Disclaimer: this is not what you think.
I will not be taking my cue from Kristie Kiser who published her prescriptive piece “Instructors, Please wash your hair” on Inside Higher Ed last Spring. Amidst the onslaught of advice on how to shift to online teaching, Ms. Kiser, the Student Success Coordinator at the University of North Georgia, took time to remind teachers that how they looked onscreen would be a determining factor in their students’ success. She writes:
“A student who has perceived Dr. Jones as a strong female role model, who is polished and eloquent at all times in the classroom, may be quite alarmed indeed to find Dr. Jones wearing her Pokémon pajamas with disheveled, unwashed hair, lamenting the added workload associated with social distancing. Your piles of unattended laundry are not trophies for the amount of time you are putting into your coursework.”
Now let’s be real, moving beyond the gender-neutral appellation “Dr.” and the colorblind (as if) surname “Jones,” this is far from benign advice. Ms. Kiser’s profiling is seeped in gender and racial biases.
Who has heard this before?: don’t draw attention to your hair; don’t draw attention to your body; don’t draw attention to your suffering…. Ms. Kiser is in essence telling BIWOC to continue the work of “passing”—pretend to be normal (i.e. look like your credible white male counterpart in a blazer).
Here, I’ll add a few anecdotal stories. Last Fall, a brilliant and esteemed white (correct) female professor felt obligated to write a welcome letter to her students for conducting her online class sans makeup in a room without perfect lighting. A young successful Black female attorney was told by her boss not to attend remote meetings with natural hair if she hoped to make partner.
These two women are likely not the only ones who felt pressured to uphold a certain standard of beauty that was until now confined to the social media sphere. This kind of advice was being dispensed by academic coaches such as "The Professor Is In.” They dedicated a podcast episode on this subject. A few takeaways from that chatter: 1) invest in a video lighting stand and kit because how you look online is important, 2) organize your background, if you have bookshelves makes sure there isn’t a book on there you wouldn’t want publicized (i.e. hide the Fifty Shades of Grey and feature the cannon). As a junior scholar who tunes in for their conversations, I didn’t think this advice was any different from the one above—keep pretending. Number two might give pause, but it is still in line with the goal to distract from your more superficial choices of hairstyles, clothes, and makeup/no-makeup look. To borrow the tagline of the Twitter account “Bookcase Credibility,” “What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you.”
I’ll admit, that at the start of the shutdown I stressed about my onscreen appearance. True tell; I even turned on the Zoom touch-up feature that evened out my complexion and gave me rosy lips in spite of the fact that I wore makeup. Before an interview for a Visiting Assistant Professor position, I googled the best color to wear onscreen. (The most popular answer was blue and that was about right.) I didn’t get the job and I have since forgotten how to do my contour. As I write this blog, I wonder what I’ll look like post pandemia. Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy makeup, but when and why I decide to add the extra half hour to put it on is for now up in the air. Ah!
So, I ask you then, when does advice about how to appear on screen stop being for your own good and not the good of others? Take it from me, a Black woman who suffers from alopecia flare ups, not everyone can wash their hair often.
My one piece of advice is, don’t get caught in your décolleté.
Cited:
“The ‘Credibility Bookcase’ Is the Quarantine’s Hottest Accessory” by Amanda Hess, The New York Times, May 2020
“Instructors, Please Wash Your Hair” by Kristie Kiser, Inside Higher Ed, April 2020
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