My hair like Jesus wore it
Hallelujah I adore it
Hallelujah Mary loved her son
Why don't my mother love me?
-From the musical Hair (1968)

While I was walking out of the theater after viewing Chris Rock's documentary "Good Hair," the young lady I was with commented, half jokingly, "Why'd he have to give away all of the secrets?" But in the back of my mind I said, These were secrets?

She, like my BV colleague Carmen Dixon, seemed a bit flustered with the movie and its message and what audiences were supposed to take away from it. As a guy, I was entertained by the film, and I didn't take it that seriously because after all...it's Chris freakin' Rock.

But looking back, I've seen what an issue hair is for women of all colors: How for some it's about self-esteem, and for others' it's about men. I've seen it used as a social barometer, as a weapon and even as a sex decoy-take that any way you want.

I've seen people fall in love over it and learn to hate themselves over it. It's been behind so many family stories passed down through the generations and has been the subject of shed tears in nightclub ladies rooms for the better part of a century. If it weren't for hair and the products we use to groom it, we never would have had Soul Train.
It's amazing that hair, the natural product of a protein called keratin that grows out of a follicle in to a shaft, which takes its appearance based on genetics, health and other factors, could turn into an industry where we spend an estimated $42.5 billion on hair care products alone. In Rock's film, he noted that blacks spend about $9 billion in the hair industry, only a fraction of which actually stays in the black community.

So is our hair a statement? Is it political? Is it something we've got to deal with since we're going to spend most of our lives growing it anyway? Rock, being the funnyman that he is, didn't really get in to that. He didn't go in to the stories about "tender-headed" girls suffering through hot-comb sessions or of women consciously deciding that perms and weaves were not for them or of the jealousies and rivalries between sisters over who had the "nicest" hair or even of guys losing potential mates to their fine-haired brothers because of women who wanted to eliminate kinky hair from their gene pool.

The film was more about our culture and the economics behind hair and ultimately how we see it. And he cleverly uses well-known African Americans (both male and female) to discuss the nuances of naps and why we try to get rid of them. Truth be told, I thought it was brave of Nia Long, Raven Symone, Vanessa Bell Calloway and others to not only admit that they wear weaves, but to describe them in detail. I also appreciated Ice-T's (typically) profane bluntness in his description of his hair encounters and Rev. Al Sharpton's sometimes self-contradictory tome on black hair and how James Brown convinced him to get "the process," which he still wears as a grayed mane.

And it's not that I'm critical of anyone. Full disclosure: I've gone from an Afro as a kid in the '70s to a brush-waved Quo Vadis in the '80s to a high-top fade in the early '90s then back to an Afro in the late '90s, which eventually became the dreadlocks I sport today. So I won't even act like I've been consistent all my life, and nobody is under that obligation either.

But there were a few things that I felt the film could have pulled in to give an understanding of where our hair obsession comes from. For one thing, although Rock featured author A'Leila Bundles to speak on the subject of why our hair matters so much, there was no mention of her great-great grandmother, Madame C.J. Walker, who is responsible for the modern black beauty industry and was the first self-made black female millionaire in the country's history.

Rock traveled to India to find one of the locations of a tonsure ritual, but didn't mention that tonsure is not unique to India or Indians. In fact, it is a practice that dates back to early Christianity and exists in Buddhism, Islam and Hinduism as a form of purging or purification.

Speaking of India, watching the film, you'd believe that all weave material comes exclusively from that country and is traded like Forex in an international weave marketplace. Nonsense. Most of the hair you buy in your local beauty parlor actually comes from China, which is behind 50 percent of export human hair sales, and it doesn't come from some religious ceremony either. It's just girls cutting their hair and selling it, not even knowing it will one day serve as a nap substitute.

He also neglected to make major mention of the number of white women who get extensions, augmentations and perms, not to mention lip and facial injections (well one stylist did in the movie) and breast and butt implants, including the support of a lucrative tanning industry. Still that's okay, because this flick was about sistas.

But where Rock was spot on was the discussion of hair relaxers, the "creamy crack" which, like it's cocaine-based nickname, has had so many of its users socially addicted for a large portion of their lives. This is where the documentary reminded me of Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me. It described what relaxer really is: a sulphur-based keratin breaking agent, which can cause irreparable damage to the scalp and even blindness if it gets in to the eyes.

Even if you're blind, you can still be fly.

But black inventor Garrett Morgan's creation (he also invented the traffic signal and the gas mask) probably wasn't expected to be a cultural paradigm that spawned an entire multibillion-dollar international industry. With that said, neither was McDonald's.

Which brings me to my point: We live in a world where outward appearances and instant gratification is what we'll spend money on and actually create wealth with. We get mad over what people say about our hair, but we'll be damned if we walk around without it styled, even if that style/statement is nappy.

If black women all decided tomorrow to let the relaxers and perms grow out, to clip the weaves out and to toss the wigs in to the garbage, would that change who they are? Or does self-actualization and social sobriety really evolve over years and generations?

I don't know. Maybe that could be the subject of Rock's next documentary. I guess he could call it "Good Scalp."

What do you think?