My Son's Hair

I haven’t mentioned it before, but Baby M is half African-American and half Latino. Ian and I are both white. Some have said we’re very white. I’ll have to decide as M gets older how much of his personal life it’s appropriate to share on the web, but suffice to say, transracial adoption is a controversial topic for many reasons, some good and some bad. We know there’s a lot of ways we’re going to embarrass him growing up, but we’re going to do what we can on anything we can fix with a little education.

Today, I drove M down to see Althea at Spice Salon on West Pico, just off La Brea. She’s a Jamaican hair dresser who has been running classes for white parents to teach them how to take care of their black babies’ hair. She didn’t have any group classes coming up, so we did a one-on-one consultation.

I wasn’t entirely clueless, it seems. I showed her the brush I was using daily and the olive oil based conditioner, and she recommended a moisturizing shampoo I could use instead of Johnson & Johnsons generic baby shampoo, which would also not hurt his eyes, called hair milk.



She told me to get a wide-pronged comb and every morning, do the leave-in conditioner, work out the knots with the comb, and then brush, and she showed me how to do it gently but firmly.

“I’m not the only black person who hates to see a white couple with a black baby whose hair is so untidy, he looks like a wild child from the Congo,” Althea says. “Hair is part of our culture. Do something with it, so he’ll be proud.”

I can’t teach M how to be black in America, but hopefully I can give him some tools so he can figure it out for himself.