Media Effects and Black Hair Politics

Hair has historically reflected material consequences in the Black community; thus, research has begun to investigate how the power/privilege matrix that is propagated throughout the media permeates society and impacts African-American women’s perceptions of hair. This research joins the discussion by exploring how Black hair magazine advertisements influence Black women’s hair styles and their perceptions of what constitutes beautiful Black hair. Findings revealed that the images African-American women consume from Black hair magazine advertisements do impact what they consider to be beautiful and, subsequently, influence their day-to-day styling and hair care mechanisms, lending further support to the idea that the media serve as powerful sources of knowledge. This study culminates by theorizing about the constitutive meanings and importance of Black hair as conveyed through magazine advertisements and considers how Black women use social comparisons to make everyday hair decisions to achieve what they identify as good hair. Media Effects and Black Hair Politics Ethnic studies focusing on African Americans have addressed a myriad of research topics. One profound area of inquiry in African-American research that has recently sparked interest involves body politics. The term body politics describes the comprehensive ideals, guidelines, and decisions made by society about the human flesh and implies that the body is the site and surface of struggle. Representations, definitions, and treatments of the body are inherently political statements because of what they communicate about the constitutive meanings, importance, obsessions, practices, and urgencies related to the body. Body politics furthermore describes the social constructs of a particular culture or group of individuals regarding the parts and structure of the body. The politics that individuals adopt explain and govern the relationships between genetic traits, physical appearance, and other political ideologies that exist in a given culture (Spellers & Moffitt, 2010). Body politics presumes that the body is a not only a political entity, but a rhetorical artifact. Thus, studying the body is similar to analyzing a text or artifact, and much like a piece of text or other rhetorical artifact, researchers have become increasingly interested in studying the human body to gain a better understanding of its relevance to art, science, religion, popular culture, cross-cultures, and even the mass media (Spellers & Moffitt, 2010). Because of the uniqueness and diversity of the demographics associated with African Americans, research has become especially fascinated with exploring Black bodies. In the book, Scripting the Black Masculine Body, author Ronald L. Jackson II (2006) describes Black body politics in popular media as “contemporaneous with slavery” (p. 12). Jackson (2006) writes, “Since the emergence of race as a social construct, Black bodies have become surfaces of racial meanings. So it is only