Intro
Was Lauryn Hill a hotep? Or was she navigating a world, making adjustments to her thinking, so she can survive and get the love she deserved?
In a 2018 essay on the twentieth anniversary of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, writer Lindsay Zoldaz speaks with Joan Morgan, author of She Begat This, 20 Years of the Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. Morgan discussed the album with her 32-year-old goddaughter who opined, “I mean the whole thing is just so Hotep. “She’s just so judge-y.” She is speaking to lines like, “showing off your ass cuz you thinking it’s a trend,” and, “ hair weaves like Europeans Fake nails done by Koreans”, criticizing black women’s fashion choices, and punishes our ability to both attempt to be acceptable in America’s beauty standards and make it our own. This finger wagging, sermonic style Lauryn adopts has been nullified by modern Black activists and artists, saying, in sum, whatever and however Black women choose to navigate this world is fine with us.
But Lauryn’s expected notions of femininity and the realities of Black girlhood forced her to adopt a “hotep” philosophy.
A hotep, in general, is a syncretic Afrocentric philosophy focusing on the assumed royalty of Black people and our ancestors, insisting that Black people should carry ourselves with a certain self respect.
This self respect is relegated to nebulous rules for Black people, especially Black women. While men shouldn’t concern themselves with certain fashion, frivolous things like popular media, the rules for women are much more strict. Black women have to be chaste, show no skin while dressing, wear our hair naturally and shun makeup, and, most importantly, serve the Black man, by doing things like cooking, cleaning, and uplifting them.
Hoteps have been dismissed in general by the Black intelligentsia since the late 1990s. Black cultural critics point out that the idea is myopic; not all Black people in Africa are necessarily royalty, they don’t all subscribe to certain rules and they are just as complex as people anywhere, and the philosophy gives women no agency. This “enlightened” woman is not supposed to desire relationships, sexual or otherwise with men, she is either supposed to accept the good Black man that comes her way or shun the one that wants nothing from her but sex.
The problem was the men who adopted the hotep philosophy also put women into two categories, the wholesome woman like Lauryn attempts to and warns other Black girls to do, or the vixen whore who wears hair weaves and shows off her ass. This ideal woman is also supposed to be discerning against men who will lie to her to start a strictly sexual relationship, and admired when she is able to resist.
Lauryn needed the dichotomy for women. Because she wanted to be treated with respect, and surmised that if she follows these rules, she would be worthy of the love she imagined. The kind of love that grew from respect and admiration, shared values and mutual humor and general enjoyment.
So did I.
We Black girls dream. We dream of love and motherhood, harm free relationships and passions. We hope if we live our lives in a certain way, we will achieve what we want.
As much as adults discourage bright girls from doing this, I assumed my life would be complete once I met the man I was going to marry. The narrative is difficult to escape. On a human level, I craved connection, especially a romantic and eventually sexual connection with the men, the people I was attracted to. To match the societal narrative, I envisioned a fairy tale romance, much like the Disney movies we grew up watching when I was a girl, I would meet my prince at a young age, he would be enthralled with my artistry, intellect and beauty and after a short but intense and amourous courtship, he would quickly commit and marry me.
Lauryn, like me, didn’t factor in one thing, she is a dark skinned Black woman, and the world denigrates us, and renders us undeserving of fairy tales, romance, actual love and accountability, and deep connection.
In particular, Lauryn is a dark skinned Black woman with an audacious hairstyle, thick dreadlocks. Not the small, fashionable ones popular in the 2020s. These dreadlocks are a persona. It’s a hairstyle that fully embraces the texture and attitude of kinky black hair. It grows freely, allowing it to coil around each other, unlike loose natural styles, when our daily detangling routines sometimes tears our hair out because the coils want to intertwine, and the aloe/water/butter/oil based gels and curl definers manipulate it into an unrecognizable elongated curl that last approximately 60 seconds until humidity hits it. Dreadlocks, especially Lauryn Hill’s style, were unapologetic. She was going to stop fighting her hair.
She did this because she knew exactly how the world loved, or didn’t love Black girls, she knew that even if she did get a man’s attention, he would overlook her, not call her on time, won’t take her out or buy gifts, won’t hold her hand in public, won’t introduce her to his friends or family, because he believes she doesn’t deserve it. So she settled for what she did not truly want, but believes what she’s going to get.
Black girlhood wasn’t what she expected. It wasn’t what I expected. So we internalize the rules given to girls, dressing a certain way, acting aloof in relationships, choosing between motherhood and intelligence and our passions, and the world still doesn’t give us the love, dignity and respect we deserve. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill is a battle between acting like a proper Black girl, and living in freedom.
To Zion
As much as they tell us not to, Black girls dream of motherhood.
I was eleven. I had first sex education seminar. Two dudes came in and said boys are going to pressure us to have sex and it’s our job to say no. They said things like, you’re going to go to a party, and a boy is gonna pull you in the back room, and he’s gonna ask you like three times and you gotta say no and give him a reason. Then we role played it. He had me stand up in front of the class with him. (I’m cringing in embarrassment for my eleven-year-old self.) The dude asked me three times to go into an imaginary “back room” with him, to which I said firmly no. I’m pretty sure I messed up my role play because I was supposed to give a reason, to which he gently corrected in front of the class.
The men came into the seminar, to my all Black elementary school to warn us of the perils of Black motherhood. Only the girls were called upon, while they played Boogieman and the thing to run away from was pregnancy.
Sex education was largely abstinence only in 1998 when The Miseducation was released, two years after the “sex education” I recieved in the sixth grade. Our educators neglected conversation around consent and healthy relationships, or how to avoid STIs (except for the fear inducing HIV/AIDS). In fact, the sex education I recieved was about being careful around men and avoiding them altogether because they will pursue you and only care about sex.
For Black girls, there was a visceral fear that we would become mothers. While the fear that we would become mothers too young persisted, the fear was that we would become mothers, period.
It came from our own mothers. Black mothers jump every time we daughters leave the home. Begging us, please don’t bring home any babies. Staring in curiosity at every boy they catch us talking to, only to furtively inquire “who is that?” when they really want to say, “I don’t ever want to see you near him again.”
Our mothers know how hard it is to raise children and they didn’t want us to suffer as they did with short money, husbands and couldn’t, or wouldn’t cook, clean, or participate in parenting, or our children’s fathers who didn’t come around at all. They didn’t want us to scramble for child care when they attempted to work, and fail to earn enough to have the freedom of choosing our food choices, change our sub-par housing, and hand us spending money for field trips, pay for beautiful prom dresses.
Black motherhood was a curse.
Black girls could never explore this part of the fairytale without it crashing into the prospect of being a Black mom.
Lauryn Hill’s family encouraged her to have an abortion. Lauryn sings, “Woe this crazy circumstance, I knew his life deserved a chance,” showing perhaps that considered terminating the pregnancy but felt a kinship to her unborn child, or that she always desired motherhood and it just happened to her, she was going forward in the pregnancy. The line is also a subtle dig at women who choose to terminate pregnancies. Women aren’t supposed to have sex, but when they do and get pregnancy, they are to feel an immediate connection to the fetus. Lauryn contradicts herself again. In the next song, “Doo Wop”, she advised young women against having sex with men but she had sex a baby.
Lauryn Hill had her child anyway. Lauryn rejected 90s conventional wisdom, having a child would ruin her life. She embraced it, despite being young and unmarried, because she perhaps realized it was a blessing, not a curse.
She battled with wanting motherhood which was pathologized for Black girls, and saving motherhood for a more “respectable” age and relationship status.
Doo Wop
I was thirteen and my friend Reyna and I were talking about Lauryn Hill’s new album in the car. Reyna said that Lauryn was telling the truth...“Showing off your ass cuz you thinking it’s a trend.” You can’t be out there witcho butt all out.”
Well, everyone thinks I had a big butt anyway so it doesn’t matter than it was all out. They’ve literally been talking about my butt and legs since I was nine years old and from what I can tell, I didn’t have it out. I mean, I get it, but what am I supposed to do about it?
Anyway, for our eighth grade trip we were going to Cedar Point, so I wanted to buy a new outfit. I found the cutest green short set at JCPenney. I was round and thick, and my ass dropped like a grown woman’s. So of course when I put it on, my thighs squeezed the fabric into an upside down V shape and hiked up in the back. I thought I looked great. My thighs were free. I spent so much time trying to cover my thick thighs that burst through jeans, skirts, though I was relegated to only wearing dresses (which I don’t mind, I like dresses, but these shorts? Man! My thighs could breathe!)
No one said anything. Well not really. My mother may have raised a brow; I don’t think my father saw them. One kid said, “the only reason why those shorts are short is because your butt hikes them up. Otherwise they would look normal.” He was making a simple observation.
I loved that outfit. I chose those shorts. No one told me to wear them because they were trendy.
Over twenty years later, I’m still wearing my short shorts. I was walking down U Street one day when I heard a man in one of those Black Jew tall tees say, “aren’t you uncomfortable? I ignored him, because one, I was on the phone and two, I don’t have to acknowledge anyone, so of course, he repeated himself. “Aren’t you uncomfortable? You know what you’re doing.”
I knew what he was talking about. He was uncomfortable with seeing the tiniest bit of my ass cheek. Because I felt great. It was 80 degrees and I felt no greater joy than feeling the sun shine on my thighs and the breeze under my butt cheek. I suppose we were not supposed to show off our ass because it’s all a commodity like Sarah Baartman. (You all know the story. If you don’t read about it here, here and here.)
While my body type goes in and out of fashion, my ass isn’t a trend. It’s mine. It doesn’t have to say or mean anything, especially to people who are not me.
While Lauryn positioned herself to direct her words at the girls from around the way, Lauryn most likely referred to the popular video vixens of the 1990s. Lauryn, a dark skinned Black woman, whose skin tone and hair type was never portrayed as a desired sexuality, had to create distance from the women in the videos because she saw that because of how they dressed, they were treated simultaneously as objects of sexual desire, but not deserving of true relationship. Lauryn, witnessing this reaction to these women, decided that in order to be in a true relationship with a man, she had to present herself differently.
We understand, and Lauryn expands on later in her album, that neither depiction in the Madonna/Whore dichotomy creates true relationships with men. If Lauryn decided to be the Madonna, or the 90s Black version of it, an Afrocentric “Queen”, she would only become a woman made to serve her man.
That’s why when women are sexual for themselves, men assign the women in the whore category, because our sexuality, for ourselves, doesn’t serve them.
Chloe Bailey, a twenty-two singer and half of the sister duo ChloexHailey, in February posted a video dancing seductively in her red lit room. The video started the Silhouette Challenge, where women and some men use a red light filter on their video to recreate the scene.
Chloe, as expected, experienced backlash. Because unlike Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer”, or Beyonce’s “Dance For You” she was not dancing for a man. She did it for herself. Unlike people’s perception of Chloe, the young lady we knew as a child, making cute singing videos on YouTube was grown up, and now an object of desire. The woman with dreadlocks, and we all know, women who wear locs are supposed to be natural and wholesome, was never expected to embrace her sexuality like she did.
So of course, men took something fun and sexy and made it perverse, by posting YouTube videos on how to remove the red filter to expose lingerie clad and nude bodies, to reclaim control and make it a “private dance” made for them, not the women.
The women in the music videos of the 1990s appeared in videos directed by men, for male rappers. They didn’t choose their clothing, or their camera gaze. Men only care when they are the authority and target for desire.
Lauryn wrote these words protecting herself from the scorn of men. But there is no protection from men.
So when I bought the green shorts, I did it with no one in mind but myself.
Ex-Factor
I was eighteen. I was about to have my first ex. I rehearsed this moment for five years after hearing Ex-Factor. It would be simple, unemotional. I would take Lauryn’s lessons of “it could all be so simple” and saying that it should be simple.
I broke up with my boyfriend, a conversation I initiated but it was something he wanted to say as well. The reason was rational. We were young, and we had no future. I was going to college in the fall and maintaining a long distance relationship would interfere with my studies. I would have to stay on the phone with him instead of reading, call him on the way to class instead of meeting new people, and spend my weekends trying to visit Toledo. I wanted a new life, and that meant leaving him behind.
In Lauryn’s version, she and her boyfriend went back and forth for weeks, months, years...she didn’t say. She wanted it to be simple. She also wanted a mutual understanding of the dissolution of the relationship.
She wanted more power but felt she had none because she was in love.
I had power. I made a decision and did it.
It was simple. I cried for weeks.
My next breakup was not.
I slowly acquiesced to the idea that love was highly un-simple and irrational and finally found my man that would bring out my crazy.
“Tell me who I have to be to get some reciprocity”, I quoted to myself often. I thought, once you loved someone, they would fight for you. No one ever fought for me. No one would fight for black women.
Black women learn to accept love in drips. We’re told, not in words, but in whispers, to expect lazy romance, like, the classic line, “I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day.” I asked the man I was dating at the time what his plans for Valentine’s Day were for me. In my mid-20s, this was the first relationship I had on Valentine’s Day, and I was excited about the wining and dining to come.
“I don’t believe in Valentine’s Day.” Which leads to the next line, “I do things for you year round.”
The things this man did for me were according to his interests. Football on Sunday while I sat next to him and read. Concerts to his favorite rappers, restaurants that accommodate his sensitive tongue. I loved indulging him, because I liked hanging out with him, but I hoped for a day that was just about me.
We overhear, or read tweets and comments of men considering their options for getting what they need from women, usually sex and attention for paltry effort. They say things like, you can’t take a girl out, then they’ll think you want a relationship, because they know relationships require commitment and accountability, and reciprocity. And we beg for reciprocity. We ask the men we’re in relationships with to communicate with us more, or tell them the restaurants, museums we want to go to, the TV shows we want to watch, or to indulge in our interests, and we’re ignored and our interests are denigrated.
When Lauryn was asking for reciprocity, she was asking for a little input, and little work on her partner’s half to make the relationship work. She was begging him to compromise to be with her.
If he didn’t, she would leave, but he defined the breakup.
A reminder, Lauryn Hill, like me, is a dark skinned Black woman.
It is as if Black men choose darker hued Black women because they think we deserve less and they can get away from treating us poorly. Men, who know they are not attractive or affluent enough to get the woman they are actually attracted to, settle for a woman that is not conventionally desirable because they know they can undercut us, and the world wouldn’t hold them accountable.
It’s as if they are punishing us because they don’t believe they deserve the most beautiful woman, then we shouldn’t expect the best from them.
If I were a light skinned, thin Black woman, I would have never heard that I didn’t need flowers on Valentine’s Day.
I even tried to back off. Acquiesce and not speak up for my needs. I just ended up frustrated and resentful.
When men do not deliver, and still expect us to feel the same about them. We have to make the decision to end the relationship. Not because we want to end it with them, we want them to be better for us. We beg them to go to therapy, open up to us and communicate more, cease saying mean things, and they just refused.
Lauryn begged for reciprocity, for accountability, for love. Her man was willing to stay in a relationship with her, as long as he didn’t give her what she wanted.
In “Doo Wop”, Lauryn again warns us of men like this, men who won’t care, and simultaneoulsy shows that not only does she desire relationships, she fights to make it work with men that she is warning her listeners of. Lauryn, even with the knowledge she had about men, couldn’t escape human desires of love and connection.
When I experienced my first heartbreak, it wasn’t all pain. It was relief, and hope. A relief from begging for what I needed from a man and going to get it myself.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
The album concludes with the maturation and the realization that we Black girls have to navigate the world for us, because we are the only one for us. Lauryn makes up her mind “to define her own destiny”.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill cannot be dismissed as “hotep”. As a Black woman, Lauryn Hill couldn’t have been that vapid. She took the messages she was receiving, made an honest attempt to apply them, all while, simultaneously rejecting them. She rejected them by having her son. By leaving a relationship that required too much of her emotional labor, and doing everything in her power to protect Black girls from the fairy tale that doesn’t serve us. The duality, her words looking different from her lived life, speaks to the double consciousness Black women have to live to survive.
The album is not titled TheMiseducation by accident. Lauryn was telling and showing us, simultaneously, that the words that she was “miseducated” by and the words to which she was “miseducating” other Black girls simply do not fit for our complex lived experiences. The form embodies the disorienting nature of being a Black girl, we must believe there is a slight possibility that our narratives will play out how we expect it if we follow the rules laid out for us, but we are sure that that is unlikely, and we may as well live life that fulfills at least some of our desires.
That’s why Lauryn tells Black girls how to dress and act in “Doo Wop”, but bucks convention and demands accountability from the men she is in relationship with, and embraces motherhood with sheer anticipation and joy.
Black girlhood is a battle. And we win the battle by being ourselves, for ourselves.
Emma, I love reading your words. Thanks for sharing. Ps, I love Lauryn Hill !!!!