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Promise Sawyers, a ten-year-old girl from Nashville, Tennessee, won the internet's heart over the weekend when she wore her Afro with pride after being made fun of by classmates for wearing her natural hair the day before. Again: It's 2019, and black women and girls are still being shamed for wearing their hair the way it was intended. Black women and girls are one of the only groups routinely shamed for wearing their hair the way it grows naturally, and are expected to manipulate it in order to make that happen.
“So, yesterday, I went to school, and I wore my hair in an afro like this... and a lot of people had a lot of mean things to say about it,” said the fifth-grader in the now-viral video. “So that made me feel some type of way.” Some. Type. Of. Way. Find me a black lady who hasn't been made to feel some type of way about her hair. I'll wait. Sawyers attended her first days at Head Middle Magnet School wearing braids before coming in wearing her natural hair texture in an Afro. But she wasn't going to let the criticism get her down, and returned to school the next day with her 'fro out and fluffed to the heavens, bullies be damned.
“I felt confident and pretty,” Promise told FOX17. “At my old school, people thought my hair was cool.” Cool doesn't even begin to describe it. The video, which was secretly recorded by Sawyers in a self-motivational moment, as she described to FOX17, “to pump her up before starting the school day," was later discovered by Sawyers' mother, Qui Daugherty, who took the video to Facebook.
The video has since gone viral, amassing millions of views and thousands of uplifting and encouraging comments. “The video was made at that point, like she’s really taking a stance,” Daugherty told Yahoo Lifestyle. “The immediate family was more proud of that moment, but we had no idea the impact that it was gonna make and the amount of messages.”
Again: Don't tell anyone, but particularly black women and girls, what to do with their hair. Recently, New York and California passed legislation to stop hair discrimination, so if you're in New York or Cali and you have a problem with natural black hair, suck it up, and maybe talk to a therapist to unpack why black women making choices about their own bodies makes you so upset. Hopefully, these bans extend to other states.
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