The afro Damsel series is a typical appraisal of the elegance, beauty and confidence portrayed in an elaborate masterpiece hairstyle. The Afro hairstyle fits with a broader generational rejection of artifice but more importantly, it expressed defiance of racist beauty norms, rejection of middle-class conventions, and pride in black beauty. The unstraightened hair of the Afro was simultaneously a way to celebrate the cultural and physical distinctiveness of the race and to reject practices associated with emulation of whites.