And when I didn’t see any hair on the comb as I worked it through, I knew the Lord was saying it was going to be alright.” Maintaining my head of long, thick hair was a community project.