There are certain things that must be repeated over and over again until a person fully understands it.
As a child we do things that we know are going to get us in trouble and our parents give us the same lecture every time until one day, we remember that lecture and stop.
It seems we are facing this same struggle with post racism America.
We must keep telling America that our does not sprout out of our scalps and plunge for our shoulders, it also doesn’t make big yet tame curls like the “natural” women in movies, and we must keep reminding them that we have absolutely no reason to be sorry for that. We have absolutely no reason to teach our children to hate it. We have absolutely no reason to force our children to relax, flat iron, hot comb, weave down or hide their hair for somebody’s else’s comfort.
But, we still have little children of color that just want to wear their natural hair to school and they are still getting punished for it. In a nutshell, they are still being punished for not being white. They are still being punished for not being scared to be different. They are still being punished for being proud.
Vanessa VanDyke is probably one of the bravest naturals that I have ever met. At the age of 12 she has decided that liking who she is is more important than other people liking who she is. She proudly wears her big afro to school and even states that she knows that she is different and would get picked on for it but she doesn’t care. After her school threatened to expel her due to her full tresses, she still decided that being true to herself was more important than the bullying that had spread from the students to the administrative staff.
I have said it before, but, obviously it is something that we must keep saying. We must keep teaching our children to love themselves as they come because this world would love nothing more than to chew them up and spit out little robots properly made to hate themselves to ever achieve their full potential.
Natural or not, we must continue to install a greater sense of self in our children. We must teach them that we can not only become the next Derrick Rose, Beyonce, Jay – Z, Tyra Banks or Larry Fitzgerald. But they can also be the next Shonda Rhimes, Eric Jerome Dickey, Oprah Winfrey or Barack Obama.
I believe that one of the main reasons that Vanessa is able to bravely stand up for what she believes in is because she has a mother that is also willing to stand beside her rather than brushing her off. It seems she is being taught that herself worth is not tied into her looks or her hair and that she does not need to change either to have the rights to an education.
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