While the pros and cons of relaxing hair are discussed in detail at black hair salons everywhere, at Nappturality.com, the Internet's shrine to natural hair, chemical straighteners are not up for debate.

If you ask Patricia "Dee" Gaines, the Rhode Island-reared, Australia-dwelling founder of Nappturality, there are no pros to relaxing your hair.

"Hate is not strong enough word for how I feel about the product," Gaines told Stereohyped. "Not only do I see what it does to women's hair, I see what it does to their feelings about themselves. I relaxed for over 20 years. The mindset that I had when I was relaxing my hair for 20 years was that my own hair as it grew out of my head was not acceptable, and no one could tell me any different."

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A few years ago at Spelman College, Lori Tharps was making an appearance to promote a book she co-wrote with her friend, Ayana Byrd. The book, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, examines the fascinating, often emotional relationship Black Americans have with their hair. And she was about to find out just how much it affected the people who read it.

During the question and answer period, a woman in the audience stood up, told an emotional story about growing out her relaxer and, when she was done, snatched off her wig, showing her natural tresses for the first time. She got a standing ovation.

"Hair Story came out in 2000," Tharps told Stereohyped, "and it never ceases to amaze me that people are still so passionate about hair and the issues that it evokes. You hear something like the Glamour incident and the Don Imus incident, and you realized that these issues will never go away. I would suspect that anywhere there are black women there are black hair issues."

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They have names like the Infamous Lisa B, Weavin’ Steven, Little Willie, Big Bad D, and Color Me Vic. No, they’re not rappers. They’re hair dressers. Excuse me, hair entertainers. And they’re just some of the creative experts that keep Hair Wars, an African American hair show known for its outrageous designs, afloat.

It all started in the '80s at Detroit nightclubs, where David “Hump the Grinder” Humphries, a promoter and DJ, would stage hair shows as entertainment in the middle of parties. He knew nothing about hair or hair styling, but he knew he was onto something when he saw how well-received the hair shows were.

From the nightclub gimmick arose Hair Wars, a monster touring hair show that has piqued the curiosity of the mainstream media and made stars of its stylists. And there is nothing else like it.

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Carolivia Herron wrote the children’s book Nappy Hair expecting a little bit of controversy. You see, the lead character, a child named Brenda, had "the nappiest, fuzziest, the most screwed up, squeezed up, knotted hair." Brenda was special. Unique. Herron figured parents might not like that she was putting this young character on a pedestal.

“I was claiming uniqueness for my character,” Herron told Stereohyped, “rather than claiming that this child represented African American people as a whole.”

But the controversy Herron got was of an entirely different sort. In 1998, a white elementary school teacher in the predominately black and Hispanic Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY, infuriated parents after she read the book to her class and sent students home with copies. They considered Nappy Hair to be a racial slur. The administration eventually backed the book and the teacher’s decision to read it in class, but it was too late. The teacher had to request a transfer because she feared for her safety.

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Don Imus found out the hard way — until things got really easy and lucrative, of course — that hair is a touchy subject in the African American community. So touchy, in fact, that if you call a group of us nappy-headed, an army of people will want your head.

But why? Well, the obvious answer is that we live in a society that has an Anglo-influenced standard of beauty. And no matter how far we've come on our generations-long journey to love ourselves, not only in spite of the way we look but because of it, little black girls still have to battle against fashion, beauty, and entertainment industries that teach them, either directly or indirectly, that long and straight is in and short and kinky is out. Little black boys get the same message.They become adults with these ideas still firmly implanted in their heads…and the cycle continues.

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