When I have my Afro and walk down the street, there's no doubt that I'm black. With this [straightened] hair, if I talk about being black on air, viewers write and say, "You're black?!" I feel [straightening your hair] is giving up a sense of your identity. Let's be honest: It's an effort to look Anglo-Saxon.
My mother's white, and she didn't know how to do my hair, so I had something that I always call white-mama hair.
My parents pressed upon me that "In this world, you are a black woman," so I was political about my hair and would not straighten it.
There came a point when I wanted to do television, and I didn't think the Afro was going to play, so I made a very difficult choice - to straighten my hair.
I think television is one of the last real bastions of the white beauty standard, but still in many industries the workers can be replaced by someone who's willing to play the game or who looks like the person in charge. And this is a problem for all women, not just women of color.
Often hair is the way we are differentiated in this culture. To me the decision to straighten your hair is deeply political.
For black women our sense of ourselves is not always consistent with the way other people see us.
I've done lots of pieces on self-esteem and hair. There's a desire to conform, but if the encouragement to be yourself is there from loved ones, you'll find that later, that true self will come out.
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Floyd Abrams Attorney
