55 pages • 1 hour read
Zakiya Dalila HarrisThe Other Black Girl
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Natural Hair
It is no coincidence that the headquarters for OBGs and the Resistance are a natural hair café and barbershop, respectively, nor that Nella discovers crucial information about OBGs during a natural hair party. On the surface, each of these locations functions as a gathering place for Black people to acquire hairstyles and compare haircare regimens. Historically and culturally, however, salons and barbershops have functioned as centers of Black American knowledge production and exchange. For example, according to legend, infamous 19th-century voodoo priestess Marie Laveaux was a hairdresser who was able to amass and circulate information through “salon gossip” and buy emancipation for Black women in New Orleans. Moreover, Black hair has always been a political battleground. In the 1960s, Black Panther Party activist Kathleen Cleaver encouraged Black women to wear their hair natural and chant “Black is beautiful!” as a form of resistance against Eurocentric beauty standards, which privilege straight and fine tresses. Harris draws heavily upon this connection between Black history, knowledge production, and subversive acts of resistance, but she is not the first: Many texts and films, including the Barbershop and Beauty Shop movie franchise, explore Black identity and cultural exchange using natural hair as a central motif.
However, The Other Black Girl complicates these empowering portrayals of natural hair. On the one hand, we can often identify Black “heroes” in the novel by their natural hair and Black “villains” by their European aesthetics: Diana’s many wigs indicate that she does not think Black is beautiful, and Nella’s “perfectly, painfully, straight” weave at the end signal her full conversion to OBG (353). In a sense, their artificial hair functions as the physical manifestation of Diana’s internalized racism. On the other hand, natural hair doesn’t necessarily symbolize Black solidarity. Hazel’s ombre locs are presented as a paragon of beautiful natural hair, but Hazel herself is characterized as a code-switching traitor. Both Diana and Hazel use hair grease, an essential natural hair product, as the mechanism for converting Black women into OBGs. Harris draws upon the empowering history of natural hair while at the same time suggesting that, like any other symbol for identity, it can be coopted.
OBGs
The idea of OBGs, or Other Black Girls, draws upon elements of science fiction horror more than any other aspect of the novel. Reminiscent of science fiction classics such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and more recent films such as Us (2019), OBGs are doppelgangers, or uncanny doubles of “real” Black women. OBGs are created when Black women are “converted” into “glassy-eyed” drones. In true sci-fi style, they are “converted” using a mind-controlling hair grease that was developed by a mad scientist with a PhD in chemistry from George Washington University. Like the pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and the doppelgangers of Us, OBGs have a flat affect due to the brain-numbing formula of the grease, giving them a slightly robotic, alien, or inhuman quality.
However, their horror comes from the fact that OBGs look like “normal” Black women. They may wear their hair natural and host poetry events for young Black women, but OBGs aren’t interested in creating solidarity with other Black people. Because OBGs are almost indistinguishable from “normal” Black women, they become a source of paranoia for the Resistance: You can never tell who might be (or become, in Nella’s case) an OBG. It’s also crucial to note that The Other Black Girl is the novel’s title. Because OBGs blend in with non-OBGs and because any Black woman might be converted, it’ is unclear to which character this title may refer. Does it refer to Diana, the original OBG? Does it refer to Hazel, the newcomer to Wagner? Or does it refer to Nella, the new recruit? What is perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that OBGs were not designed by white supremacists; they were designed by Black women who simply wanted to become numb to the nonfictional horrors of a racist world.
The Resistance
Unlike the science fiction horror of OBGs, chapters featuring the Resistance seem to fall into the genre of spy novel or procedural drama. There’s a secret headquarters with meticulously kept files, and Lynn, the leader of the Resistance, distributes or withholds information as she sees fit. She demands that members abide by rigorous rules, such as not engaging OBGs in the wild, and she has a flair for over-the-top espionage tactics, such as leaving Nella cryptic notes, ambushing Shani on the subway, or demanding that Shani answer code questions before being admitted to Joe’s. Given these dramatic and often comical elements, the Resistance emerges as a parody or critique of social justice organizations that privilege research and methods over action. Lynn fetishizes facts and is willing to sacrifice innocents, like Nella, for the cause. Despite its best intentions, the Resistance is driven by paranoia and bogged down by bureaucracy, rendering the organization ineffective at making actual change. By the end of the novel, the Resistance has taken such pains to remain underground that Shani wonders whether it still exists. What’s perhaps more discouraging is that, because the Resistance was better at keeping secrets than sharing them, there’s no trace the Resistance ever existed at all.
Wagner Books Publishing House
Wagner Books is a fictional representation of the real politics and power dynamics of a mostly white workplace. Harris draws this setting from her experience as one of only two Black people who worked on her floor at Alfred A. Knopf Publishers. She includes quotidian office details, such as Sophie the “Cubicle Floater” (11); the encounters and confrontations between employees in the office kitchen; the elevator gossip; and the many barbed microaggressions that employees exchange. Wagner might be any corporate setting anywhere in the United States, rife with competition, exploitation, and indeed racism.
Although Wagner could stand in for any corporate office, it is significant that Wagner is a publishing house with the power to exercise massive influence over public opinion. Thanks to Burning Heart, we learn that Wagner’s readership is wide-reaching, and the book empowers young Black readers like Nella and Hazel, who see themselves well-represented by the characters in the novel. However, Wagner’s massive influence likewise has the potential to negatively impact young readers; this power is especially well-articulated through Nella’s internal dialogue at the cover meeting, during which she imagines “little Black and brown and white children walking up to the New Releases table at Barnes & Noble” who will be “forever touched by the troubling racist image of Shartricia without even being aware of it” (249-50). Given Wagner’s influence, the implications of the publisher’s partnership with the newly converted Jesse Watson, whose YouTube platform already has millions of follows, is particularly foreboding. Wagner’s reach is about to expand, equipping Richard Wagner to “convert” even more young Black minds.
