The Hair Trade and The Global Veil

 

Shelby Goodwin

Hammer and Park’s “The Ghost in the Algorithm” applies a Dubosian perspective to globalization, emphasizing the racialization of workers under colonialism. DuBois’ concept of the veil, considered on a global scale, explains why “... the metropolitan population cannot consider the colonial population as fully human” (Hammer and Park 2021: 230). The global veil “... protects the metropolitan world from reckoning with the kind of violence upon which its comforts depend” (Hammer and Park 2021: 230). Today, the global veil continues to justify the violence of the global supply chain, which ultimately benefits consumers in the global North at the expense of workers in the global South. Consumers in the North are mostly ignorant of the conditions within the supply chain because of the veil’s concealment.

The above image depicts workers at one of the largest hair factories in China: Guangzhou Honest Hair Factory in Guangzhou City, Guangdong Province, China. China is one of the several countries in the global South which processes hair before it is shipped to the United States, where it is sold as extensions and weaves. Typically, racialized workers speedily process hair in exchange for low wages. In addition, the hair itself often comes from the heads of women in the global South (mostly from Asia), who sell their hair out of economic necessity. Unsurprisingly, many consumers of this hair in the US are unaware of their extensions’ origins. Additionally, many retailers sell Asian hair as “French” or “Caucasian” (Jones 1994: 131). In some cases, retailers in the US claim to have lacked any knowledge of factories’ working conditions – as in the case of OS Hair, who had been selling hair produced from forced labor: “We were initially shocked to find out about forced child labor and prison internment camps regarding our products” (Wright 2020). I think the continued effectiveness of the global veil is revealed by the concealed inner workings of the hair trade.

Works Cited

Hammer, Ricarda and Park, Tina M. 2021. “The Ghost in the Algorithm: Racial Colonial 

   Capitalism and the Digital Age.” Political Power and Social Theory 38: 221-249.

Jones, Lisa. 1994. “From ‘The Hair Trade’.” Pp. 119-136 in Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex, 

    and Hair. New York: Bantam Books.

            Unknown Creator. January 28, 2021. Untitled. From https://www.honesthairfactory.com/.     

                Retrieved May 5, 2022 (https://www.honesthairfactory.com/).

            Wright, Rebecca et al. 2020. “Black Gold.” CNN. Retrieved May 5, 2022

                    (https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/10/asia/black-gold-hair-products-forced-labor-

                      xinjiang).