Need for ‘Hair Love’ angers me
“Hair Love” — the Oscar-winning, animated short film created by a black producer and a black director with black characters bonding over their black hair — shows just how far we must go to approach anything resembling cultural equality.
It should infuriate any person of conscience that we still have to comb through these sorts of tangles.
Then again, a Phoenix-area You Tuber with almost 13,000 subscribers loved it and wished it had been around when she was growing up.
“If ‘Hair Love’ had been a thing,” Tiara Danielle of Ko’lana Kurls said, “if the culture represented in ‘Hair Love’ had been a thing, I would never have felt out of place simply because I had kinky, curly hair … I had to learn what it means to like having textured hair. It’s sad, because it’s something I had to learn as an adult. I should have always known.”
In the film by producer Karen Rupert Toliver and director Matthew A. Cherry, a father helps his daughter with her hair on a big day. It’s smart. It’s funny. It’s a tear-jerker. And it does all that in about seven minutes.
“Hair Love” is nothing less than an act of subversion aimed at chopping the split ends off ridiculous stereotypes.
Don’t see enough loving black dads on screen?
Here’s one.
Don’t see enough middle-class black families?
Here you go.
Think a black producer movie made?
Toliver helped elevate “Hair Love” from a Kickstarter online fundraising campaign into a studio-quality production.
Think athletes should “shut up and dribble”?
Cherry played pro sports. Think athletes blow all their opportunities and end up destitute after their playing days?
Cherry looked pretty good on stage in a tuxedo to accept the Academy Award for best animated short film.
Each of these items should be self-evident, and the fact that they’re not shows just how much human potential is wasted can’t get a every time a person with thick, kinky, curly hair decides to leave the house.
“The hair that black women, black men have, its physical characteristics, I don’t know why it’s been politicized, but it has been for decades,” Danielle said. “And it’s either you’re trying to get rid of the texture or you’re trying to change the texture or, now, you’re embracing the texture. For some reason, walking around with my hair as it is, some people see that as a political statement. I see it as, I’m too lazy to make it straight. It’s easier to just let it do what it does.”
There are constantly stories in the news that confirm just how stressful it is to wake up with a head of black hair — whether it’s curly, wavy, knotty, thin, thick, frizzy, tangly, long, short, coiled, coiffed, braided, brushed, twisted, picked, pulled or covered.
A Texas high school student who attended the Oscars with Toliver and Cherry is being denied the opportunity to participate in graduation ceremonies unless he cuts his neatly manicured dreadlocks.
Lawmakers in that state are considering a bill, known as the CROWN Act, that would bar discrimination based on hairstyles.
California legislators passed such a ban last year.
Let’s stop here to acknowledge the absurdity of this conversation. We’re talking about hair.
We’re not talking about how to improve education. We’re not talking about how to get more people to vote. We’re not talking about ways to make health care more affordable. We’re talking about hair.
It’s a distraction from issues affecting the nation, not just the black community. And it’s yet another barrier for black people to navigate before they can help solve any of them.
“It is frustrating to think, ‘Wow, I feel like I wasted so much time just learning to re-love myself,’” Danielle said.
She and others should have the freedom to exist and contribute based on the thoughts inside their heads, not the hair that grows out of it.
Here’s hoping “Hair Love” and the culture it nurtures helps more people come around to that idea.
The fact that it’s necessary makes my hair stand on end.