On SiriusXM Urban View’s “The Lurie Daniel Favors Show,” host Daniel Favors gathered two scholars for a fast-moving conversation on ethnography, Black beauty culture and what hair can mean in public life.
Dr. Shatima Jones, a NYU Gallatin School clinical assistant professor, as first introduced to listeners. Jones is writing a book tentatively titled “The Headmasters of Brooklyn: Barbering Blackness and Brotherhood.”
Daniel Favors also welcomed Dr. Ingrid Banks, an associate professor whose work spans African American studies, gender, sexuality and beauty culture. Banks is the author of “Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness.”
“When it came time to have a conversation about the politics of Black beauty, we could not imagine another group of people … better suited,” said Daniel Favors.
Asked for a plain definition of ethnography, Jones kept it direct.
“Ethnography in short is a qualitative research method where you pick a site and … spend lots of time there,” she said. Researchers track “what people are saying” and “what they’re doing,” then “leave the field and try to make sense of it.”
Banks placed the method in context. Early ethnography, she said, often involved “white sociologists … placing their biases on Black culture.” The difference, Banks added, is intention and accountability. “When Dr. Jones and I go into our salons, barber shops, you know, we’re really in there … to do right by Black people and not do harm,” she said.
Jones said older scholarship frequently treated Black identity through “deviance and pathology.” She also recalled skepticism about her focus. People asked, “That’s it? Like that’s a topic?” Her response was simple: the everyday is the story.
On minimizing bias, Banks offered a frank starting point. “Education,” she said, including learning Black culture “from those of us who study it … from a humanist position.”
The discussion turned to hair politics and the trap of easy judgments. Banks described arguments that Black women who straighten hair are acting out “self-hatred” as “reductionist.”
“As Black women, we catch hell no matter how we wear our hair,” she said, pointing to state-level CROWN Acts protecting natural hair and calling the fight against hair discrimination ongoing.
Watch the full exchange in the clip below.
