Chapter 3: The Stolen Crown

The psychological warfare against Black hair extends far deeper than mere aesthetics—it is rooted in the traumatic conditioning of slavery itself. For generations, enslaved Africans were forced to spend their days bent over cotton fields, their hands intimately familiar with the coiled, fibrous texture of cotton bolls. Day after day, year after year, this texture became associated with bondage, exhaustion, and dehumanization.

For some, when that same coiled texture appeared on their own heads, the psychological association was inescapable. The mind, seeking to distance itself

from trauma, began to reject not just the memory of cotton fields, but anything that resembled that texture—including their own natural hair. This psychological conditioning created fertile ground for the chemical hair industry to exploit to the point of it creating a new cultural identity for blacks and this image was pushed by utilizing those who had conformed and had  signed contracts to gain success, these are your celebrities with their ‘make up artists’ who advise on what image is in and which image is out all gradually leading to the loss of their original identity.

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Their perceived acceptance into mainstream society was for them to be used to influence the cultural direction of communities globally – furthermore, for riches and success, they would desecrate their own divine image calling their crown ‘nappy’.  Later we will see the chemical assault on black hair via the use of cosmetic products, the hidden agenda.  Let’s at least touch on it here.

Products with names like "Royal Crown" hair grease promised to transform the "difficult" and "nappy" texture into something more manageable, more acceptable, and freer. The marketing language was deliberately crafted to tap into these deep psychological wounds. Slogans like "Relax your hair and set it free" carried profound psychological undertones that connected hair texture directly to concepts of bondage and liberation. The implication was clear: natural Black hair was a form of captivity, and chemical alteration was the path to freedom.

The Crown of Thorns: Suffering for Divine Identity

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The purpose for marketing Black hair as "ugly" is precisely to make the true wearers of the crown willingly give up their divinity. This is achieved not through physical force, but through coercive tactics like ridicule, mockery, and the exploitation of vanity. People are systematically shamed into submission, accepting the myth that they are less than all who walk the earth. Yet, on the contrary, Black people wear this crown, which has become a crown of thorns, and endure the pain and suffering it brings just to fit in with a narrative that denies their inherent power and their creation in the image and likeness of the creator—people of the sun with woolly hair. They are the lost sheep, guided not by reverence for the true shepherd, but by fear through the deception of the "wolves in sheep’s clothing."

The story of Black hair in the Americas is not a simple one of fashion or style. It is a profound narrative of identity, survival, resistance, and reclamation, written strand by strand over four hundred years. To understand its depth, we must begin not on the plantations of the New World, but on the shores of West and Central Africa, centuries ago, before the world changed. For the women of the Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, and Mandinka peoples—cultures from which countless individuals were kidnapped during the 'transatlantic slave trade'—hair was a sacred and intricate language.