These days, the idea of existing as a bald, black woman carries an air of stately rebellion. Like me, many black women have taken the plunge as an act of radical self-acceptance, with Danai Gurira, Lupita Nyong’o, and — of course — Grace Jones modelling the blueprint for bald bodaciousness. “Without fully understanding it at the time, I savoured the response to what I did to myself, by breaking certain laws about how I was meant to behave and look – as a model, a girl, a daughter, an American, a West Indian, a human being,”
Jones shares in her book,
I’ll Never Write My Memoirs. “My shaved head made me look more abstract, less tied to a specific race or sex or tribe. I was Black, but not Black; woman, but not woman; American, but Jamaican; African, but science fiction.”