‘The Hair Tales’ connect coiffures and culture

The Hair Tales, 9 p.m. Saturday, Hulu & OWN BY JAY BOBBIN

Following her award-honored run in “black-ish,” Tracee Ellis Ross is getting to the roots of another matter. The actress turns interviewer as the host and an executive producer of “The Hair Tales,” a series from the relatively new Onyx Collective initiative that makes its debut Saturday, Oct. 22, on both Hulu and OWN. An executive producer of the show with others including Oprah Winfrey and author Michaela angela Davis, Ross talks with such notables as Winfrey, Issa Rae and Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Ross’ fellow “black-ish” alum Marsai Martin about their hair experiences and how those have impacted their connections to Black culture and society. (Pressley lost her hair to the condition alopecia areata.) “I feel like I, like so many others, can chronicle my journey of selfacceptance through my journey with my hair,” Ross explains. “I don’t think it was until I was a teenager that I started to face my own personal journey with my experience with my hair, not seeing myself mirrored back to me through culture, through media, through newscasters ... anyone. I saw it at home (with Ross’ mother, iconic singer-actress Diana Ross), but I didn’t see it out in the world. “At the time, I took that personally, and really sort of put on my own self that I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t correct. As I’ve gotten older, my own sort of realization about myself was that I was one of many. I was part of a vast community, a culture of people who also weren’t seeing themselves, and it played into the larger story historically, about how black people have been seen in this country, and how the culture of beauty and the industry of beauty has not necessarily mirrored back the reality of the power and the beauty of who we are.” Fellow “The Hair Tales” executive producer Davis says, “Often, Black women’s hair and Black women’s existence is positioned like a challenge or a problem that we have to solve. We’re talking about it in the layered way in which we live, so there’s joy, there’s resilience, there’s history, there’s memory, there’s hysteria, there’s ancestry. We’re getting at all of it, and that’s the beauty of it. When we get to tell our own stories, we get to tell them inside the complexity in which we actually live.” Indeed, Ross emphasizes, “We are using, in this show, hair as an entrance — as an on-ramp into our souls, to explore the largeness of our humanity. I hope that ‘The Hair Tales’ really offers a new definition that beauty is a reflection of self, the imprint of the soul, instead of an idea that is concocted from history and systemic limitations.”