When the first ships carrying enslaved people landed on America’s coastline, the word nappy might’ve already been born. Its origins are likely derived from the word “nap”: the “frizzled threads raising from a piece of fabric.”
Historians speculate that “nap” took on a new meaning as a phrase for the coils and kinks of Black hair, particularly in connection with the colonial cotton field where our people toiled.
According to Silvio Torres-Saillant, a professor of humanities at Syracuse University, “Hair texture was one of the many rationalizations of the perceived subhuman status of the African.” The term was just one way Europeans tried to rationalize their perceived superiority.
Never ones to let anyone else define us, we’ve long reclaimed nappy, and many wear it as a term of endearment, often expressed in media with movies like Nappily Ever After and fashion with brands like Nappy Head Club. Words are powerful, but so are we.
Despite what anti-Black systems and the people who uphold them say, we always have the power to ignore their definitions of us, reclaim words and spaces, and make them our own.