Transcript | Ep. 124: Untangling Hair Pt. 1: Racism + Natural Hair

Deanna: All of a sudden there was this unwanted and negative attention on my hair and I could do nothing about it. It's not like I can hide it or cover it, like this is my hair. Everyone's looking. Everyone's, you know, not it's no longer a good thing right now. And so having to walk down in front of my whole class like that, I remember was like the first feeling where I was just like sunken and unhappy about my own hair.

[theme music]

Caroline: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike. I’m Caroline.

Cristen: I’m Cristen. In 2017, Deanna Cook and her twin sister, Mya, were banned from high school extracurriculars like sports and their junior prom — all because they wore their hair in box braids. True story.

Caroline: But one of the most remarkable things about what happened to Mya and Deanna is just how common it is. In 2010, a black third-grader in Seattle was sent out of class because her teacher claimed her hair product was making them sick.

Cristen: In 2013, a Black second-grader in Tulsa, Oklahoma, got sent home because she refused to cut off her dreadlocks.

Caroline: In 2018, a Black fifth-grader in Louisiana was sent home on her first day of school for wearing braided extensions … just like Mya and Deanna Cook had gotten punished for the year before.

Deanna: Sometimes people underestimate the power it is to not be discriminated because of your hair. Like you know I feel like sometimes people think, oh, it's just hair, but it's like it's really not it really is a part of people's identities, and it is so important in schools and workplaces for honestly everyone.

Cristen: We’re talking with Mya and Deanna today about how they led the fight against hair discrimination at their school. Because here’s the thing: Black hair discrimination is real, prevalent and usually legal.

Caroline: That’s why activists and legislators around the country are trying to pass the CROWN Act. The law would make it illegal to discriminate based on traditionally Black hairstyles like braids, twists and locs in both the workplace and in public schools. Here’s Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley talking about a federal CROWN Act on the House floor.

Rep. Ayanna Presley: Many, especially Black women, grow up hearing that our natural coils and kinks are distracting, ghetto, ugly and unprofessional. From as early as grade school, Black girls are pushed out of school for wearing their hair naturally. And as we grow up, we are taught to straighten our hair if we want to get a job, or simply to live our lives in peace.

Cristen: A federal CROWN Act was first introduced in Congress in 2019, and has passed in the House of Representatives, but it has yet to become law. Fortunately in the meantime, the CROWN Act has been enacted in a number of states.

Caroline: States like Colorado, where our third guest, Unladylike listener Tara Nelson, is thrilled to live. We’re going to talk to Tara about her natural hair journey - and why it’s been about so much more than just hair. But first, back to the Cook twins.

[stinger]

Cristen: To start, could you each just introduce yourselves and tell us who you are and where you live.

Deanna: My name is Deanna Cook. I live in Malden, Massachusetts, and I go to the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Mya: My name is Mya Cook. I live in Malden and I go to school at UMass Dartmouth

Caroline: Deanna and Mya chemically straightened their hair for years. But their sophomore year at Mystic Valley High School in suburban Boston, their friends convinced them to switch things up.

Deanna: They encouraged us to get braids for years, and we are just too nervous to do it. We weren't sure how it was going to look, and we had never done it before. But eventually, after talking with some of our friends, we're like, OK, we'll do it during April vacation. That way, if we don't like it, we can just take it out before we come back to school. So after that conversation is when we decided to just go for it.

Cristen: Love a spring break makeover, Caroline.

Caroline: Oh definitely. All right, so when the twins returned to school in their new braided extensions, it was a total hit. Their friends loved it, and they even got compliments from a few of their teachers

Cristen: But then two days later …

Deanna: I was sitting in my class and my history teacher had called me up to her desk, and she was like, oh, Deanna, I noticed your hair is longer than before. And I was just like, OK. And she said, “All right, well, I'm going to have to send you down to the nurse's office for a uniform infraction because your hair’s not allowed.” And so that's kind of when everything started going negative.

Mya: Yeah. Deanna had history class, and then after that, we all went to our lockers because it was a transition period in between classes, and we had lockers next to each other. And she told me that she got a uniform infraction. And so I look her over, and I'm like, what would she get an infraction for? Like she looks in dress code to me. And she tells me it was for her hair. And I was like, "For your hair?" And that it was the our history teacher. And I had history with the same teacher right after. So I was nervous I was going to get in trouble for my hair, too. And when I got to that class, before I could even, like, sit down and get settled, the teacher called me to the desk and she already had the form filled out for me and told me I had to go to the nurse.

Cristen: What!

Caroline: So how did that feel?

Deanna: I was very embarrassed. She did this in front of the whole class. You know, it was silent because we were all doing homework. So, of course, everybody heard. I was just like humiliated. I have to go down. Everybody knew why. And all of a sudden there was this unwanted and negative attention on my hair, and I could do nothing about it.

Caroline: The high school's dress code banned “drastic or unnatural hair colors or styles...that could be distracting to other students” as well as “hair more than 2 inches in thickness or height and hair extensions.”

Cristen: Well I’d call that policy distractingly racist!

Caroline: But Mya and Deanna said the hair policy was more of an unspoken rule. They knew plenty of other Black students who’d worn extensions and never gotten in trouble for it.

Cristen: The twins told their parents what happened, and they weren't too concerned. Surely this was a misunderstanding that the girls and their parents could clear up with the school administration.

Deanna: Which we thought was just going to be a simple quick meeting like, hey, you know, you really shouldn't even have this rule the first place. You know, let's discuss removing it so we can just move on. And of course, that didn't happen.

Cristen: What did happen was … jaw dropping.

Deanna: The school decided to continue to fight us and be like, no, no, you guys aren't the only ones that we're targeting. And if you're not, then we're going to go after other students. So then they started calling down all the black girls in the high school at the time, going - calling them down to the nurse's office one by one and asking them if their hair was real or not.

Mya: Whether they had braids or not.

Deanna: Yeah, whether they had braids or not. You know, some people had like locs in or different types of braids in or none at all. And they still called them down.

Cristen: So basically, they were calling them down to essentially like check their hair?

Mya: Yeah. Like inspect it.

Deanna: At first, people had thought that we were telling them to do that, which we did not.

Mya: Yeah. They asked us to. If you guys want to do that, that's all you. I'm not giving you names.

Deanna: Yeah, we - they definitely asked us to like, oh, well, who else has hair like that? We're like, that's not our job. We're not going to sit there and tell you to go and call out everybody's hair. But of course then they did anyway. And that's also how they kind of proved their point of discrimination, is by only calling down the black students and the black girls’ hair. And those were the only people they questioned. And we just kind of said look like you're making this worse and they did not care.

Caroline: Did any other students get in trouble in the way that you did when they were called down?

Mya: So other students didn't really get in trouble the way that we did. Because the school, like when they asked them, like, oh, do you have extensions or not? You know, they lied because they knew that they would get the punishments that we were getting, and they knew that the administration couldn't even tell extensions from no extensions. They just were trying to push a rule onto people. So no, no one else really got in trouble the way that we did, except for one of our friends named Lauren. She got in trouble, and they said if she cut her hair, that they would leave her alone. So she just put it in a bun and told her that she cut it.

Caroline: Oh, my God. OK, now was the - the history teacher and then all of the administrators who are doling out all of these like interrogations, were all of these people white?

Mya: Yes.

Deanna: Yeah.

Cristen: So we've read that the school claimed that your hair extensions were a quote unquote, distraction because they highlighted class and wealth differences between students. Uhh what did y'all think about that argument?

Deanna: Yeah, that - I still don't know who decided to come up with that statement, but.

Mya: Yeah. That statement really makes no sense.

Deanna: Yeah, see, our schools like we have uniforms, which is kind of the whole point is to avoid that, or at least that's what they say. Hair is not a class or wealth difference. That was kind of their just excuse from one of the meetings they had to try to shut us down and shut parents down to say that we were trying to, I don't know, show off with our hair or be distracting in the class. I really don't know how that's doing that. But that was their excuse.

Caroline: The excuse was bullshit. Braiding and hair extensions cost about the same as other hairstyles. It's also on par with the price of chemical straightening treatments, which, by the way, were totally permitted under the school’s dress code.

Cristen: It's like school trying to ban the Rachel haircut because they assume that it's more expensive than a bob because of all the layers involved. It’s just ridiculous.

Caroline: Yeah, super ridiculous — and super racist! Mya and Deanna kept holding their ground, though, and the school kept turning up the heat

Mya: So each day that we wore our braids, we were given two - two hours of detention, and then if we didn't go to those detentions, we were given an additional two hours to that each day. So it accumulated to about 40 hours each. We didn't go to them because we didn't feel like we should be punished for wearing our hair in braids. And then they also kicked me off the softball team and they would not let me go to prom. That was another one of the punishments. And we couldn't go to any of our school clubs, and no school activities.

Deanna: Also during our - when we have detentions, instead of going, we would held - we held rallies during some of those hours. Of course, not all of them, because again, that's just an insane amount of hours to go to. But we chose to hold some protests during those detention times as well. So every day to get our detentions, they decided to special deliver it to us during class. So just about our last period before the end of the day, the dean of students would come in with a special letter for Mya and I, to each of our class and hand deliver an additional hour or two of detention. And so that's what we also had to deal with every day.

Mya: And she would have the the number of hours that we've accumulated so far written on the paper too, so we’d have to look at that each day.

Deanna: And again, another not private thing, this would be in front of whoever was in our class that day and whatever teacher or whatever was going on. I was also kicked off of the track team, which I had already made states for, and they did not care. They - and again, another time where they completely humiliated me, I was already in my track uniform about to go to our next track meet, and they decided to block me off of the bus in front of my entire team and told me that I was not allowed on the bus and that I had to go back inside and change and go back to class. So that moment honestly stuck with me. Probably still to this day. I still like, it hurts so badly that I have to go through that, and the pain still like every time - it ruined track for me, honestly, because after that it was so hard for me to get back into it and not feel like it was going to be just taken away from me again at any second. That was probably one of the worst moments of my life. And then on top of that, we also couldn't do any other sports activities, attend any other events in school. We basically could attend school and leave. We had to leave the premises where they said if we were on the premises after the bell rings, then they would suspend us as well. So they definitely doled out a big list of punishments that we accumulated, all for wearing our hair in braids.

Cristen: Was there - was there ever a point in all of this where you even considered like, “Maybe we should take out the braids”?

Deanna: Not once. No. I think for me, I just knew that this was more than them really wanting to keep an extension rule in their handbook. It's - it's clearly derived from something bigger and more hateful. And I was not going to let them get away with that and just continue to do that to other students. Like to me, what it - I just kept thinking about, like the little girls that are in the school, like - like the kindergartners and the little kids who have braids in their hair who are going to be like embarrassed and told and felt the way I feel. Like I just couldn't imagine, like those kids having to face any more trauma or embarrassment or hurt. So there was just no way we were going to just let them continue to enforce that.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break.

Cristen: When we come back, Mya and Deanna team up with the ACLU to stop their school's hair discrimination.

Caroline: Stick around

[stinger]

Mya: I wish that the school understood the cultural meaning behind braids, too, because back when black people were taken from Africa, they had their - they had their braids back in their country. But when they came here, their braids were shaved off their head. They weren't allowed to have their braids here. And so it's kind of like history repeating itself where, you know, we go to school, we're told you can't have your braids here.

Cristen: We’re back with sisters Mya and Deanna Cook. And Mya is right. It IS history repeating itself. What happened to them — getting punished because their hair was allegedly “too distracting” — echoes what Black women were dealing with more than TWO HUNDRED yeas ago.

Caroline: Yeah, if we go back to 1786, that’s the year Louisiana enacted the so-called “tignon laws.” It was basically a dress code that only applied to Black and Creole women, enslaved or free. It banned them from exhibiting “excessive attention to dress” AND required them to cover their hair with scarves, or tignons, whenever they went out in public.

Cristen: All because the white governor was worried that Black women and other women of color were too distracting to white men.

Caroline: Nice, great. In the spring of 2017, there was no way Mya and Deanna were going to concede to their school’s obviously racist dress code. About a month into their standoff with the high school, a local news channel reached out. Another parent had tipped the station off about what was going on, and they wanted to hear the twins’ side.

Deanna: And so that night is when we did the first news interview.

[CLIP - NEWS CLIP]
Anchor: All new at 6 o’clock. Students punished. Told that they can’t go to prom. And it’s all because of their hair extensions..

Deanna: And then after that, basically everybody in the school had seen it and heard about it. And things slowly started to change to more positive than negative. And people were like, oh, wow. Like, I can't believe you're speaking out about this. Like, we want to help and, like, say something. So that's when we started doing protests outside of the school and we did the detention sit-ins. And then more and more things we started to do to try to convince the school to change the rule and show that we're not the only ones who want this rule changed and that it would affect so many people in the school in a better way.

Caroline: Soon, the ACLU caught wind of the story and reached out to Mya and Deanna’s parents to help. In mid-May of 2017, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Department of Education saying that the high school’s dress code policy discriminated against Black and biracial students.

Cristen: But the administration wouldn’t budge.

Mya: The school just disagreed with what they said and said, no, it's not us unfairly discriminating everyone, and that's that, we're not doing anything about it.

Deanna: Yeah, the school pushed back as much as they possibly could. The ACLU definitely kept on their heels, though, and were very much not going to let go either. Definitely when they joined, it helped us a lot and gain more, at least with more communication with the school because at the very beginning, they just ignored everything we sent and then eventually, you know, they could not ignore it. So that definitely really helped us a lot.

Cristen: Less than a week after the ACLU filed their complaint, the Massachusetts attorney general got involved. She issued a four-page letter agreeing that the dress code was discriminatory and unfairly enforced AND said that if the school didn’t get rid of the policy, it could be shut down.

Caroline: So, left with basically no choice, the high school administrators suspended the hair policy for the final days of class. Mya and Deanna had won.

Cristen: So you get a dress code infraction just - just call up the attorney general, that's all you need to do.

Deanna: Literally.

Caroline: In August, when Mystic Valley sent out its student handbooks for the upcoming school year, the hair extension ban was gone.

Deanna: I think that my anxiety really rose basically throughout the entire year. I was like a shaking mess. I remember when they finally told us that they got rid of the hair policy and that it was over. I think I finally breathed for the first time that year like a full breath, because that was such a stressing and very - such a stressful time for me

Cristen: Yeah, it just it seems like the school, which claimed to - which justified its actions towards y’all as like claiming your hair was distracting - in the process of it, it sounds like the school just created a lot of distraction, to say the least, not only for y'all, but the entire like student body.

Deanna: Honestly, they really did. I mean, even though everyone was instructed not to talk about it, of course people did. And we would have teachers and other staff members, you know give us their opinion. Sometimes we'd have teachers come up and be like, oh, you know, I'm not supposed to say anything, but I really support what you're doing. And I think you're really brave and that's awesome. And then we've had we would have other teachers come up be like, yeah, I mean, I get where you're coming from, but I think you should just stop or we'd have teachers that say, yeah, I mean, I understand why you don't want it, but the school's not going to listen. You should just drop it. You're not going to win....So, again, it was just a whole whirlwind of on and off about the whole thing.

Caroline: What do you wish that more people understood about braids and extensions?

Mya: I wish more people understood that braids and extensions is meant to protect our hair, black people, hair, people of color, their hair, usually it needs to be put in protective styles because it breaks easily and it's not for attention or anything. It's it's just meant to be beautiful and to protect our hair.

Deanna: Yeah, I wish more people would understand also, just like how much our hair goes through, like we can't just wake up and just go out. That's not it at all. Like, that would be a distraction. And this isn't just some beauty trend style, which, of course, it is. It's beautiful, but it's also what we need to do to keep it growing and to keep it healthy. It's literally called a protective style because it protects the hair. So instead of just shutting it down and making it something that it's not to actually just like take a second and learn about why we're doing it in the first place.

Caroline: Mya and Deanna's activism didn't end with their school's racist hair policy. Since then, they have continued sharing their story as advocates for the CROWN Act, which we mentioned at the top of this episode.

Cristen: So Mya and Deanna, very curious for y’all’s takes on the Crown Act. Like what do y’all think about it and similar efforts to ban hair discrimination in schools and workplaces?

Mya: So I'm really happy that the CROWN Act has been passed in multiple states, like it's really incredible. And I was just like, I couldn’t even believe that this had to be an act in the first place, but I'm glad that you know the wheels are kind of turning for it to be everywhere.

Deanna: Yeah same, I - me and Mya, we’re able to help promote the CROWN Act and get people to sign and to just learn about it in general, which we're super excited to do. Definitely we're hoping that more and more states and progress join in with the CROWN Act because it really is so important. So we're very, very excited about it.

Caroline: Yeah, I mean having a Crown Act could’ve prevented what y’all went through.

Deanna: Oh, yeah. If the Crown Act was actually implemented during that time, the school would not have been able to get away with what they did. And that's kind of the whole point is that we don't want any other school to be able to get away with doing that to any other students anymore.

Mya: Yeah, we don't want anyone else to have to go through what we went through.

Caroline: We’re going to take a quick break.

Cristen: When we come back, Unladylike listener Tara Nelson shares her natural hairstory with us and why she’s also very excited about the CROWN Act.

Caroline: Stick around

[stinger]

Caroline: We’re back. So, earlier in the episode, we mentioned that hair discrimination is often legal. It’s mind boggling, and to understand how the hell that’s possible, we’ve gotta rewind to the 1981 Supreme Court case, Rogers v American Airlines. The Rogers in that case is Renee Rogers, who was fired from American Airlines for wearing cornrows to work.

Cristen: Now you would think that Rogers would have a winning argument because the Supreme Court had previously ruled that firing someone for wearing an afro was racial discrimination — and therefore illegal. But here’s where a massive wrinkle called the “immutability doctrine” comes in.

Caroline: The Court decided that afros are “the product of natural hair growth,” making them an immutable, or unchangeable, racial characteristic. But for Renee Rogers and her cornrows, the Court said, well, that’s just a hairstyle that has nothing to do with race. … And brace yourself for their rationale.

Cristen: The Supreme Court declared that cornrows had actually been popularized by Bo Derek in the 1979 movie 10. You’ve probably seen the famous scene of her running down a beach with her blonde hair in cornrows and beads. So the Court is like, hey y’all listen, a white lady made cornrows a thing, therefore they are not an immutable racial characteristic. Sorry not sorry. Renee Rogers, you lose.

Caroline: Cool. Bo Derek, huh?

Cristen: Bo fucking Derek. The Bo Derek Rule? Who knew?

Caroline: Well, that legal precedent has allowed companies AND schools like Mya and Deanna’s high school to get away with this kind of hair discrimination over and over and over again. So rather than waiting for a Supreme Court majority that understands the significance of Black hairstyles, the CROWN Act is a way to close that racist legal loophole.

Tara: When I first heard about the Crown Act, I, I think I, I was like, that's such a great idea, you know, that there is something out there to protect you know how people's hair grows naturally out of their head, because - because why? Why is that a problem?

Caroline: That was Unladylike listener Tara Nelson. Tara emailed us a while back to tell us about transitioning from a lifetime of relaxing her hair to going natural. Now, she hasn't experienced the degree of hair discrimination that Mya and Deanna did, but she has had to face down internalized stigmas around her own hair.

Cristen: And we’ll get to that in a second. But first: Tara lives in Colorado, and the state enacted the CROWN Act in 2020, and Tara welcomed it - especially considering the hair discrimination she's witnessed on the job.

Tara: I work in the legal field. I started out working in the public sector. I always heard commentary around me about, you know, when a black person would come in with their hair in dreads or braids or you know or if if they came in with super long hair, you know, there were comments like, oh, you know that they look so dirty or do you think that's really her hair?

Cristen: The comments really bothered Tara, but as a young professional, she was too nervous to speak up.

Caroline: Plus, she worried her white colleagues would be like, “Why do you care, you straighten your hair.”

Cristen: Tara began straightening her hair when she was 5. Or rather, Mrs. Kelly who owned the neighborhood hair salon did. At that time, pressed and curled hair was an essential part of the "respectable" Black dress code. But Tara's mom was less concerned with looks than how difficult Tara's hair was to wrangle.

Caroline: Little Tara was definitely tender headed, and she would cry whenever her mom attempted to tame her hair at home. But getting her hair done at Mrs. Kelly's salon? Tara loved it.

Tara: I was such a girly girl. Like, I would just I’d get down off the seat after she'd do my hair and I could actually, you know, like, run my fingers through it. And I thought that that was so cool. And, you know, and this is like early 80s. And so, you know, I would see, like, Farrah Fawcett on TV or and I'd see her shake her hair, you know. And so then I was doing that as I walked over to my mom and my grandmother, like, I was shaking my hair, you know, thinking that I’m like running around with the wind blowing through it or something.

Cristen: Achieving that Farah Fawcett hair could be painful though

Tara: It didn't matter how many precautions my stylist took, and no matter how hard they tried, I always burned. And I was always in communication like, oh, it's starting to itch here, or it's starting to get tingly over and over on this section. Or this part's kind of bothering me here. And they're like, OK, you know, and they’d keep an eye on it and we keep talking and keep up communication. But I just always burned. And so that just became a thing that I lived with.

Caroline: The older Tara got, the more she recognized the everyday racism and white supremacy she lived with, too. Trayvon Martin's murder in 2012 was like a lightning bolt. She found herself thinking, Black people fight just to survive — they shouldn't also have to fight just to let their hair grow naturally.

Cristen: And that also got Tara thinking more about her own hair. Why did she relax it? Who said she had to look a certain way?

Tara: And I really started kind of I guess examining like, is my you know inability to you know call myself beautiful or this desire to have the straightest hair or the smallest body because of this kind of idea that has been put out there that the only way I'm going to fit in to the society around me is to be as close to white as possible, although I will never I will never be white. And for some people I’m always gonna be less than. And that's not a way to live your life, You know, it's taken me years to kind of get to that where I feel like I, I can't keep trying to be an invisible person because I have a right to - I have a right to be here.

Caroline: Tara started to dream about curly hair. She’d see a woman walking down the street or an actress on TV with amazing curls, and she was like..I want that! So, Tara consulted with her hairstylist about it.

Tara: And she was like, Well Tara that’s how it grows out of their head. Like, if you want hair like that, you have to stop relaxing your hair and let it just grow out of your head the way that it. And and I was like, Right. Duh. You know. And of course, the whole point of these relaxers is to kind of destroy the curl, you know, to get rid of the curl. And she said, is that something you want to do? And I think for two or three years, I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm not sure. And she's like, well, let me know if you want to do that. Let me know.

Cristen: Then, one day, when Tara was 39, she’d had enough. Getting her hair done was expensive, time consuming and something had to give. She was working full-time, and she had a 2-year old son who wasn’t sleeping through the night. She thought going natural might free up some time in her schedule at the very least.

Caroline: Tara started Googling around to understand how to transition her hair from relaxed to natural. She found a ton of blogs and websites by black women who were sharing their hair journey.

Cristen: Most bloggers mentioned two routes to natural hair. The first option is to slowly transition, cutting off the relaxed ends every few months or so and letting the natural hair slowly grow in. The second option is to cut off ALL the relaxed hair in one go — which in the natural hair community is called “the big chop.”

Tara: And so I decided to go the transition route because I wasn't quite mentally there as far as just cutting off all my relaxed hair, you know, and ending up with a TWA, a teeny weeny afro.

Caroline: For a few years, Tara was slowly growing and cutting off her relaxed ends. But, she wasn’t really styling it — she was just pulling her shoulder-length hair back into a tight ponytail every day … which wasn’t really how she imagined going natural. But there was at least one big perk to this approach.

Tara: I, I managed to add an hour and a half to my sleep.

Cristen: Wow!

Caroline: Woah, nice!

Tara: So I was getting - I was getting up ridiculously early to make sure that I could do my hair and makeup every day. So, yeah, I got more sleep.

Cristen: I am - I am so impressed.

Tara: Thank you

Cristen: I thought maybe you'd be like, oh, 15, 20 minutes. So you're like almost like a full REM cycle. That’s amazing.

Tara: Oh yeah. And I was like, you know what, moisturizer and Chapstick are my friends and my hair will grow. It'll look however it looks.

Caroline: In late 2018, Tara took the plunge and went all natural all at once. She got the big chop.

Cristen: Well, what was it like to - to see yourself right after the big chop for the first time?

Tara: It was kind of surprising. I mean, like when when she turned me around to show me how I looked in the mirror, I got a little teary eyed. She's like she's like, you know, it'll grow back. And I'm like, no, I, I'm not getting teary eyed because I'm like, "oh my God. What’d I do,” I'm getting teary eyed because, like, I have always wanted to rock short hair but always kind of thought, I don't think I could pull that off. And I think it was just for me, a bit of kind of negative self-talk, unfortunately, where I was like, I don't think I'm cool enough to pull that off or I don't think I'm this, blank enough to be able to pull that off. And so when she turned me around and I was like, oh my gosh. Like, I look kind of pretty. And and she's like well, you look so cute. Like, I don't know why you didn't think you would. I was like, I don't know, because - because I'm me, I guess I don't know. But I - thank you so much, you know. And so I was and every time I looked in the mirror, I just was super excited that I had you know this cute little short hair and, you know, yeah, I really liked it. It was just super exciting.

Caroline: Tara was excited not only to see herself with her new TWA, her teeny weeny afro, but also to find out more about how her hair likes to grow out of her head. She’s learned that her curls are type 4B and 4C — so, tightly coiled and dense — and that her hair is low porosity. That means that it has a harder time holding onto moisture, oils and dyes. So now, for the first time in her life, Tara knows exactly how to care for her hair — and in the way that she wants.

Cristen: You know earlier, we were I was amazed with the 90 minutes of sleep, extra sleep, but it also sounds like all of that, too, was a facet of not just a quest for more sleep, but a much really, like, broader kind of evolution that you were on in terms of how you saw yourself and also the world around you. Or am I - am I making that connection correctly or —

Tara: Yeah, I mean, I think you are. It wasn’t just you know, yeah, I got extra sleep, but I also started really feeling a lot more comfortable with who I am, who I was, who I am. I guess like some of the negative voices, they went away. I came into my blackness, I feel, you know, because I let my hair go natural. And it is - you know it is just growing and it is thriving. And you know I just walk out the door with my hair how. If it's going in the same direction, that's great. If half of it is standing up, well, it's just going to have to stand up because I'm not going to fiddle with it because it'll get tangled, you know. So, yeah, I think it's just been - it's been a journey that has gone beyond my hair.

Cristen: To learn more about the CROWN Act, head over to thecrownact.com where you can find events and resources for your state. And get pumped y’all because this episode is the first in a three-part series we’re dedicating to head hair!

Caroline: You can find us on instagram, facebook and Twitter @unladylikemedia. You can also support Cristen and me by joining our Patreon; you’ll get our undying love AND weekly ad-free Extra Unladylike bonus episodes, including our latest about a controversy brewing around the mega-viral short story, Cat Person. Join the party at patreon.com/unladylikemedia.

Cristen: Nora Ritchie is the senior producer of Unladylike. Michele O’Brien is our associate producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford and Andi Kristins. Executive producers are Peter Clowney, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.

Caroline: This podcast was created by your hosts, Caroline Ervin

Cristen: And Cristen Conger of Unladylike Media.

Caroline: Next week...

Jessica Berger Gross: In the beginning, it was like I didn't really know it was happening so gradual for me. And then once it was, you know, real gray, resistant, gray, large portion of the percentage of my hair, I felt like I was losing my youth. And like I was losing, you know, any sense of possibility of beauty. That's where the shame came in and I just felt like, wow, I feel really old all of a sudden

Cristen: It’s part 2 in our head hair series, and it’s all about color! We’ll be talking with writer Jesssica Berger Gross who embraces her grays and Jameson Hampton who connects the dots between bold hair colors and queerness.

Caroline: You don’t want to miss this series! Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Cristen: And remember, got a problem?

Caroline: Get Unladylike.