ABSTRACT
African American cultural critic and feminist theorist bell hooks’s rst children’s book, Happy to Be Nappy (1999), is the political calm aer the two-year storm of controversy that accompanied African American author, scholar, and educator Carolivia Herron’s Nappy Hair (1997).1 Clearly not the socially and politically controversial text that Herron intentionally or unintentionally creates and defends as a positive message about the personal and communal acceptance of black folks’ hair-particularly little girls’ hair-Happy to Be Nappy comes from a veteran participant in this discourse about the gender and racial politics of hair. Dedicated to her nieces Katrese and Sarah, whom hooks identies as “the sweetest of the sweet,” the book achieves its race-and gender-positive message by unilaterally challenging and replacing negative images and attitudes about black people’s hair-its textures, its lengths, its grades, its shapes-with unquestioningly celebratory ones that dene, self-empower, and unite.
