This week I read "Hair Love", a picture book inspired by the short film of the same name. In this book, a young Black girl talks about how much she loves her versatile hair and all the different things it can do. Her father is up to the challenge of trying to style it into the perfect hairdo.
As a white woman, I have recently become aware of how white our stores are in the hair products they carry. This was eye opening for me - that an entire section of the population can't walk into most stores and buy hair products designed for their hair. It's interesting to me how many of the "big" racist actions don't surprise me, but something small like this I never considered.
As an educator, I try to make sure I have a wide range of representation in the stories I share in class. One of the paths I'm walking is trying to understand how to make sure that I'm not making a token out of the stories, that I'm choosing stories by Own Voices, and that they are not just Black stories about Black issues, but sometimes they are just stories that also happen to have BIPOC characters.
But the charm of this story put a smile on my face. I have a daughter and I just saw so much of my own girl in the lead character. I recognized the imagination and tenacity and love of hair and fashion. After three boys, I struggled to figure out how to french braid her hair. And as a young girl with a thick mass of red hair, I remember the struggles to get it to do anything at all (truly - I was 30 before I found a stylist who knew how to cut my hair and finally let me love it for what it could be).
Reading this story is a lesson for me in seeing stories as stories, and that I hope we are moving in the direction of not needing to search so long for stories with BIPOC characters. It reminded me of earlier this year when I was using the popular teaching app Kahoot to make quizzes for my students. The topic was learning body parts in French, and each slide needed to have a picture of a body part. I wanted to make sure there was representation of all people, but a simple search for "eyes" led to pages and pages of white people's eyes. Same for ears, legs, feet, noses, arms... It required a specific search of "Black" or "Asian" to bring more varied search results, but the selection was severely limited. I immediately looked for how to send an email to the company, bringing the search results to their attention and asking for change.
I teach French. I have the privilege of being able to teach Global citizenship through my class, and to help my tiny town see further than their own front porch. There are times when I can teach real lessons in this area. But there are also times when I can just tell a charming story and let it be just that.
From the book:
"My name is Zuri, and I have hair that has a mind of its own. It kinks, coils, and curls every which way."
"Daddy tells me it is beautiful. That makes me proud. I love that my hair lets me be me!"
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