Why Black Hair Is Still Stigmatised | Emma Dabiri

My name is Emma debris and I am a broadcaster and author of don't touch my hair Thanks. There are a number of reasons why the history and the contemporary reality of afro hair is so is so important, but one of those really stems from the stigma that exists around our hair and where that stigma comes from for Africans in Africa before slavery before colonialism. There would have been, and there was no stigma attached to having afro textured hair to having afro hair. There was no concept of good hair being a type of hair that more closely resembles European hair. This idea of there being a stigma related to it, emerges directly from the transatlantic slave trade and the dehumanization of Africans that was necessary to justify their wide scale. Enslavement and part of that. The humanization process was to say that african people and people of African descent were not fully human, and one of the ways in which that was done was through. Our hair, which it was claimed, was not actually hair. So it was European people that had hair and African people had wool and, of course, that association with the characteristics of an animal with livestock goes goes a long way in justifying the exploitation of people. In that way, look these aren't really they're, not really people. They actually have characteristics more in common with livestock. They can be used on our farms on our plantations, so that negativity around our hair really stems from that history, and that was maintained throughout black people's experiences. In America and in the Caribbean and in the Diaspora and those attitudes were also introduced to the continent through colonialism and through the the global media and European beauty standards which always presented black features, and particularly our hair, as not only other but as far far lesser. These are not issues that belong to some far-flung distant history, but they are ideas that are still extremely potent today, it's only as recently as from kind of 2010-2011 that you start to see black women rejecting this imposed, beauty, standard and re, discovering the the the beauty Of our of our natural hair - and it's only very recently that that is becoming becoming normalized again, which brings us to today whereby fails of hair relaxers. The products that are used to chemically straighten afro hair have slumped dramatically and have gone from being one of the best selling products in the multi billion afro hair industry to being by far one of the one of the smallest smaller segments. Now that's really really positive, but what we've seen happen kind of in parallel with that is this backlash against our hair and particularly in schools. We have seen a huge rise in punishments, regulatory policies and procedures and school exclusions for black children, mixed children, children of African descent, whose natural hair is deemed unsuitable for the school environment amongst these school petitions, one of the hairstyles that comes up again and again as Problematic are shaved. Styles in the black community is entirely normal for boys and men to have tight, leash, Oren and Barbara hair. These tightly shorn hairstyles keep daily maintenance to more of a minimum but also conform to norms in black culture, about tidiness and present ability a case that was in the media last year, one of many involved a five year old boy who was excluded from school because The school deemed his hair, too short, he was not allowed to return to school until his hair grew back and covered his scalp. However, the way his hair was cut is the way that my son wears his hair is the way that many, many black and mixed-race boys wear their hair. Not only have we not seen a decline in these cases, but they seem to be on the increase. The news is full of cases of black and mixed children. Who'Ve been excluded from school for doing nothing more than daring to wear their hair as it grows from their heads or in using the protective styles that are necessary for the maintenance and health of our hair. In 2019, world afro day commissioned a report to examine this area more fully and it found that anti afro hair policies had risen by over 66 percent. If you kind of flipped the script and reverse everything, imagine my hair was the norm and the school policy reflected that norm. Everybody who went to the school was told that they had to make their hair resemble mine, even if that was virtually impossible to do and could only be achieved by painful and dangerous chemical procedures. I don't want to know about that. I don't care how you do it, but you just need to do it. This is the school policy. This is the the norm. You have to make your hair look like an afro. That would be absolutely ludicrous but effectively. That is what black children are being told when they are being forced to make their hair conform to standards that have emerged to suit the characteristics of European hair. It'S been really wonderful for me to see all of the conversations that my hair has started. All of the different types of people who have gotten in touch with me just saying that it's really changed their understanding of lots of different issues and hearing that there are schools that have changed their uniform policy from reading the book and coming to realize that policy. Around hair, in particular, was disproportionately negatively impacting on black and mixed pupils. So really, I just hope I hope, there's more of that and that the very necessary change that needs to happen is forthcoming. You