Pomade

I had braids until I was 14, when my father made me cut them off. He didn’t think that natural Black hair would ever be accepted in the workplace. He was trying to get me to look “professional,” which I later realized meant “pleasing to the white gaze.”

I began to believe that my hair was “bad” so I used the pomade to make myself closer to what I now know were Eurocentric standards of beauty and respectability.