What does the shape of your hair says about you? | Pamela Ferrell | TEDxVCU

hello everyone let's talk here I'd like everyone to look at the person sitting in front of them or beside you and think of one word to describe their hair but keep it to yourself this is something we do every day we judge people's hair even I'm guilty of it but that's what I do for a living what if blondes redheads and straight hair styles was banned from the workplace that would be outrageous right well something like that actually happened to me I didn't have blonde hair and it wasn't straight I was 18 years old an aspiring fashion designer and I got a part-time job in a fabric store and one day the manager came to me and said the boss told me to tell you you can't work here with your hair like that it's not appropriate for our clientele that wasn't true because all day customers were complimenting my hair I said to her have him to tell me and the next day he did he gave me an ultimatum he said if you want to work here you have to take out that hairstyle now it took me eight hours to braid my hair it would take me five hours to unbraid it and the thought of going and working for someone that felt that way about me was unbearable so much of 1978 I was fired because of my hair style believe me I cried I knew it was wrong but I didn't know what to do about it other than brain so many heads that this wouldn't happen to anyone else and so here I am two months later braiding out of my apartment it's 2017 of course and it's still happening in the 60s it was the Afro in the 80s and 90s it was braids and today you face discrimination if you wear twists locks in the again it's a pattern right these are the faces of a few of the thousands of women that have faced hair discrimination this is Pamela Mitchell Mariette hotel Sheryl Tatum Hyatt Hotel Barbara Cooper American Airlines Lorinda Wilson US Navy Kalika Patel thirteen years old patria high school and dr. Christie Mitchell she resigned from the Army in 2009 because she was told she'd have to put her hair under a wig eight years later January 5th 2017 the outgoing Obama administration lift the ban on lock hairstyles in the army Janet Davis I got a call from her one day where she was panicked because a new grooming policy came out in the army that ban the hissed out she had been wearing for years twist hairstyles so I contact the army and I did a lesson on hair to the senior officials and they change that restriction on the twist hairstyle and today women can wear twists in the army in 2016 a federal appeals judge ruled that it's okay to discriminate against locks in the workplace and six months ago in the u.s. the UK and in South Africa schools banned children from when braids and afros and told them they would have to straighten their hair so we organised and we created the natural hair care movement to empower people to not only love their hair but to fight for here freedom and against hair discrimination we protest we filed lawsuits just to wear our natural hair in the workplace and to also be able to do open businesses to do it so over 36 years we found that there was a pattern of hair discrimination and we documented these patterns the first one was job loss occurrences African Americans who wore natural hairstyles were discriminated in the workplace and employees even went so far as to create written policy to ban you from wearing these hairstyles the second pattern was no job loss occurrences if you wore straightened or naturally straight hair in the workplace you were not discriminated against and there was no written policies that ban straight hairstyles and the third pattern was threat to economic Liberty you probably wondered what does that have to do with hair well as braid businesses opened across US cities states use irrelevant occupational lights licensing laws to shut them down in fact in 1980 we opened cornrows and company and natural hair business and we created jobs for young women to braid in Washington DC government attempted to shut us down four times issuing fines and cease and desist order and some breeders will even arrest it such as Isis Brantley Abdallah Dallas Texas so I am thankful to Tala Dean okhta who is known as the godfather braids and the Institute for justice they continue to successfully fight for here freedom and economic Liberty which is our 14th amendment to earn an honest living now here is not a threat it's not political but there's this constant effort to degrade it even by the words used to describe it in cosmetology school in the textbooks they describe this hair is over curly what is that like overdone or too much and then bloggers and haters will call it nappy when that B means diaper so now we have diaper here and then there's a new made-up make-believe here typing system that classifies number one as straight here and number four see at the bottom as kinky hair we have to change how we feel about hair this is where you come in we can change hair discrimination if we change the language we use to describe hair and we change how we see it take a look at this microscopic image of hair as you see there's a circle pattern on the tip looks like a fingertip a fingerprint this you can't see with the naked eye but what you can see with the naked eye is once the hair grows out of the scalp one day I found strands of hair on the floor that were perfect circles what I realize is that hair has a shape and so the shape should be the name that we use for hair so I started the circle hair project to collect hair from around the world to track human migration based on hair shape and to teach people about the beautiful evolution of hair so I collected hair from over 100 different people and I found some really interesting patterns and occurrences so hair has a shape it's either circle or straight and everything is in between and that shape determines how your hair grows and what happens when it gets wet so large circle or straight hair grows down and when it gets wet it hangs down small circle here grows up and when it gets wet it shrinks and as you see the middle photo here that is her wash and we're here and beside it we blow-dried her hair and twisted it so you can see the length is pretty much the same and so straight here these two little girls they here is basically the same length but again one grows up and one grows down also what I found was that circle here came in different sizes from really tiny to very large and I came up with an accurate way to measure the circle size I used the point unit measurement and so the smallest size that I collected as I said was eight point the largest 135 so to put this in perspective eight point is the size of a pinhead and 135 point is the size of a quarter and obviously the larger the circle the easier you will see it and this is what small and large circle here looks like small circle here is an afro and large circle here appears to be straight so here's the hair of four different males again the smaller size eight point all the way to Street the eight point here I collected from a ten-year-old South African boy who is a descendant of the sandpeople one of the oldest indigenous populations on the planet and according to geneticist and genetic studies they have the oldest gene pattern found in modern humans and it dates back over 80,000 years so this is the sandpeople and if you notice it's a small circle size and the hair of the baby all the way to the eldest is the same because there's not there's no ad mixing they live in small family bands the picture here that's my people those are my nieces and nephews both parents african-american but they have distinctly different sized circle here and so as you see the four children have different circle size here and in fact there's a set of twins here the tallest girl and the smallest boy so we thought we could predict the circle size of children in the order they were born we were totally wrong if there are if there's a distinct difference and the shape of hair of two parents it's unpredictable what the children's head would look like so this is my hair which is a 28-point my firstborn is a 36 point and my second born is 135 point and both her father and I african-american and our circle size is pretty small to medium here we have the hair of an African woman Fulani from Gambia and her husband is Caucasian and her hair is 14 point her firstborn 48-point and her second born 72 point an interesting the most common circle size here that we collected in my salon in the Washington DC area was twelve point from African American women in particular but I also found that twelve point was the same circle size that I collected from women from different parts of West Africa that's not surprising so let's go back to the original pattern of hair discrimination large circle to straight here there was no discrimination against that here in the work place small circle medium circle here was discriminated against in the workplace in eight to ten point circle here was the most most unfavorably judged here as well as it was expected to be straightened even by black people and when written policy was created to ban small circle hairstyles they usually referred to them as extreme or fad check this out here is ancient it's been around as long as humans have been in existence and these brilliantly preserved human remains they reconstruct how humans wore their hair thousands of years ago these are two men recently and as you see this is not a fad they had the same hair as that Kermit skull that was 2400 BC so why here is not a fad this is a 2000 year old mummy and that's a hairstyle that I did recently not a fad it's just what we do to circle hair braids thousands of years so when I look at ancient here I see the pattern in the rhythm of life repeating itself I mean braids is around the world today are doing braid styles that were done thousands of years ago and we don't go to school to do this it's in our DNA it's in the shape of the hair and so these are some of the braided hairstyles that I did actually these were done years ago and so let's get comfortable with hair that makes us uncomfortable let's get comfortable with hair that grows long that small circle and let's use the neutral language that is factual and objective of hair shape which is circle here or straight here let's respect hair that grows down and here that grows up and so we are all connected by the strands of hair on our head I'm sure in many of your families there are different circle sizes and straight hair within one family what we do have in common though is a desire to be respected when I think of hair and when I think of the history of hair I want us to be remembered for hairstyles we choose to wear and not those we are forced to wear so now remember genetically we all come from a mother hair so let's honor that hair and our birthright to wear it so please take a look at the person in front of you or beside you do they have circle or straight here I hope you see them in a different way thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 29,612

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Social Science, Activism, Anthropology, Beauty, Biology, Body, Culture, Discrimination, Evolution, Genetics, Human Rights, Inequality, Movement, Nanoscale, Protests, Public Policy, Race, Research, Science, Social Justice, Society, Women, Women's Rights

Id: jj4KNcY0a5M

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 17 2017