When news broke yesterday that Halle Berry had again taken her former partner Gabriel Aubry to court over co-parenting issues, it seemed like easy celebrity tabloid fodder. The two have been in heated disputes over joint custody issues involving their six-year-old daughter, Nahla, before. But this proved to be different: Berry reportedly alleged that Aubry had presumptively straightened and added highlights to Nahla’s head of curls without Berry’s consent. According to reports, the actress found the move to be, in her words, an attempt on Aubry’s part to stifle Nahla’s biracial identity.
As an Academy Award–winning actress, longtime spokeswoman for Revlon, and African American woman working within Hollywood’s image-focused business, Halle Berry’s career is not divorced from preconceived standards of beauty, but has directly challenged them. The star has broken down a myriad of doors for black female entertainers and, along the way, helped make the idea of, say, Lupita Nyong’o winning both an Oscar and a Lancôme beauty contract feel like the norm, rather than the exception to the rule. Is it any surprise then that Berry would be so proactive when it comes to the perceived white-washing of her own daughter’s appearance?
The judge in Berry’s case ultimately ruled that Nahla’s hair is not to be altered from its natural state by either parent—a decision that has broad-reaching implications extending beyond the realm of beauty: Imagine your afro or head of curls being lawfully protected from manipulation. It’s a small, but significant win, considering the growing conversation around the topic of black hair—for instance, the recent online petition calling for Blue Ivy Carter’s puffs to be tamed. While the act of criticizing a small child’s appearance seems particularly cruel, and the petition’s creator later claimed that it was a joke, recent photos of the two-year-old reveal her afro pulled into tightly wound buns and plaits—a sign, perhaps, of the sizable pressure that society still exerts on such matters of aesthetics.
And what about grown women who ostensibly don’t have the right to choose how to style their own hair? Interestingly enough, another online petition rose up around the policing of black hair earlier this year, but the uproar it evoked was used to call into question the U.S. Army’s new restrictive appearance policies, entitled Army Regulation 670-1. These policies, while never directly stratifying along racial or gender lines, forbade army personnel from donning twists or dreadlocks—unauthorized hairstyles that seemed to infer a particular group. In fact, it left many black female soldiers feeling isolated and largely misunderstood; the policy swiftly went under review and has since been revised.
The barrage of online petitions and policies concerning black hair—many of which are an attempt to restrain it—make Berry’s case still more symbolic, as the resurgence of the natural hair movement in recent years eschews century-old methods of chemically straightening black hair. It was Blue Ivy’s aunt, Solange Knowles, after all, who nearly broke the Internet with the styling of her wedding day afro just last week. Model Imaan Hammam’s calling card is her bountiful curls, while prime-time heroines played by Kerry Washington (Scandal), Viola Davis (How to Get Away with Murder), and Tracee Ellis Ross (black-ish) have all donned their natural curls onscreen.
These representations within broader culture may appear few and far between, but they shift the conversation about beauty entirely for black women. It is not necessarily an argument about privileging straight versus curly hair, or determining whether our appearance needs to be patently altered. As Berry’s suit drilled home, it’s about embracing the power of determining a beauty ideal all our own.
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