When pondering on my topic of research, I had to decide who I wanted to study. I decided that the people I would study would be Black women, including African-American and African women living in the U.S. The criteria for participating in this study was to self identify as “Black”, a “woman” and have participated in a study abroad program in a college/university in the state of Georgia. Since I am investigating Black women that have participated in a study abroad program in Georgia, all of my participants lived in Atlanta and were either current or past university students. I chose to study Black women who have studied abroad initially to investigate racial identity abroad but in discussing issues with friends and other study abroad participants, I became interested in hair as it related to beauty and identity.
Study abroad allows people to directly explore the concepts of intersectionaily and positionality i.e. the shifting states of identity. College students in the U.S. such as Black American women who have been socialized with American ideologies about their hair (race, gender, class ideologies), are temporarily placed in a foreign country through study abroad. It is important to investigate how these women's experiences with their hair weas impacted by their time in these countries even though they only traveled there for a short period of time and further, how they were perceived in these contexts by the local population. Throughout this paper, I will refer to them as participants. Feminists and anthropologists prefer to identify those who partake in the study as participants rather than subjects (Reinharz 1992:18). It is important to choose language that will oppose the subject/researcher dichotomy in order to break down social hierarchies. Regardless of my interpretation of their identity, I wanted to give them the
chance to identify themselves in order to make them active agents in their construction of self identification. (Appendix C, Table 1.1).
Racial and ethnic background
Most of the women identified as Black and refered to themselves as Black women during the interview, which was partially because I told them it was a study on Black women and in my questions refered to them as Black women. Nine of the women identified as Black, four as African American, one as Afro-Trinidadian/Afro-Caribbean, two a bi-racial (Black Hispanic and black Mexican), one as African American and Black, one as African, one did not want to racially identify but if she had to would choose African American and the other defined herself as a human.
Many of the women could not identify ethnically or just used Black, partially because they did not understand the term. When I asked the women about how they self-identified in terms of ethnicity, they would look puzzled. This idea of ethnicity is discussed later. Two could not give an answer and were confused by the meaning of the term, three said “Black”, one said “Black?”, four “African American”, two “Black American”, one responded “United States.” The other participants that gave an ethnic background, meaning that their parents were born outside the United states, had ease answering the question. They claimed: African (Nigerian), Jamaican American, Haitian, White/Black, Jamaican, Black/Hispanic, Afro-Trinidadian/Afro-Caribbean, Black/Panamanian Hispanic. They all are women of African descent that live in the United States that identify socially with the meaning of “Black”.
Educational background
All of the women were in colleges or college graduates of schools in Atlanta including Clark Atlanta University, Spelman College, Emory University, The Georgia Institute of
Technology (Georgia Tech) and Georgia State University. The majority of the participants were Georgia State students because I had access to many of these students via the study abroad office and prior personal relationships I had with certain participants. I utilized the snowballing technique to gain this sample. Thirteen people went to Georgia State, three Georgia Tech, one Emory and one Clark and two Spelman. Eleven were undergraduates (junior/senior status), six were graduates with their BA, one was a graduate with her BA and MA and two were currently in graduate school. Fifteen were/are majoring in the social sciences and the other five major/ed in computer science or business fields.
Age
Fifteen of the participants were between the ages of 21 and 23. The others were 24, 25, 26 and 39. This was the expected age pool due the fact that I was interviewing mainly undergraduate students. Since the population for this project is college students, all of the women are over the age of 18.
Hair type and skin color
The participants described their hair by texture, color, length and style. When asked to state their skin color they would all look at their arm and all answered shades of brown. In terms of skin color, six identified their skin color as brown and two said Chocolate/dark-skin. Other answers varied, for example as brown/caramello, tan, black, golden brown, tan/light-brown skin/fair skin, two- dark-brown, chocolate brown, medium brown, dark ebony, dark brown like coffee beans and red brown.
In terms of hair, two said “Multi-textured”, two said “dreads”, and other described their hair in various ways such as course, “tightly” curled, three thick, thin, very curly, three natural, curly, relaxed, straight, nappy/kinky, “kinky”, different, wavy curly, wavy, black and 3b4a. One
of the participants is a hairdresser so she described her hair using jargon that is used in the hair industry. 3b4a the way she classified her hair type and described her texture. Many of the participants had their own way of describing their hair and touched their hair as they were describing it. They also would describe my hair and discuss how my hair looked. The variety in these answers to skin color and hair description stem from the great variation that exists in Black hair and skin color and our need to reinvent and reclaim and rename ourselves.
Study abroad location
Four of the participants went to Brazil, two went to Central America-Guatemala, two went to parts in Mexico (Guadalajara and Guanajuato) and two went to Japan. The others went to: Sydney, Australia, Barbados, East Africa-Kenya, England, Dominican Republic, Malaysia and Singapore, South Africa-partly Johannesburg, Ecuador, India-mainly Chennai and Spain.