Search Results: Melissa Burlock
The examination room seemed too sterile for such an intimate revelation: two hard plastic chairs, harsh fluorescent lights, and a rolling stool where the dermatologist perched, petite and patient in her white coat. I removed my head wrap. My black-and-white checkered scarf was of a slightly stiffer fabric than the few others I’d possessed at that time, which meant I didn’t have to unwind the snug folds I had swathed and tucked around my mesh of coily hair that morning. Like baked clay from a mold, it held the shape of my head as it waited on mom’s lap beside me—warm and ready to wrap its folds around my head again once the doctor and her assistant had finished the scalp biopsy.
The dermatologist phoned a few days later to tell me I had central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia. I was twenty-nine years old. A common form of hair loss experienced by Black women, CCCA starts in the crown of the scalp as your hair follicles inflame and then spreads, with the insatiability of fire, leaving scarring and baldness in its wake.
But I still had a lot of kinky hair back then, enough that my arm was tired when I would pick it out. I could beat the odds, I figured, and I had a to-do list: men’s Rogaine to regrow my edges—check. Biotin supplements—check. Essential oil-infused castor oil for nightly scalp massages—check. Switch from braids and glue-in weaves to a TWA—double check.
In the beginning, I was consistent. Then I started my first “real” job with a salary and 401(k), and I had less time, and energy, for scalp massages and scheduled wash days. Soon, my hair care regimen shifted back to its default: extensions and wigs.
I remember resenting having to spend so much time on my hair over the weekend when my kinky coils would just be cornrowed and smothered underneath a serious straight-hair bob wig by Monday. At least I had stopped getting tight micros like I did in high school, and relaxers and damaging glue-in weaves like I did during grad school, I equivocated.
Two dime-sized bald spots at the top of my head were the hidden fees that years of those hairstyles had forced me to pay. But there was still an abundance of kinky coils left on my head. I treated them like a natural resource I would always have, until there was nothing left to not take care of. By my early thirties, the hair loss had spread across the entire top of my scalp.
“A woman’s hair is her crown of glory,” the Bible says (1 Corinthians 11:15). But I had lost mine. My glory washed down the drain or came out in a comb, and I didn’t even notice. I was too busy working the most stressful job of my career, within an environment where you could count the number of black people holding leadership roles in the entire building (aside from maintenance and security) on two fingers.
Reflecting on a recent study in which researchers linked the manacles of workplace racism and unhealthy inflammation in Black women, I’ve wondered if my hair loss was a result not only of what I failed to consistently do at home, but also what I was going through at work.
CCCA is a form of hair loss in which white blood cells in the body destroy hair follicles like foreign agents, causing inflammation and scarring. This lymphocytic response that triggered inside of me, and the unchecked caucasity that went on outside of me at the office, may not have been coincidences.
Did the stress I experienced contribute to the inflammation that accelerated my alopecia? I don’t know for certain. What I do know is that if I had a hair for every microaggression, every put-me-in-my-place meeting, every idea not given credit for, every passed-over promotion, every “other” duty assigned, every time I did the work of two employees for one low-end entry-level salary… well, I’d have a lot more black coils springing from my brown head.
Exacerbated by stress at work, which was unmitigated by my hair care regimen at home, my worsening hair loss was a humiliation I tucked beneath a wig cap and silky-straight, shoulder-length wig. My straight tendrils were extensions of how I wanted to appear to other people: professional, nonthreatening, assimilated.
Then COVID happened. Working in my bedroom-turned-office due to the pandemic, separated by the white gaze of colleagues by a screen I could exit with a simple click, I suddenly had the freedom to come out from under straight-hair wigs five days a week, eight hours a day.
Many Black women felt relieved to work from home during the pandemic, free to curate their personal workspaces, safe from the microaggressions and passive aggressive comments that are pervasive to majority-White workplaces. I would pull on my lace front before a Teams huddle and replace it with a scarf when it was over. These were strictly inside-the-house-only scarves.
I eventually resigned from that job in 2021, worked remotely for about a year and a half, and then transitioned to working part-time to focus on co-writing a book about black hair care and spiritual identity with my mom and sister. This was in 2023.
By then, I wore headscarves everywhere I used to only feel comfortable wearing a wig to. I confess at first it was because, at a new job where I only worked part-time and my coworkers wore jeans, I felt like I could wear “informal” accessories like headscarves. The headscarves I began to add to my collection were much too colorful, too ostentatious, too “black” to be equal to the professional and refined (read: Eurocentric) straight black hair wigs I wore in my former roles.
Centuries of racism have shrouded black women’s headscarves in layers upon layers of demeaning stereotypes, and this history tipped the scales of my judgment. Whether the proverbial “head rag” that enslaved black women had to tear from used animal feed sacks to cover their kinky hair beneath a scorching sun, which unavoidably led to matting and rampant scalp diseases (Willie L. Morrow, 400 Years Without a Comb, 25-27), or the mammy caricatures commercialized through films like Gone with the Wind and products like Aunt Jemima syrup bottles, black women’s headscarves have been symbols of shame and subservience.
But peek behind the tight folds of Mammy’s lily-white kerchief and you’ll catch the glint of an ancestral crown. From the duku in Ghana, gele in Nigeria, and the kitambala in the DRC, to the tarha in Sudan, women have worn traditional head wraps across Africa. Headscarves are known by as many names as there are countries in which they are worn. In South Africa women have reclaimed the doek. In Malawi-Zimbabwe women wear dhukus, while women in Sierra Leone wear the enkeycha, and women in Zambia the chitambala.
Whether it’s the kilemba of East Africa or the igitambara in Rwanda and Burundi, black women don traditional headscarves, not as a mark of subjugation, but a symbol of cultural pride, religious adherence, and respect. Or simply as a chic fashion statement. Because black people’s head coverings are worthy of the haute couture treatment, as Solange Knowles displayed at the 2018 Met Gala in her haloed black do-rag. Reclaiming the beauty of the traditional African head wrap has been a revolutionary act for a long time.
In eighteenth-century Louisiana, black women rebelled against the Tignon Laws that required them to cover their hair with a tignon to show they belonged to the slave caste by choosing to use rich, eye-catching fabrics for their head coverings and embellishing them with elaborate decorations like jewels and feathers.
My choice to start wearing head wraps was, at least for me, less a political statement than a personal one.The last time I wore a wig was at my brother’s wedding. Since then, my repertoire of head wraps has become fancier.
The headscarves I buy from black woman-owned companies like The Wrap Life, founded by Nnenna Stella, and Fanm Djanm, founded by Paola Mathé, add splashes of emerald, mahogany, bright yellow, coral, and indigo to the formerly subdued color scheme of my closet. Headscarves that come in fabrics silky, stiff, and ribbed, patterned in decorative swirls, florals, medallions, and marbled designs. Headscarves for academic presentations, summer vacations, special events, and everywhere in between.
For me wearing wigs was hiding. Donning headscarves is showing off; for the first time in my adult life, I am (hair)dressing in bold colors rather than blending in. For an introverted personality like myself, pairing a solid-color dress with the multicolored pop of a patterned headscarf is the kind of silent statement I prefer.
More important than my uncharacteristic confidence in accessories, my relationship to my hair has changed. Unlike when I exclusively wore wigs and weaves, I nurtured the health of my scalp and hair beneath my headscarves with a consistency and conscientiousness I hadn’t practiced since immediately after I was diagnosed with CCCA.
I didn’t walk this hair journey alone. In My Divine Natural Hair: Inspiration and Tips to Love and Care for Your Crown (published March 2024 by Broadleaf Books)—the aforementioned book I co-wrote after I started working part-time—I share how my sister taught me hair care recipes I could mix up with ingredients from the kitchen to heal my scalp inflammation, how my mom emailed me “hair prayers” to encourage me to invite God into my sense of loss. Those organic recipes and affirmations became both the inspiration behind and invitation of our book, which is to come alongside other black women on their hair care journeys, from hot combs on the kitchen stove to the pain of hair loss.
Because we all have hair stories. Some ladies who have experienced a form of alopecia choose to rock the beautiful and bald look, while others go to talented hairdressers who can transform their brokenness into beautiful styles, and still others explore hair follicle transplant surgery.
Right now, I’m in the part of my journey where I’m practicing the discipline of wash days and patient finger detangling, fingers refamiliarizing themselves with the double-helix coils of God’s design sprouting from my own healthy scalp in defiance of everything they’ve been through, partly from my poor decisions, partly from what was out of my control.
Once thought to be the result of tight hairstyles and chemical relaxers, researchers have begun to recognize that the causes of CCCA are multifactorial, even genetic. My mom has told me that her mom experienced hair loss in her scalp in the same area where I have alopecia. I have grandma’s eyes; could it be that I also inherited her crown? Except she protected her scalp with big floral-accented church hats on Sundays, and I wear my floral-patterned head wraps to church services now.
“‘I have crowned you with glory and honor,’” the Bible says (Psalm 8:5). A crown manifested in the African beauty of a bright yellow head wrap, filling in what I lost, as gold in the seams of what was broken, with the truth that, whether in a head wrap, satin bonnet, or a do-rag, I wear a diadem I will never ever lose.
