Friday morning, Tamron Hall, the Today show's first African-American co-host, unexpectedly revealed her natural kinks and curls on national television.
After the unveiling, the news program-in an 'I can't believe they're actually doing this' move-polled its audience regarding whether Hall, 43, should stick with her natural look on-air.
Somewhat surprisingly and thankfully-given white America's well-documented resistance to African-American women who buck conventional beauty ideals-70 percent of viewers who tweeted in response said that Hall's tightly curled style was a winner.
For many black women-even for those for whom unprocessed hair is no longer anything novel-her choice, and the reaction to it, do matter.
Why is that, when it's 2014 and black women all over the country have been going natural for years and talking ad nauseam among themselves about whether to go natural, how to go natural and their go-to natural products? Especially when this new approach to hair care is so ubiquitous that it's been deemed a 'revolution'? How is it that this is relevant, when Hall is seemingly so late to the natural-hair game?
Well, because in America, black hair has been and remains highly political. It has been used as a yardstick, for blacks and whites alike, to measure beauty, respectability and worth.
Just last week, BuzzFeed released a polarizing yet provocative video, 'If Black People Said the Stuff White People Say.' In one of the most poignant scenes, a black girl with natural hair looks at a white girl in dumbfounded disbelief saying, 'Your hair is amazing. You know it's kind of like my golden retriever. So limp and lifeless, like, how do you do that?' thus illustrating an all-too-familiar ignorant conversation African-American women encounter when engaging with nonblack acquaintances or navigating predominantly white workspaces.
In March, the U.S. Army released AR-670, its updated guidelines and grooming policy that prohibited natural-hair styles typically worn by black women, like cornrows, braids, two-strand twists and dreadlocks, and thus joined a long line of institutions, corporations and schools that have attempted to regulate black hair-as if it's something that's fair game to mandate and control.
And remember when the Washington Post proclamed, 'New York's incoming first family says it all with their hair,' in Nov. 2013? It asserted that that Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio's wife, daughter and son's hair choices-dreadlocks, loose locks and Afro, respectively-- put on rare display 'black hair politics' and served as a 'baby step toward a new political and cultural era.'
So Hall's seemingly minor decision to go natural on air-because, as she explained, she was simply too tired to 'tame' her signature pixie with heat, blow dryer and flatiron after a late night shooting a segment in the wilderness-may not seem significant, but there's a case to be made that it is.
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