Black Hair, White Gaze.

I passed by the secretary’s office to pick up the PC monitor I’d ordered. The woman at the desk found a box with my name on it – opened already, too small for a monitor – just a keyboard and a mouse. The package wasn’t complete. We were both so confused, since I had the email saying the monitor was ready. She decided to call the ICT desk to gather some more info.

“Yes, it’s me,” she said into the phone. “I’m here with this student, E-L, you know…”

I froze for a second. Was she going to describe me to the ICT guy? And how would she do that? I am, after all, the only Black PhD candidate in the entire faculty. Would she say it? Would she risk saying the B-word, or worse?

She didn’t. Instead, she said: “The student with the krullekes” (Flemish for curls). Though, this description didn’t match me at all, but the ICT guy seemed to know instantly who she meant. And this wasn’t the first time. Back in my third bachelor year, after a meeting with the head of faculty about my thesis, he emailed a professor to recommend seeing me, cc’ing me on the message. He introduced me as “the student with the afro”.

The thing is, I don’t have (visible) curls and I don’t have an afro. I have long dreadlocks nearly reaching my bum. So why couldn’t they see my hair for what it was? Why did both people, in two different universities, reach for the same false description, and still get understood?

I know white people can’t always tell the difference between Black hairstyles. But there’s limits to that ignorance. My hair is nothing like an afro and it’s not curly. If they tried, they could have said “braids”… a common mistake.

I believe that, in predominantly white environments, the absence of explicit racial language doesn't equate to racial neutrality. Instead, a complex system of signifiers operates to subtly encode racial identities. Terms like “afro” or “krullekes” (little curls) serve not merely as descriptors but as markers of racial identity. They function within a racialized lexicon that bypasses direct mention of race.

In this context, hair becomes a racialized signifier. Even in the absence of overt racial language, the use of specific hair-related terms reveals the awareness of “race”, and becomes racialized discourse where racial meanings are conveyed and reproduced without explicit mentions of race. In such discourses, Blackness is often reduced to a set of physical attributes... hair texture being a common one.

Referencing my hair (however incorrectly) is a workaround for the etiquette of colorblindness. They can’t say, “the Black girl,” so they say “the one with the afro.” But the meaning is the same. In a white space, I am reduced to the Black body, no matter what my actual hair looks like. Even if I relaxed it, I might still be “the girl with the ‘fro.” Because that’s how Blackness lives in white people’s collective imagination. That fantasy becomes the gaze that fixes me as the Black girl.

And yet – same day, different moment – a colleague of mine, who is a white guy, passed me in the hall. He stopped me briefly. “I like how your dreads look today,” he said. “Did you twist them?”

Yes, I had.