The other day a curious teacher politely asked me, “Why is it so important to you to have your hair done?”

I responded, “Well, I get bored with my hair very easily. I like a lot of looks.”

But then I thought about it: Why am I, as an African American woman, so obsessed with my hair?

A friend of mine said: “We as young African-Americans are always taught that our hair is our crown.” In other words, she believes that African Americans associate our hair with what is beautiful.

But what is beautiful? The fashion magazines suggest that African American hair is not attractive, which is why the covers rarely show African Americans with their natural hair. Instead we see that long straight blonde hair is beautiful. As a young lady, this leads me to believe that my own hair is not “good hair.”

Being an African American female is very hard in today’s society, because every day we are fooled into believing that the qualities we possess as African Americans are not beautiful.

Most successful black women in the entertainment business are not seen with their natural hair. Instead, they are seen wearing long tracks and dyed weaves to keep up with the trends of today. I believe that everyone is beautiful in his or her own way. But what I believe often dwindles when all I see on the cover of fashion magazines is long, straight hair.

My sophomore year I remember reading an excerpt by Malcolm X called, “Hair.” In the story Malcolm wanted to have his hair “conked” (a procedure done to straighten one’s hair) because he didn’t believe that his hair was good. He stated how his head burned due to the product’s chemicals.

Later in his life, Malcolm realized how foolish he was for going through the painful act of having his hair conked just to look like a white man. While reading the excerpt called “Hair,” I felt foolish myself. I perm my own hair every six weeks because I don’t like how it looks natural.

On the Tyra Banks Show, model Tyra Banks covered a show on black women who reject their heritage. During the show there was an African women who stated that she only dated Korean men so her children wouldn’t be born with “nappy” hair. As I watched the show, the woman appeared more and more ignorant to me. But in reality there are African Americans who do this.

Tyra once stated that she believes that if she had worn her hair natural as an upcoming model that she would not have been as successful in today’s media. And the sad thing about her statement is that it holds a lot of truth.

But African American women are not the only race which doesn’t like the qualities given to them? Caucasian females pay for lip implants because they don’t think their lips are full enough, and Asian women get surgery on their eyes because they think that they are too tiny, even some Indian men wish that they had been born with blue eyes.

I came to the conclusion that in today’s world we should embrace the qualities we were born with. Everyone should realize whether you are black, white, orange, yellow, or purple, we are all beautiful in our own way.