No. You Cannot Touch My Hair! | Mena Fombo | TEDxBristol

[Applause] let's play a game Mina says clap once great modern Mina says high-five someone next to you very good ok Mina says touch the hair of the person in front of you I'm serious okay now they touch the hair of the person next to you guys guys Mina didn't say that time come on you know the rules thank you for playing just want to see you by show of hands how many of you just had your hair touched by someone you've never met before yeah it's quite a lot of people and just by show of hands how many of you were like now I'm not touching anybody's hair today I'm with you guys I launched the no you cannot touch my hair a campaign survey in the summer of 2017 and just under half of the respondents said they had their hair touched on a monthly basis by people they've never met before and within that 18% said it happened once a week as you can imagine unwanted and uninvited hair touching by people you've never met before that's that's my daily life about a year ago I got exhausted with constantly saying to people don't touch like thanks for the compliment but keep your hands to yourself and I kind of wanted a recorder to kind of just press play but I figured that prevention is much better than cure so I printed these t-shirts and I started to walk around wearing no you cannot touch my hair and I wore them to supermarkets I wasn't to work into conferences I wore them out socially but why I find is that lots of people started asking me questions so some people generally didn't know that this was a thing even though it affects my life I was like yes it's a thing and some people were like yeah I want a t-shirt that happens to me so I want to start texting that data and the survey was born as part of the research for the survey I made this bit of a social experiment Wow it has amazing the hardest part of that was trying to like chase people lift up my shirt to Cheryl's wearing this new can't touch my hair a campaign t-shirt underneath at which point they thought I was flashing them and try and say no no it's a social experiment but what I did catch up with people I asked him how it felt and most of the people in the video said it was weird and it was uncomfortable the majority of our campaign survey respondents said that it felt intrusive if not invasive and they were very angry and annoyed that this happened to them one of the things that I find was that the majority of respondents were female so 90% in fact identified as female and the majority of those were black women and girls so we know that this is an issue that affects black women and girls more than any other race now a friend of a friend this white guy was saying yeah but Mena you know I went on holiday to India for two weeks and people were touching my hair and lots of other women were saying oh you know when you're pregnant people come up and touch your stomach and it's the same thing now I don't want to take that experience away from anybody any form of unwanted and uninvited touching is completely unacceptable but most women on average only pregnant for nine months so that type of touching will come to an end and I'm not on vacation on holiday and like many of the respondents this is the country that I was born in and it still happens some people a very small minority said they didn't mind the touching and again that's cool but this campaign is really targeted at the overwhelming disproportionate number of black people black women black girls that experience this unwanted hair touching when I was six years old I was asked to be Mary in my school playing like get in the park and the only other black kid in the schools has to be Joseph and on the day they gave us this white baby Jesus now I accept that it is genetically possible for two people of African ethnicity to birth a white child but this was the 80s England so I don't think that as a point my school was trying to make so I asked for a black baby they said no and in response when all the parents came in I just refused to smile that was a day that my inner activist was born when I got to seven I started to notice that I was different to my peers that I concluded that I was really really really intelligent hermia so basically this is kind of the age when they start to notice that I was black and so they don't ask me really really crazy questions like why are you black and because I was really intelligent I'd give these over like elaborate detailed explanations and I would say I was boring black and this is mind-blowing to them because then they would keep asking me but why were you born black and I'd never considered why they were born white but I would kind of say well I just was and we'd go back and forth but it became very apparent that this wasn't a response they wanted so not just being intelligent I was very creative and so I made up stories now retard the other kids that I was walking to school one day in the pouring rain and it was car drove past me this massive puddle splashed me with mud and by the time I got to school the mud had dried so hard that I couldn't wash it off and the kids actually believed this story and they'd be like is it true and I was like yeah and they would go and get their siblings and they come back and say tell my story sister while you're black and so this became my rhetoric that I would go around telling people and the fact that they believed such a ridiculous story made me conclude they were idiots and I was really intelligent many years later my birth mother ie Berber tell me stories about when she would go to work and she would take her Nigerian lunches so she would have her goosey you know Cassie Garre and her colleagues would say what's that smell what are you eating what is that and she would look at them and she would say I am eating worms I am eating snake I am eating insect and she said Samina sometimes you just have to tell these people what they want to hear they think I'm a savage so I will act like one my serving yourself learn to tell people what they I thought they wanted to hear by the age of eight I had convinced for the kids that my hair is made of sponge because of course being black it couldn't be made of hair but by nine my different start had become more of an embarrassment and Ike remember going on a residential and on the first night all the girls had to shower and I was more developed than my peers so we get into the showers and Mike prepares went fascinated by my body so much so that they took it in turns to run into my shower and to grab me here and to grab me here to see what it felt like and at the time I tried to laugh it off but it was humiliating it was so humiliating bit for the next three days I didn't wash and every day the girls would say come herecome shower and I was like now I'm not going and by the third day I couldn't tell whether they wanted me to shower because they still wanted to grab my hair or to see me naked or whether it's because I smelt so bad because one of my guy friends turned to me and said Samina you stink I couldn't be me the rest of that day the room were kind of spread through the school and over the next couple of weeks I can member being pulled out of my class and sent to the headmistress his office and as I got there there was a male doctor in the office and the head was down another teacher and they had concluded that it was unusual for someone my age to develop so they wanted to examine me and they pulled open my skirt and my knickers and looked down to see that I had hair and I returned to class when I got home that evening my foster mother Jean was absolutely furious when she found out and she called the school she said a few angry words and then she put the phone down and she turned to me and she said I did not give permission for that to happen to you said I'm really sorry she said it takes all types of people to make a world and there's absolutely nothing wrong with you and I was very grateful for my mother for saying that because it does take all types to make a world and if we appreciate difference and it's not such as this intrigue that we feel a right or an ownership to go and touch and maybe if other mothers shared that story with our daughters then perhaps we wouldn't be seen as too much of another and my childhood may not have been so humiliating in 1810 a woman named starchy Bartman was taken from Africa and brought to the UK she had distinct features she was a black woman she had a large behind and they put her on display in Piccadilly Circus and thousands of eyes of the people become year-on-year to stare and to point and to touch fascinated intrigued curious and she survived for five years in the UK and when she returned so I went and so she survived for five years in the UK and when she died doctors and scientists were so fascinated by her body they made a plaster cast and they preserved her organs in museums until the 1970s and in 2002 Nasser Mandela sent for her to come home where she received a burial well I think about the experience I had at school with my peers and I think about the women who answered the no you cannot touch my hair a campaign survey and I compare that to the experience of Sarah Brightman I have to say that the actions keep repeating themselves this fascination with black bodies when I say black bodies I include black hair has been around for centuries so is the motivation for touching hair different to the motivation for those that went to see Sarah Baartman I said that again is the motivation the same for touching hair as it is for the actions that happen to Sarah Baartman in 1889 humanzees were first founded by a guy named Carl Hagenbeck and he traveled the world and he took tribes don't be a freak in trials and he presented them in Europe and in the Americas and people would come to stare and to see and those whose existed until the 1960s and I think to myself had I been born a few decades earlier could this girl have been me hundreds of thousands of people came to point and to stare into view and they even had signs and they would say don't feed the natives they've already eaten many women in the responded to the survey said that people touching their hair it felt like being petted in a zoo your hair looks like my pubes is what a group of lads chanted at me as I walked down bristol harbour side I've never touched an afro before are the kind of comments that people respond when I tan them after they've just grabbed my hair you can touch mine is a common response I get in meetings or at conferences as a trade-off for exchanging hair touching one women said to me well if you haven't so beautiful people wouldn't touch it after I went up to her and said don't touch my hair again is the motivation different because the actions are still the same a 14 year old girl from Bristol wrote in and said that she was in the shopping mall and a group of girls came I started playing with her hair from behind and when she turned and asked him to stop they laughed and walked away is the motivation different because the actions are still the same another woman talked about her boss's boss walking past her desk every day playing with her hair she said it happens not just to her but to other women always of color is the motivation different because the actions are still the same a father talked about his daughter begging to have her straighten because the touching it can become relentless and mother talked about having to braid her child's hair every day because the touching had come too much is the motivation different because the actions are still the same we live in this world that is systematically unequal so we have designed it to favor one group over another and over another and we start to say terms like unconscious bias and micro aggression and macro aggression but I would argue that we should really be saying racism the motivation hasn't changed the actions are still the same if you imagine that we were to describe words as people then I would argue that power would be the grandfather prejudice would be the grandmother and together they have given birth to racism now racism hooks up with ignorant and they create micro aggression if you imagine that micro aggression is raised by ignorance and racism what do you think she's going to become every time you put your hands in my hair without my permission you are her and every time you asked my permission and I say no you are also her and every time you see it happen and you don't call it out and we don't have systems in place to stop it from happening you are her I call hair touching hair attacks every black person black woman black girl deserves the same privileges as our peers so we deserve the right to go to work and to not be attacked we deserve the right to have an education and to not be attacked and we deserve the right to go for dinner with friends and not be expected to be the educator of all things black hair black history black hair care many of the respondents were angry at the responses that come when you challenge things so I asked them what can we do what can be done and they came up with three things one they said that the touches just need to stop touching so if you're someone who touches whatever you need to do put a memo a post-it note on your computer educate yourself but stop touching - they said that more education and awareness was needed and that looks like more representation in mainstream media more history in schools and not just one month I hope that this talk today is helped to raise some awareness in education but don't be complacent Google YouTube exists so if this reaffirms your position or if this is new to you then learn share and three last but not least they said that we need to call it out more we all need to call it out more what does that look like I'm gonna tell you I'm gonna split us through the middle you guys have a hero don't when I point you're gonna say your word and you guys over here a touch it's two simple words and this is how we call it I guys that was weak it's two simple words if anybody who doesn't understand or doesn't know isn't hasn't experienced this yet this is how you call it I I want to hear it loud like these guys at the front I want to hear one more time how do we call it out Angela Davis said I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change but I am changing those things I cannot accept I extend that to you and I say if the motivation is truly different then we need to let our actions be that change thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 179,071

Rating: 4.8951001 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Activism, Body, Change, Childhood, Discrimination, Feminism, Gender, Race, Social Change, Social Media, Women

Id: OLQzz75yE5A

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2017