The Methods that Make Us

A “protective style,” as we colloquially understand it in Black culture, refers to African braiding hairstyles that shield hair from the elements and allow for new growth. The process of “protective styling” is laborious, and loving; hair washed, blown dry, brushed out, precisely parted, and intricately designed. It’s a poetic term. Independently, these two words can be used in various different contexts: protective, meaning “designed to keep safe from harm,” and style, meaning “a way of doing things that expresses an attitude or culture.” Strung together, protective style describes a sense of purpose…“a way of keeping safe from harm that expresses an attitude or culture.” It captures the moment when practical intention is performed with flair. 

The earliest reference I could find to this phrase — although used in a dramatically different context — is in an 1882 issue of Demorests' Monthly Magazine,1 a fashion publication from the late 19th Century overseen by dressmaking pattern designers Ellen and William Jennings Demorest. The article at hand, titled “Children’s Fashions,” analyzes the Victorian dresswear of the day, and points out that the liberties that dresses and skirts afforded to young girls — their flowiness, layers, and flounce — actually serve as a better shield against cold weather than the pants young boys were expected to wear. There is a “hardiness,” the author writes, “engendered by the thoroughly protective style of dress which is at present worn by children.”2

The shift in the phrase’s use from dress to hair — and further, to describe Black hair — seems to have begun in the late ’50s, amidst civil rights reform. Advertisements in EBONY magazine for a range of hair products used the term “protective” as a selling point.3 Their oils and serums, advertisers promised, would allow for easier straightening and faster styling. Of course, this era of hairstyling, which just preceded the natural hair movement of the ’60s and ’70s, still prescribed to white standards of presentation and respectability. Black women were seeking products that would help them flatten their curls, and leave no strand out of place. They sought to protect their hair so that they could continue to manipulate it.

Today, our understanding has evolved beyond this premise. We braid, twist, and wrap our hair to minimize manipulation. Through these methods, we seek to preserve our curls, hold moisture, promote growth, and protect our ends from harsh weather (much like with the Victorian skirts). With this new definition in tow, usage of “protective style” in publications has multiplied fifteen fold4 since 1960. It’s a household term across the Black diaspora. 

Still, I think there is room to explore the symbolism of the practice further. On the surface, the reasoning behind protecting our hair seems pretty straightforward. Why wouldn’t we all want to protect our hair? Surely this objective is universal — ungendered and culturally unspecific. What makes this practice meaningful, to me, is how radical it is within the context of oppression. In the Western world, where Black peoples are persecuted and punished for wearing their hair braided,5 to continue to do so is a commitment to maintaining Black diasporic culture. It’s poetic, moving, and beautiful in all the ways. And so, the other methods that have evolved out of Black and Brown culture — which are, by nature, evolving in the face of discrimination — fall under the same category. 

“A way of keeping safe from harm, that expresses an attitude or culture.” To me, elaborating upon our understanding of “protective style” works to honor practices that have been hidden, dismissed, or otherwise taught back to us as primitive. To expand this definition, I studied my family, my neighborhood, and my digital communities. The following categories, which are by no means exhaustive, offer an initial framework that unites BIPOC methods of making. The material methods I’ve focused on — braiding/beading, weaving/quilting, and wrapping/covering — function as longstanding practices for retaining culture and facilitating safety. These methods are used to maintain archives, preserve stories, repair objects, shelter dwellers, and honor decorative traditions. In other words, this approach to making serves and services us. Below, five stories unpack these practices. These are the methods that make us — and as Essie Pettway says so poetically in Maris Curran’s short film, While I Yet Live: “We gon’ leave this all behind one day. It’s not ours in the beginning. We’re just only borrowing it, for the time we are here.”6

Wrapping & Covering

1. Somewhere in a Black neighborhood, a grandmother sits on her plastic-covered couch

The plastic sofa cover is one of the first things mentioned when folks speak about a Black aesthetic of homemaking. There’s something to be said about its familiarity: plastic so old it has gone off-white, or fully yellowed. The material either holds itchy friction on bare skin or is otherwise slippery.  The sofa sighs squeakily when you sit on it. But you can rest assured that the antique beneath — purchased in 1971, Grandma exclaims! — is not disturbed. And that is comforting. It’s an act of kindness to the future self and any and all future generations — the idea that Black material belongings are worth maintaining, preserving, and sharing. The plastic-covered couch is how Grandma shows she is hopeful for the future. She is contributing to (or in many cases, inaugurating) a collection of heirlooms.

2. Migration bags cross every ocean

As human rights atrocities continue to occur around the globe, the migration that nearly always follows is traced in a myriad of ways: photography, video, oral storytelling, live tweeting, memoir, and beyond. There is not yet a truly universal piece of material evidence of these migrations, but a product of the last 50 years comes close: a large plastic zipped tote bag, with a tricolor red, white, and blue tartan pattern. It is practically weightless on its own, but is tough against rips and movement. The pattern is printed, but appears woven, giving color and life to an otherwise simple concept. It has been labeled the “migration bag,”7 or more controversially, the “Ghana Must Go”8 bag, and is found for purchase across the globe.

Weaving & Quilting

3. Pieced together with love, a quilt comforts through the American night

Lisa Gail Collins depicts the Black American quilt in Cycles of Mourning and Memory as a “tender textile elegy — a pieced cotton dirge.”9 Quilting represents a passing down of knowledge and skill from elder to junior, as well as being a remarkably patient practice in pattern-making — the idea that the sum of a multitude of fabrics is greater than its parts. Sewn together, these pieces offer comfort and carry stories forward.

4. A vision of the world is woven

For Maya women, 500 years of weaving has offered a chance to create functional objects that are embedded with tradition and Mayan history. “Hidden between the warp and weft,” the website Mayan Hands explains, “[the work of weavers] escaped the fate of Indigenous books that were burnt by Spanish priests and authorities.”10 A backstrap loom, designed to be wearable, enabled this elaborate art practice to be portable. Equipped with this, Mayan creations across Central America can be traced to specific villages, with each locality having passed down its own design style and use of pattern.

Braiding & Beading

5. Rice and resistance is diffused over a large area

African hair braiding is the original protective style we’ve come to know. It is a method of making that crossed the ocean with our enslaved ancestors, used not only to protect hair itself from the harshness of the daily environment, but also to conceal grains of rice necessary for survival. It’s a freeing act, and therefore a defiant act of resistance. The creativity borne from this attempt at survival enriches the practice further. Our traced evolution of braiding today demonstrates the infinite possibility and beauty of Black hair. Serena’s beads on the world’s tennis courts speak to this. The intricacy of patterns in hair worn around Bedford-Stuyvesant speak to this also.

6. But first, meditative beadwork

While developing the “Protective Style” Are.na channel, I came across Malinda Gray’s 2017 Dissertation, entitled, “Beads: Symbols of Indigenous Culture and Symbolic Value.”11 Gray’s exploration of beading as a practice of repair — literally and figuratively — offered a beautiful case study for resiliency to close with. The physical act of arranging, stringing, stacking, and knotting is therapeutic. In the face of the terror that was the residential school system, this practice heals, recounts, and affirms that the community is still here.