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ting hired or they’re getting fired, black students are getting teased or removed from school, all because of their hair.”
John Oliver has taken aim at the opposition from white people and institutions toward black hair and hairstyles.
The Last Week Tonight host devoted his most recent episode to the harmful discrimination many black people still face. He started the episode by admitting that he wasn’t the best person to be taking this subject on. “On the whole, white people don’t understand a lot about black hair,” he said.
But Oliver stressed its importance, stating that questions over black hairstyles are “yet another pretext for discrimination” and history has shown that “white people have been unable to handle it”.
He gave a brief history lesson, telling of slaves having their hair cut off, and while the 60s brought about more awareness that black hair could be seen as “a radical act of self-acceptance and political power” things didn’t shift.
Black women are still 80% more likely to agree with the statement “I have to change my hair from its natural state to fit in at the office” and are viewed as less professional and less competent with certain hairstyles. “The way your hair is perceived and therefore, the way you are perceived can manifest in all sorts of ways,” he said.
Oliver used examples of children and teenagers being told to change their hair. “Black people from an early age are often told their hair is unattractive and needs to be corrected,” he said.
He also spoke about the damaging impact of white people trying to emulate certain styles, using the case of a black woman in the 1980s who was told by her employer that the only reason she had dreads was because she was copying Bo Derek. “White people appropriating black hairstyles isn’t just infuriating, it can directly make it harder for black people to fight discrimination concerning their hair,” he said.
There have been continuing legal struggles as black hair has often been viewed by the system as not being immutable so can therefore not be listed as part of other discriminatory factors.
“Since professionalism gets defined by white standards and expectations, black hair is more likely to crash into those expectations,” Oliver said.
There have been more bills to protect black hair yet they have repeatedly met with Republican opposition.
“Black hair shouldn’t be viewed, corralled or judged by white people’s comfort because it doesn’t belong to white people, it doesn’t affect white people, white people really don’t need to have an opinion on it,” he said.
He added: “Black people aren’t get