Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women's Consciousness

Drawing on interviews with over 50 women, from teens to seniors, Hair Matters is the first book on the politics of Black hair to be based on substantive, ethnographically informed research. Focusing on the everyday discussions that Black women have among themselves and about themselves, Ingrid Banks analyzes how talking about hair reveals Black women's ideas about race, gender, sexuality, beauty, and power. Ultimately, what emerges is a survey of Black women's consciousness within both their own communities and mainstream culture at large.

• Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture, and African American Women
• At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
• The Politics of Black Women's Hair
• Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty
• Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America
• Ain't I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race
• Tenderheaded: A Comb-Bending Collection of Hair Stories
• Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975
• Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America
• White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism