date, Oklahoma’s bottlenecker status quo remains.
Jestina Clayton nervously approached the armed guard standing outside the US Embassy in Conakry, Guinea. The soldier’s hard gaze and automatic rifle were having their intended effect. Desperate for a visa to escape her war-ravaged home country of Sierra Leone, she, along with many others, had been sitting outside the embassy for three days. Absent the visa, she would be forced to return to a home devastated by civil war and, perhaps, to a terrible fate she had seen befall family members and friends. “Young girls, young women my age were being taken,” Jestina recalled.1 As a child, she narrowly escaped the same happening to her. “We were hiding in a building. My mother dressed me like an old person and then stood in front of me to hide me while the rebels took my best friend.”2
At the age when girls in the United States are just beginning fourth grade, Jestina was worried about whether she would live to see the next day: “I was nine when the civil war started, and for a long time it was just survival, making sure that . . . I’m alive the next day, that my family is alive, and that my friends are.”3 Jestina’s life of survival lasted for nine of the eleven years of Sierra Leone’s civil war.
The war in Sierra Leone began in 1991, forming the bloody climax of a postcolonial history marked by frequent coups, juntas, contested elections, and rampant corruption.4 By the time Jestina was born in 1982, the country had already suffered decades of political upheaval, economic turmoil, social distress, and the pauperization of its people.5 As she grew, her mother provided her as stable a life as possible and passed on elements of a cultural heritage she had learned as a girl, one of which was hair braiding. She learned to braid hair at the age of five, first braiding her mother’s hair and then spending her youth braiding for other girls and women.6 As a young girl and then as a teenager, braiding was more than a way to style hair for Jestina; it was also part of her identity. Little did she know what role it would play in her life in the years to come.
When the civil war erupted in Sierra Leone, her family spent the next nine years struggling to survive in and out of displacement camps, fleeing in the face of rebel soldiers. Constantly aware of the fate of other young girls, her mother insisted that Jestina find a way to escape. Reluctantly, Jestina tracked down the phone number of an aunt living in the United States and used funds her aunt provided her to travel to Conakry in neighboring Guinea—a trip of more than 160 miles—to secure a visa to escape to the United States.
And so it came to pass that this young woman of eighteen approached a US soldier at the embassy in Guinea, not as a naïve teenager seeking a cosmopolitan life in the United States but as a war-weary survivor leaving her family to avoid what had befallen so many females of her age. Through a stroke of luck, Jestina’s request to the embassy guard resulted in an interview, then a visa, and then, in relatively short order, a trip to the United States. On August 10, 2000, Jestina arrived in New York, where she lived with family for three years. She quickly set about seeking to provide for herself. She completed her GED in 2001 and began taking a course in computer literacy. All the while, she applied the knowledge she had gained through her cultural roots by braiding the hair of members of her family.
In 2003, Jestina got married and shortly thereafter moved to Utah, where her husband’s family lived. A year later, she enrolled at Weber State University to earn a degree in political science. Her husband, Paul, was also in college, and they began a family. Paying tuition for two, regular bills, and the expenses that go with having children added up quickly. Jestina and Paul were getting by, but just barely.
Paul worked at the local hospital, and Jestina tutored on her college campus and worked at the student newspaper. She secured scholarships for her studies, and members of her family helped when they could, but the couple had no money for even the simplest of luxuries such as eating at a restaurant. They considered applying for government support but ultimately rejected it. “It’s my responsibility,” Jestina explained, adding:
When you think about how I was raised, we did not get anything from the government. I felt like I needed to handle my own affairs. It was important that we do our best to take care of ourselves. We did not even take financial aid, no student loans. This was about ourselves, not getting handouts. There were times we wanted to give up. It was hard, and after we had our second child, it was pretty tough.7
Jestina and Paul lived a frugal existence, cutting every conceivable corner to provide for their family and pay for the schooling they knew would afford them a better life in the future, but despite their best efforts, more money was going out than was coming in. Jestina cast about for a way to earn extra money. It had to be something with enough flexibility that she could care for her family and continue her education. She also needed to be able to generate income immediately, without significant upfront training. It was then that a confluence of circumstances provided the answer. She would do the thing she had done her entire life—indeed, something African women have done for thousands of years—she would braid hair.8
THE ART OF HAIR BRAIDING
The highly specialized and intricate crafts of twisting, braiding, weaving, and locking natural hair into different styles are types of hair braiding mostly used by African Americans. Today, these distinct techniques are generally grouped together under the rubric of “natural haircare,” because they do not use any chemicals or artificial hairstyling techniques. The history of this type of hair braiding is thousands of years old.9
In African cultures, the grooming and styling of hair has long been an important social ritual. Elaborate hair designs reflecting tribal affiliation, status, sex, age, occupation, and the like are common, and the cutting, shaving, wrapping, and braiding of hair are centuries-old arts.10 Anthropologists have identified the symbolism associated with hair as particularly powerful and important in individual and group identity in numerous world cultures.11
When African captives were brought to America to serve as slaves, the symbolism of and emphasis on their hair was preserved,12 but by the nineteenth century the physical attributes of African Americans—their skin color, facial structure, and hair characteristics—had become freighted with negative connotations. Whites frequently referred to black hair as “wool” in order to differentiate it from the “superior” texture of white hair.13 Blacks were taught to view straight, light-colored hair as the paramount expression of female beauty, which led to racial self-hatred, shame, and pervasive hair straightening in the African American community, typically accomplished through chemical means.14
It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that natural African hairstyles began to reemerge. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Afros; dreadlocks; cornrows; and braids decorated with chevrons, beads, and mirrors became the symbols of black pride and a rejection of the white aesthetic that had for so long dominated the black sense of self.15 The effect of such symbolism was profound. As Roberta Matthews, an African American woman, now in her early seventies, recalled, “When I first saw a woman with an Afro, I was shocked. I could barely look at her. I almost fainted.” That was 1958. Yet, moved by the symbolism of natural hair, Roberta, too, began wearing her hair in an Afro two years after that encounter. The disapproval among her relatives was immediate and severe. “‘Why do you want to mess yourself up like that?’ they asked me. They thought I was awful.”16
Ever so slowly, the negative view of natural hair changed. Today, although still viewed with some skepticism both inside and outside of the African American community,17 natural hairstyles for African Americans have become so popular that natural haircare has
