The fact that the firing happened exactly one day after the release of the video is further fueling speculation of racial politics at play. Zahira Kelly-Cabrera, socio-cultural critic and your new Goals, probably said it best in this post:. Being yourself, embracing your natural hair, your skin color, and your heritage are things to be celebrated — not punished. But in the Dominican Republic people of color are still being denied equal access to education for something as immutable as their appearance.
Discriminating against anyone let alone a child for wearing their hair in its natural state is not only an affront to nature but an obstacle that impedes on their sense of self-worth and limits their upward mobility and professional prospects. One that obviously ends with pin straight hair, free of the natural locks. She used this issue as an incentive to start her blog, where she would try at home treatments and oils on her hair to see what worked best for her.
Grassals adds that although it was a drastic and difficult change at first, it really paid off for her. She created products at home, and took in and took on clients at home. Soon, her success grew so much that she was able to open up her own salon.
It was the same indifference from other salons to cater to all womens hair that helped her attract more clients. Grassals recants memories of young girls who she could tell had naturally textured hair, and never even knew. This is ingrained in our culture, and it is too visible to ignore. However, women like Grassals have inspired others for the better.
Because I am a white Latina, I will never understand the burden Afro-descended women carry. However, I live here, and it is not hard to see that when I walk into a salon, they treat me differently than they do my friends of color. Meanwhile, my friend with much more textured hair than me laughs it off with the woman who washes her hair;.
But that is because everytime I went in I was told I looked great, so why would I need to go? On the other hand, many of my friends and family saw it as a necessity to get their hair done every Friday and I never and will never , understand why.
The now year-old activist and social entrepreneur discusses her experiences as an Afro-Latina who decided to go all natural. She received scrutiny from her parents who would threaten to relax her hair while she slept, and her brother who called her names for wearing her hair how she wanted. There are no salons near us that cater to her hair, they simply relax and straighten it, and so it took a while for us to learn how to style hers.
This is why it is important to support these businesses, because not only do they help combat these colorist beauty ideals, but as Grassals pointed out, it helps other women of color succeed in the same field.
So like every person that I have been training, not all but most of them, have been undertaking on their own as well. It all starts by listening. Listen to women, especially women of color, and understand where these beauty standards come from, before immediately assuming it comes from a place of shallowness. She is an undergrad at Emerson College, majoring in Journalism. Cancel reply. Your email address will not be published.
Marcos Castillo Jun 10, at pm. Search this site Submit Search. The Berkeley Beacon. Graduate program pushes T advertising campaign. Student turnout soared in election, study finds. Pooled testing model draws mixed reactions among students. As noted by Mr. Robles report:. Someone light a match! Ahh yes. The Dominican Republic is a truly special place for ethnically Black looking women who wear natural hair. Which make sense. After all. This is the land where the beloved baseball player Sammy Sosa essentially pulled a Michael Jackson R.
Vilorio the young woman pictured above is originally from the Dominican Republic and for much of her life people assumed she was Black due to her skin color and features. This was actually a source of irritation for Ms. Vilorio— until she made the decision to stop chemically treating her hair. In a truly remarkable article written for the Huffington Post, the young Ms. She writes :. After many years in the closet, after many years of breathing that stale air of self-denial, I can finally say this.
In fact, I made it a point to emphasize my Hispanicity simply because I knew what was coming next. You definitely look Black. Young girls…are brought to salons to make their hair pretty. After all, straight and pretty are interchangeable words…I had been chemically straightening my hair from a young age — six years old. What amazes me about this young woman is that learning to love her hair played a key role in her ability to accept her Blackness.
It was embracing her hair that helped her to incorporate her Blackness into the other parts of who she is. In another article she writes :. When people think of the hair texture of Hispanics, they think of luscious curls or straight, thick locks.
I have no such hair textures. My hair is wild. It has tightly-coiled, barely perceptible curls. My hair is virtually equivalent to that of my [B]lack peers. When I think back on my own personal natural hair journey I find that learning to appreciate my hair had a lot to do with my ability to appreciate myself as a Black woman.
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