The founder of a black hair-care empire supported the NAACP and the Tuskegee Institute, helped preserve Frederick Douglass’s home. She also tried to used her prominence to stop lynching.
Chelsea Johnson, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Natural hair has become a political rallying point for women across the African diaspora. For these women, wearing natural hair is way to resist Eurocentric norms and “post-racial” political thought.
States do not record the structural violence of racism as part of crime statistics. But this invisible violence has driven some people to self-harm. It has also masked forms of suicide.
Hair has long been modified for aesthetic and other ends. But skewed power structures have meant that women, particularly women of colour, have borne the brunt of stereotyping and prejudice.
When it comes to black hair, “common sense” is the least reliable tool for decision making since even black people are constantly changing their minds about what they want to do with their hair.
Qunta advocates a reparations fund to accelerate corrective policies, that schools be freed from colonial indoctrination and that African culture should be mainstreamed, especially African languages.
South African Research Chair in Teacher Education; Director of Centre for International Teacher Education (CITE) & Professor of International Education and Development Policy (University of Sussex, UK), Cape Peninsula University of Technology