Abstract
In this edited interview, psychologists Eric Greene and Nisha Gupta converse with psychologist and filmmaker Dr. Gillian Scott-Ward about her documentary film Back to Natural (2019), which explores the psychological and emotional experience of the intersection of hair, politics, and identity in Black communities. This documentary is a powerful, thought-provoking call for healing that takes a grassroots approach to exploring the globalized policing of natural Black hair. The film offers a journey of discovery and enlightenment while celebrating Black history and natural styles that are taking the world by storm. In this conversation, Gillian shares her own experiences of critical consciousness about natural hair while working as a clinical psychologist, which led to this film, her insights into the intergenerational trauma, resiliency, and healing of African descendants as exemplified in the natural hair movement, and her experiences using her film as a tool for human rights discrimination cases and implicit bias training as a psychologist.
Keywords
Watching your film Back to Natural was amazing. It was a piece of decolonizing psychology scholarship brought to film.
I was totally blown away by your film. It was precise and clear and emotive and just wonderful to watch. Can you tell us what Back to Natural is about?
Back to Natural is a film about healing. It is an international, psychological, and historical exploration of the natural hair movement. I interview professors like Dr. Noliwe Rooks from Cornell, Dr. Carl Hart from Columbia, Dr. Salamisha Tillet from UPenn, Lori Tharps from Temple, as well as psychologist, hair stylist, authors, bloggers, vloggers, and everyday people, so I can understand and unpack the relationship African descendants have with their hair within communities, and also how it’s perceived outside these communities.
You start by saying that it’s a film about healing. Can you tell us why [you] decided to make this film and what is the personal meaning of it?
I started production on this film in 2013, and it was a very interesting time in my career and in my personal life. I was working clinically at the counseling center of Barnard College—the beginning of my second year working there. It was one year post licensure. That time period can be an exciting time for psychologists. Prior to licensure, a lot of my focus was on doing what I had to do to get licensed, this “prize” at the end of almost a decade of focus. After I got licensed, I regained control of these different parts of my life and freed up enough mental space to open myself up to new discoveries. I had more space to reflect, to reassess what living life authentically and in alignment with my values meant to me.
I loved working at the university counseling center because I was developing relationships with an international community of people and was able to see the differences in how this time period, late adolescence/young adulthood was experienced by people from a vast array of backgrounds and identities. I noticed that a lot of my juniors and seniors were coming into therapy with similar anxiety about internships and jobs, how they and their families had spent all this money on school, and now they must make it worth it by getting employed. But what was different was that people from within the African diaspora—Black people from all over the world—what was unique about what they were coming in with was concerns about how their appearance—specifically their hair—was going to impact their ability to be employed. Many were grappling with this sense that in order to be successful, professionally and in some cases socially/romantically, they had to don a costume—a costume that had serious repercussions physically (i.e., negative health conditions due to toxic chemicals present in hair straighteners, or permanent hair loss/damage due to wigs and weaves) and emotionally (feeling “not good enough” and needing to be physically altered.)
At this point in my career, I had chemically relaxed hair. Internally, in response to the themes I was working with clinically, I began to think a lot about what I was going through when I was their age. When I was in college, I also thought a lot about my hair and my hair choices. I had moved from a racially diverse and fairly inclusive environment to this Ivy-League, majority White environment which sparked complicated and difficult thoughts about my racial identity. I started to connect the importance of natural hair to affirming my Black identity. I was a student at Cornell University, in upstate New York as an undergraduate and didn’t have a lot of resources to make that shift from permed to natural though. Once you begin chemically processing your hair, something that I had started somewhere between 7 and 9 years old, you can’t just stop. If you didn’t do “touch ups” (i.e., get another chemical process done) every 6 to 8 weeks, your hair becomes fragile and could break at the point on the hair shaft where the chemically straightened hair meets the new growth—the naturally kinky or curly hair. It was a process and commitment to make that transition. There were no salons, I didn’t have friends who could support me in that process, and there were no YouTube tutorials yet. Honestly, I just pushed down the discomfort and conflict, basically for the next decade. In a lot of ways, chemically relaxing my hair was the antithesis to everything else I was doing in my life. I was about being healthy, and I was a vegetarian. I cared about my products and what was in them. But for some reason, I was still engaging in this physically and emotionally toxic, chemical process. It makes me think of all the ways I have felt compelled to ignore my inner wisdom because so much of my cognitive energy had to be expended trying to cope with all the other competing realities; like being a Black woman and getting through what was at times, a harsh collegial environment that didn’t feel inclusive. To figure out another thing, like learn how to manage my natural hair, and not the “deadened” and literally flattened version of it which I was familiar with, was too much at the time.
However, I finally had to face the choices, and conflicts, I had made both in college and at that time in my adulthood if I was going to be supporting people as they explored the intersection of their hair choices with career, racial identity, anti-Blackness, and the compromises we can all feel compelled to make in life. I needed to understand what needed to heal within me.
The exploration of hair choices is about different things for different people. It can be about authenticity, or maybe just ease. It may be about what parts of ourselves, our identity we are willing to give up to or hold on to for strength and groundedness. It may be about how we may define success or financial stability. Issues of privilege in our felt “access to choice” may be a factor. How much of our full selves do we want to bring into different environments, versus what do we feel we have to do just to get a job to pay back student loans? We have to consider how gender, sexuality, and all aspects of our identities impact our choices. So, I was having real genuine conversations. And in order for me to be a good role model and to feel good about myself, I needed to go on a journey for myself.
Something that came up while watching your film, which was the process of what liberation psychology calls critical consciousness. It’s the awakening among both the oppressed and the oppressors . . . but especially the oppressed awakening to the realities of the oppression within their own lives, and the pain that can accompany looking inwards. Can you speak to that process of the awakening to critical consciousness—what that process like psychologically?
For most of my life (other than a fleeting awareness in college), I didn’t know that there was anything in conflict with relaxing my hair because it was so commonplace. A lot of people did it, and I realized that there were some people who did not, but it never occurred to me that their choice to do it was consciously different from mine. It was just completely out of my awareness. I don’t know what else to say other than it was completely out of my awareness. And I didn’t connect it to political values or how I felt about my Blackness. At that point in my life I was very centered in Black healing. My undergraduate research was about unconscious processing, which is funny, like automatic thoughts regarding racial and political beliefs. And then I chose to go to a program that was in Harlem that billed itself as centering social justice issues in the therapy room and working with underserved populations. And so I thought those things were compatible. It wasn’t until I started the film, and then began to understand the way that history and society and psychology played a role in that choice, that I realized it was actually very much in conflict with my values.
Was there something psychologically healing about then making the film, for yourself and for other members of the film?
This film was definitely one of the most powerful and healing things I’ve done for myself personally. It completely changed my life. It really was a build-up, because the way that I was working individually with people is to destigmatize people’s lived experiences.
People come into therapy with all these symptoms and unhappiness, and a lot of the times we focus on that. We risk pathologizing by creating a rigid narrative in which it’s all about individual responsibility for one’s condition or it’s the fault of the family. It’s important for me though to make sure the narrative includes realities about how the history of people’s communities—whether that’s their immediate community, or their countries, or globally—was impacting their circumstance and symptoms. How systems of oppression were impacting their symptoms, whether that’s colonization or capitalism or things like that. Because I think that once we understand that we are impacted by the things that are happening around us, we feel less stigmatized. We have compassion for ourselves. We realize that our experience is larger than just ourselves. And I find that to be really healing for people. But even though I aimed to practice in that way already, I didn’t see how it was connected to hair. We were not taught that in graduate school!
Everyone I interviewed for the film helped heal me in some way, whether it was professors who explained the ways that the Black Power movement of the 1960s or 1970s shifted the ways that people thought about hair or learning about the meaning of hair on the continent prior to colonization . . . like all these little tidbits shifted the way I thought about hair. The way I thought about myself. What I needed to build up my identity and self-esteem. I’m thinking a lot about the issue of privilege. Who has the privilege to feel connected to their history, to feel connected and positively about their identities? Who has the privilege to see themselves reflected in nursery books, in academic books, on TV? And I think that we need to shift all of that for everyone. I think we all benefit from having reflections that are more diverse, and that’s certainly one thing that I took away from the film as well.
One thing that was really palpable in your film was the intergenerational aspects of the natural hair movement. At the end of your film, you talked about historical trauma in this way that’s not just having to look at the trauma but also the resiliency. Can you speak more to that aspect of your film: intergenerational trauma but also intergenerational resiliency and healing?
Inherently we are survivors, and that comes from somewhere, our ancestry. There is power in taking ownership of healing trauma within our family line. In many Black families, survival in a White-dominant society required some type of assimilation; for some that came with a rejection of the self, of African culture, religion, sensibilities, and even our bodies. Those beliefs and behaviors get passed down the family line as a source of protection. But now, as we reimagine a more equitable society, we can reimage what liberation, emancipation, and freedom looks like spiritually, emotionally, financially, and even physically through our relationship with our body and hair. That reimagining can impact not just the imaginer, but they can be a model within their family/community. The new self-acceptance: even new skills to care for natural hair, can be transmitted across generational lines. I have heard many stories of the impact of someone going natural inspiring their mother or grandmother to take the leap, heal the trauma of self-rejection, and relearn how to love a more authentic version of themselves.
You talked about the isolation that somebody can feel. There seems to be a parallel process going on for you which is that you’re going through a process yourself of self-discovery, and then making the film and talking to people about it. There’s something inherently healing about that. You start speaking to other people and you realize, wow I’m not alone in this. There’s a lot of people struggling through this process. And there was a comment in the film by someone you interviewed. She was explaining the effect of the Internet, and how it brought so many people together who had previously just been isolated in their bubbles, as we all are in the world. And it was through that process that sales of relaxers went down. People started holding more communal events to share in natural hair, and it launched this movement.
That’s a very long-winded way to say: this collective trauma that Black people have shared intergenerationally, for hundreds of years, dislocates people from that tradition. And part of what it sounds like you’re doing is, you’re trying to say: hey, these things you struggle with, these symptoms you have, these problems you’re going through, we as a people are going through them together. And in sharing that together, you sort of put a person back into the tradition. And it’s empowering that way, and it’s healing that way, and it’s liberating that way. Because so much of what capitalism does, and so much of what contemporary culture does, is isolate you. Noam Chomsky calls it atomization. It puts you in a home by yourself, disconnected from the history of the community. Maybe you could say a few words about that.
Well, I mean I could almost cry thinking about how powerful that sense was for me in the film. So that person was Lori L. Tharps, a professor from Temple. She wrote the book Hair Story with Ayana D. Byrd. There is just something painful and beautiful about traveling around the world and seeing people who look like you, but they don’t sound like you. While their first language is not the same as yours, their experiences in some ways are so incredibly similar. And so that makes you feel connected but simultaneously sad. Particularly, going to South Africa and having fantasies . . . I don’t know why I would have this fantasy because apartheid only ended in ‘94 . . . but whatever, you know the fantasy that I would land there and feel so connected to the continent and there would be this place where Black people were in power. And so the sadness that there’s still so much oppression there. And children are being kicked out of school there for having natural hair. And that is debilitatingly sad. But again, I also I felt so deeply connected. Like you may have a different life experiences, but there are ways we can deeply relate. We are thriving despite these things that are happening to us globally that feel outside of our power, but somehow we’re managing to really just thrive and feel empowered. Now that’s obviously not everyone’s experience. Obviously, there’s a definite issue of privilege. The people I spoke to were absolutely privileged. But there is also the sense that these people with privilege within these communities were trying to use that privilege to get rights for people who didn’t have that, to get the message out to people who didn’t have access to that.
I picked up on that piece too. It was powerful for me because it’s obviously something I don’t have to ever think about. I don’t have to think about my hair really and that’s part of a conversation of being a White man or being a Jewish man. For the most part, the privilege that I have allows me to not ever have to think about that.
That’s really interesting, because yesterday I did an anti-bias training. I show the film, and I do this whole thing on bias. And somebody said that to me—a blonde woman, a stylist, said, “I didn’t realize that young kids at 3 or 4 thought about their hair. I never thought about my hair.” Maybe that’s true but maybe it isn’t. I went to a really diverse high school, and I stayed Facebook friends with a lot of people from a wide variety of different backgrounds. And it’s fascinating to see people have kids, and someone I went to high school with is blonde and she has these blonde little kids. She posted a school assignment that her daughter, who was maybe six, did. There were questions like, “what’s your favorite food” and “what’s your favorite color.” And then the next one was, “what’s your favorite part about yourself?” And you know what was in her little handwriting? This little girl wrote “my yellow hair” was her favorite part of herself. I was taken aback. You know, what was going on in her life as this blonde little girl that when asked about her favorite part of her whole self, she said her yellow hair? So, what does that mean about her identity and how her identity is formed, and what is reflected to her about what’s valuable about her? I imagine so many people go up to her, and say “you have such beautiful blonde hair.” She probably looks more like the characters in the stories her mom reads to her than other people. So obviously we now have the gender stuff, but I’m guessing you look more like a prince in those stories though than my uncle would. So I guess it’s about what’s conscious and what’s not conscious. But there’s something that’s communicated to young kids regardless of their race about what they look like.
I’m exploring the impact that White supremacy has on me as well. I have naturally curly hair, but because of the internalized White supremacy with Indians, I was also told I was ugly with my curly hair and that I had to straighten it. And it would break off. I broke off my hair because I was relaxing it constantly. Obviously this is a big thing with communities of color, but it is interesting to also think about how White people are impacted and possibly harmed by it, which is what I’m hearing from your story. For the little White girl, her favorite thing about herself was her blonde hair. For girls and women across race, this White beauty standard becomes their symbol of worth. That also came up in your film: gender and ideals of beauty.
Yeah we can really get into that, especially how it impacts men depending on their sexual orientation. And certainly, if they’re attracted to women, what that means about who they partner with and how that reflects their self-esteem. Anti-Blackness impacts everyone, and it’s anti-Blackness. So it’s so unfortunate that you had that painful experience really born out of anti-Blackness. One of the studies I cite is from the Environmental Working Group (Zota & Shamasunder, 2017). And in this study, they found that Black women are spending nine times the amount of money on beauty products than White women. That includes things like skin lighteners, makeup, and different products to get the hair texture to be very different. Asian Americans spend 70% more average on skin care products. What that means is not only are we spending more money, and let’s not even talk about how much less money we earn depending on what category a woman of color you are. We have to spend the fraction of the money earned on those beauty products, so we aren’t discriminated against, and then that means that we have to be exposed to exponentially more chemicals. Which puts people at an exponential risk for things like cancer, fibroids, obesity, the other health risks, because we try to meet these beauty standards, which are insurmountable. That’s across women of color, and the darker you are within your cultural group, the more money and the more exposure to chemicals you’re likely to experience. And so that for me is a serious issue, and I emphasize that a lot because it’s not just self-esteem. I think self-esteem and identity are really important and impact every aspect of your life. But particularly for people who aren’t attuned to the importance of emotion, that’s less convincing. But certainly, you cannot ignore the disparities in health that these standards bring about.
In what ways have you even seen your film having a healing and therapeutic impact—on individuals but also the broader cultural healing of it|?
I mean just so much. In November 2018, we were invited to the New York City Center for Human Rights. What was happening at this point was that they were seeing more and more cases being brought to the city about discrimination about hair. The lead attorney who was litigating these natural hair cases Grace Sacro was a friend of mine and a follower of the film. She got the opportunity to see the film when we competed in the New York City Independent Film Festival. As a Filipina, and she made a concerted effort to expose herself to understand more about this issue. If she’s going to be an integral part of leading and supervising these cases, she really put herself out there and made sure that she understood this issue from every angle. So she saw the film and invited me to the commission to show the film and to give a presentation.
I prepared this very long in-depth presentation about why it shouldn’t be okay, and how the federal courts had basically allowed this discrimination to go on because of the many reasons they said it was an immutable characteristic. What that means is that if it’s something that you can change, you can ask someone to change it. You can’t change your skin color; you can’t change your ethnicity but you can change your hairstyle, so you should be able to. And so there was a confluence of things that were going on. There were more cases. There were more advocates. And then there was this film. And very shortly, probably by the next February, I was working with a large team of people to talk about how to reinterpret the already stringent human rights laws in New York City—because New York City already had the strongest human rights laws possibly in the world—to make it really clear that discrimination against natural hairstyles styles historically connected to Black people was racial discrimination. So that was the first jurisdiction that did that. Shortly afterwards, what I didn’t realize was that at the same time, the Crown coalition was working on the same thing at a state level. But New York City was the first to pass it, and then that’s when California and New York State passed their laws protecting our Black people’s ability to wear their hair in these appropriate and culturally connected styles. So it’s an amazing time for this film to come out, while all these people are working globally on this issue.
It’s interesting that the question was about how the film is healing to individual audiences and culture as a whole, and you went to the politics of it. Are you explicitly making that link—that this kind of psychological healing is dependent on political emancipation, and the two are interconnected?
I’m conflicted about that one. When I was in graduate school I was a fellow at the Colin Powell School for Civic And Global Leadership. During the fellowship, we learned how to use our academic expertise to influence public policy. That was a transformational experience for me. I had always been politically minded, but I became very activated at that time to make sure that I used my knowledge in a way that was going to impact more than just what was happening in the individual consultation room. And so that is also when I learned about the term soft power and the way that we export culture by media. And that influenced my dissertation, which looked at the impact of media on Black youth. So there is a way in which I think that healing happens individually, but healing also happens collectively and certainly happens on a policy level.
In terms of healing on an individual level, every screening has become incredibly emotional for the audience. For a lot of people, it is the first time they feel like their struggles are seen and represented in film, it normalizes feelings about their hair that may have felt shameful in the past because it puts those feelings within a context of history, society, and family, it helps people feel compassion for themselves; the foundation of healing. It allows people to engage in dialogue between different generations within the family system, which can be extremely transformationational. It has the power to transform wounds and perhaps feelings of betrayal or confusion; especially when family members have been perpetrators of denigrating naturally textured hair and other acts of anti-Blackness. Maybe most importantly it can provide a blueprint for how we can behave intentionally within our families and communities to create environments that are accepting of natural hair. The film really creates an environment of reflection that is powerful. And for non-Black audience members, I have been told the film has opened their eyes to a whole world in front of them they were blind to, which allows them to see the Black people in front of them and the “Black experience” in a different way—more compassionately and empathetically.
But back on the policy note, I’m not naive to think that changing laws and policy changes society, certainly not immediately. You know, in some ways many school districts are more segregated now than they were immediately after desegregation. I am fully aware that you can go around laws, and they don’t necessarily change hearts. Particularly because people aren’t readily given the history and knowledge that they need to understand the situations that our communities are facing right now. We are not learning it in school and it’s not reflected in TV for a lot of reasons, to keep structures in place. But certainly people have recourse now if they want it—if they’re discriminated against, whether in school or at work in the few states where we have antihair discrimination laws. That does not mean that it’s easy to prove that discrimination happened. And it also doesn’t impact the fact that we still hold bias beliefs. Just think of the school situation; most teachers are White women. And if you saw the stats from the film, White women hold the most negative beliefs about curly, kinky, textured hair. We also know when teachers hold these beliefs about their students based on race or class or how they look, it can impact how well the students can do in school. So, laws are amazing and important, but I’m also working to continue to push for education on a historical and emotional level. I have been traveling with Back to Natural and holding screenings with a variety of workshops. The workshops are antibias focused or healing focused depends on the audience, but there needs to be an improved awareness, improved compassion, and empathy. You know, in order to have you know the full impact that we need to have that. Does that make sense?
Yes, and it’s very holistic. I appreciate that.
In your film, Toby Thompkins said one of the things that you notice is that Black people are constantly matching an identity, an image, that they want to project onto the world with an image that is also being projected onto them. And there is this space between those two things that gets filled with psychological wounds and cultural and historical wounds that people really don’t have a lot of ways to deal with. It’s confusing; it’s traumatizing. It shapes how you make sense of things. I was hoping maybe you could speak to that a little bit more.
The first thing that comes to my mind is the privilege, right. The privilege to not be confused, to have a good handle on why what’s happening to you and why what’s happening in your communities, and why what’s happening internally and psychologically. When we have a good sense of that, then we can become empowered and make intentional choices about our lives—when we can see ourselves more clearly. And not in this stigmatized way, or in ways that are full of these projections that are not us. I think that is where a good grasp of our history comes in, the history of our country, of our world, even of our family. Unfortunately, and purposefully, that history has been hidden, destroyed, and manipulated.
You speak about empathy, how that helps to convey those messages or helps someone be more oriented to their own place in the world. It’s this vehicle of empathy, which really has a powerful effect on creating change.
Right. Again, something else I am really conflicted about because my dissertation looked at the impact of the media. And also, I know that with film there can be an empathy gap. What that means is that if you don’t feel like the people on screen reflect you in some way, you’re not going to have the same emotional, physiological, visceral response to what’s happening on the screen. It may deepen your empathy and may not deepen your empathy. Certainly, that was my intention, to deepen empathy. But I’m also aware that you have to be open to that. I think that ninety nine percent of people are deeply impacted by the film, and it opens up their world and they see things that they hadn’t seen before.
My graphics editor who helped with a lot of the graphics is Italian. He went back to Italy, and he called me one day from the hospital. He was there with his daughter, and he was like “I’m in the hospital with my daughter, everything’s okay. But I wanted you to know something.” I said, “What’s going on?” He said, “There’s this Black man. And he walked into the emergency room, and he’s very tall, and he’s wearing a suit. He’s very well-dressed, but he has these long locks down his back.” He said, “Before working on your film, I would have said who does this guy think he is? What is he trying to say, why is he trying to draw attention to himself? You know, I’d been really angry.” Like he would have been shocked, confused, angry, offended, you, know that this man had the nerve to walk into the emergency room in a suit with these locks. And he says now he understands that he’s not doing anything, he’s just living his life being himself, and his locks mean whatever they mean to him. And it’s not an affront. I think the insight for me is the importance of cross-cultural relationships in realizing what people genuinely feel. This is why you have to have good relationships with people who are different from you. And I realized for some people, it is an affront. I don’t just mean White people. I mean even Black people seeing natural hair could be an affront, like, “Who do you think you are to not make yourself small? Do not draw attention to yourself.” You know, “You fit in here.” So some people are open.
Meanwhile, I was leading an antibias training yesterday using the film as a jumping-off point, and I break people out in small groups because I know they’re not going to say anything in large groups, I start eavesdropping on a small group, and I hear a gentleman say, “This movie was completely bias. I don’t want Black people telling me how to feel about what’s beautiful.” So now, he didn’t say that in the large group. He kind of changed his answer when I asked them to reflect on what their groups were saying. I think he changed it to, “It’s good for young Black people to watch this film, but I feel like I don’t want to be told what to do.” And you know, no one is telling you what to do. But what I am telling you is what you can’t do at work. What you can’t do at work is discriminate against people. I’m not telling you what to think about what is beautiful. But I am asking you if you could take a moment to hear what I am saying: that what you think is beautiful is about what you’ve been exposed to. And the reason you were exposed to that is with a purpose: to center Whiteness as the norm, as the best. So I don’t know if that was received, but you have to try. But that were two very interesting responses. And so if people are open, they’re going to get it. If people are not open, they may not. Or they may get it later.
It plants a seed, at the very least. And sometimes that seed transforms consciousness, either quickly or gradually.
And people are going to respond, if they feel that what is center and normal, we’re asking that to change.
So the last question, and you’re already speaking to this, is: how do you think that film, as a unique art form and language, can express psychological experience?
Film and visual representations resonate with us on a bodily level that, for some, writing may not. Film allows us to sink into an experience—we can give ourselves over to the screen—almost in a hypnotic state. So in terms of shifting people’s consciousness and connection to others, deepening empathy, film is a powerful vehicle.
Film also allows a group of people to have a powerful shared experience. You know, the Back to Natural DVD is coming out, and my fantasy is that people will watch this with their families: with their grandmothers, and their mothers, and their kids. To be able to create that space where they’re all having the same thing at one time, and allow people to communicate and share their experiences, their pain, and their questions in groups. Because I think that’s where the healing really can be.
I remember how you were saying that by making the film, you were experiencing that sense of community that Eric had highlighted. And now you’re offering that for others who view your film—that very healing you experienced is now experienced by the people gathering in community to watch the film. That connection between your own experience of filmmaking, and then the intergenerational community experience you are now creating for others, is very poignant.
Thank you. I want this film to be an embrace for people. I think there’s a lot of pain. I think particularly when . . . you know, not all families are like this. But certainly, if you are a part of a family where Grandma has said something to you about your hair, or Mom permed your hair, or something like that, or you have an uncle or a brother who impacted the way that you feel about yourself, particularly in ways that aren’t positive. It’s a way to create a space to heal those ruptures, and also decide as a family that you are a community, that you have an intention to do something different. I end all my screenings and workshops with everyone writing a list of commitments and intentions about how they are going to leave this space. What are you going to do differently on an individual level, and what are you going to do differently on a community level to impact change as it relates to this issue? I hand people a sheet of adjectives that they can use to describe their natural hair, or the natural hair people they see on the street, you know, just shout out, “Wow your hair is so bouncy and so amazing or so elegant.”
And I talk to people about social media, like change your whole Instagram and your Facebook and make sure there are some natural hair representations. So that you are exposing yourself to positive examples of natural hair, so that you can begin to download different representations. You know, how do you talk to yourself about your hair, and how can we be intentional about that so that it then reflects how you do that with other people? And then certainly within school systems, or salons, or other communities, what kind of images do you have up? What do your grooming standard guidelines look like? We have to make this healing really actionable on multiple levels for it to really take hold and affect change.
I just want to thank you because I want my career to look like yours. You know, the issues that mean most to me, what do I want to do with them? You’re modeling that for me as both a filmmaker and a psychologist. This is a meaningful film. It is having such an impact, and it will continue to. And this conversation has had an impact too, so thank you.
Thank you so much. I am so excited. I think psychologists belong in so many different spheres. We have so much to offer, and I feel like in a lot of ways we can be marginalized. No one listened to us about what’s happening with the government. But we know things folks, just listen! And so the more psychologists can feel steadfast in our knowing of humanity and healing, and get those messages out—particularly in an intersectional way, particularly in a way that’s anti-oppressive—we just have to go out and get it. I had no experience [of] filmmaking. Literally, I bought a camera and said “let’s just see what happens.” I had no experience cutting a film. I learned on YouTube. So I just feel like there’s nothing that we can’t do, especially in this day and age of technology.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
