For decades, Black women have been using hair relaxers to help them “fit into” global mainstream workplaces and the European standards of beauty that continue to dominate them.
‘Don’t Call Me Resilient podcast’ Associated Producer Dannielle Piper, and host and producer, Vinita Srivastava speak to Cheryl Thompson, Associate Professor, Performance at Toronto Metropolitan University.
In this reflective and personal episode of ‘Don’t Call Me Resilient’, Prof. Cheryl Thompson of Toronto Metropolitan University and author of ‘Beauty in a Box’ untangles the wending history of hair relaxers for Black women — and the health risks now linked to them.
For decades, Black women have been using hair relaxers to help them “fit into” global mainstream workplaces and the European standards of beauty that continue to dominate them.
More recently, research has linked these relaxers to cancer and reproductive health issues — and a spate of lawsuits across the United States, and at least one in Canada, have been brought by Black women against the makers of these relaxants.
Prof. Thompson and I get into it: including her own relationship to using relaxers as a Black woman, the lawsuits and the wending history and relationship between these relaxants and Black women.
We also — for obvious reasons — dip into ‘The Other Black Girl’, the novel that is also now a horror-satire streaming series about mind-controlling hair products.
Read more in The Conversation:
Read more: Black Canadian women artists detangle the roots of Black beauty
Read more: Kinky, curly hair: a tool of resistance across the African diaspora
Read more: Jada Pinkett Smith and Black women’s hair: History of disrespect leads to the CROWN Act
Read more: What’s in a word? How to confront 150 years of racial stereotypes: Don’t Call Me Resilient_
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This article was published courtesy of The Conversation
This article first appeared on 947 : Detangling the roots and health risks of hair relaxers
