A lovely little book like Hair Love can be read within maybe five minutes, six if you look closer at the great illustrations. But why on Earth this book has been showing up on the banned lists and being pulled from libraries and schools is a wonder.
The book was written by Matthew A. Cherry and illustrated by Vashti Harrison was also made into a short film with both being released in 2019 and the movie won the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film revolves around the young Zuri and her father trying to find the perfect style for her hair. That’s all. It’s a story about a black father’s bond with his daughter as they work together because the mom in the family is returning home from cancer treatments. The mom has no hair and her daughter is wanting to look her best for her mother.
Seriously, how could anyone want this book banned? Cherry said he wrote the book and made the short film to show how loving and supportive black fathers can be. I agree with him that black fathers are given a bad rep in the media. Look at how Good Times had to kill off James Evans (John Amos) because they couldn’t portray a black family in a positive light pulling themselves up. And then, you had Family Matters where Carl Winslow (Reginald VelJohnson) as the father of a black family in the Chicago suburbs got usurped by the slaptstick foolish antics of Steve Urkel (Jaleel White).
And I came very close to buying YouTube Premium to avoid seeing the BMF commercials of actor Russell Hornsby being a jerk to his kids because they’re not sitting “proper” at the dinner table. Black fathers have to be very authorative and tyrannical or absent. It doesn’t matter that white fathers spend their weekends on the golf links or out fishing, drinking in bars or in their man caves. There’s “weaponized incompetence” where fathers, white fathers to be exact, can’t even dress their own kids, do laundry or even cook them food.
Yes, how dare someone show young children that black families can love each other. I see it all the time on social media with people I know and their spouses and kids. It’s a novel idea that black mothers and fathers everywhere are loving and caring with their children. Maybe that they’re afraid the white children are going to see black families happier than them. Every other stupid movie about a white family has to show deranged they are. They can’t be worse than the black families in the media.
And let’s be honest, schools are doing whatever they can to keep non-white children from expressing themselves through hair styles. And it’s just braids! What’s so wrong about braids?! I was sitting at a school board meeting about a decade ago and one member asked why they allow the students to wear mohawks with colored hair. And even though it’s Oklahoma, the students with said mohawks are mostly white. I think it’s because their parents and grandparents have more pull.
I’ve seen high school girls over the past 30 years since my first day in the ninth grade have hair styles that probably cost more in one month to maintain than most people make in their pay. I heard of one young woman who got up at 5 a.m. to wash her hair because she doesn’t want to use a hair dryer. What some school districts (and mainly the racist, bigoted people flooding meetings) want is to put black people and other non-whites in their place. White people can style their hair anyway but black students have to abide by certain styles that are “acceptable”?
I’ve never been distracted by someone’s hair regardless of who it is. If these education bureaucrats think hair styles are too exotic, I suggest they never take a trip to Las Vegas or Rio de Janiero during Carnival. I think if black students have to abide by dress codes, I’d say all teachers and administrators should too. While covering an education story, I literally saw a middle school teacher bend over and her “tramp stamp” showed. When I was in school, the riskiest thing teachers wore were mom jeans and not the fashionable ones young women today wear either. Teachers dressed like Bea Arthur in Maude.
If this book is at your library, please check it out and get it in circulation more. This is a very sweet book about love between a family. If that’s a message that people want to ban, then there’s something seriously wrong with people in this country.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 