Sesame Street… I Think You Love My Hair
I hadn’t seen this until a friend of mine shared it with me this morning. I got a little teary just thinking about how great an impact this could have on little girls. I would have loved to see this as a tot. I hated my hair for a very long time, and I still battle sometimes when looking in the mirror and then at the television.
At any rate, check out this amazing article from Ivy Onyeador, a senior in Yale College and staff writer for Yale’s feminist magazine Broad Recognition. I couldn’t say it any better if I tried. She says,
Over the past year, popular media has rolled out a slew of articles and news specials attacking black women, in particular trumpeting statistics about low marriage rates. Article after article with titles like “Marriage eludes high-achieving black women”, “Single black women being urged to date outside race”, “Why can‘t a successful black woman find a man?” and simply “Blacks struggle with 72 percent unwed mothers rate” attempted to explain the “unmarriageable” black woman’s relationship struggles. Explanations included the gender disparity in higher education between black men and women, with far fewer black men graduating from institutes of higher education; “uppity” attitudes as a result this gap, supposedly resulting in an unwillingness to cater to black men; a reluctance to date outside their race and so on. The media assault went as far as to claim that half of all black women have herpes! It was later discovered that the statistic actually referred to the percentage of black women in their sample that had been exposed to the herpes virus. By this point however, the damage had been done, panic, shame and confusion erupted, and it’s unclear whether the clarifying piece received as much attention as the original statistic
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