Black Hair vs The Entertainment Industry

Culture

Apr 9

The lack of diversity in the entertainment industry is a topic that has been picked apart and analyzed for decades. Diversity and inclusion initiatives have pushed aspiring black and brown actors, filmmakers, and screenwriters to pursue careers in the industry in an effort to add color to predominantly white spaces.

Since the turn of the century, the entertainment industry has become considerably more diverse than it was mere decades ago. But the people often left out of these conversations regarding race and ethnicity are the hairstylists and makeup artists preparing these actors to appear on screen.

With the majority of union stylists being white, black actors often find the techniques used for their hair and makeup to be unsatisfactory, and end up taking matters into their own hands before arriving on set. In recent years, many black actresses and other celebrities have spoken out about the mistreatment and disregard of their hair on countless film and television sets.

Trina McGee.jpg — Trina McGee via Getty Images

In January of 2020, Trina McGee spoke out on Twitter about the racism and microaggressions she faced as the only black cast member on Boy Meets World. In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, she elaborated on a distasteful interaction she had with a cast member, in which she was called “Aunt Jemima” while in hair and makeup.

“I didn’t have a hairdresser on the set of Boy Meets World,” she said. “All those little micro braids you see, I stayed up all night doing them right before I went on national television for myself.”

McGee’s experience on set is one that many black actresses know well. Many of them are forced to wake up hours before their non-black castmates, and do their own hair and makeup in order to look presentable on camera.

Actress and comedian Natasha Rothwell spoke about the problematic nature of this shared experience in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.

"It's a real disservice to actors of color who are effectively doing someone else's job and not getting paid for it,” she said. “There's nothing more dehumanizing than sitting in a hair and makeup chair and watching your co-stars go through the works and leave, and you're still there because someone's moving very slowly because they're very scared. It's you feeling like a problem to be solved."

The lack of education on black hair and natural hair care doesn’t end at all-black casts, either. While the on-screen representation may seem to be a marker of progress, behind the scenes there is still a lot of work to be done.

In an interview with natural hair blogger Nikki Walton, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’s Karyn Parsons spoke about her own natural hair journey following her time playing Hilary Banks on the much-loved ‘90s sitcom. When she first starred in the show, Parsons said she got a texturizer in order to maintain her bouncy curls while making it more manageable for the hair and makeup crew to work with.

Hairstylists would frequently use a curling iron on her already texturized hair, causing severe damage that they attempted to fix with extensions and weaves.

“Finally, at some point toward the end of the show,” she said, “they started putting wigs on me. They of course could never get those right either. But I was like, ‘you can’t fry my hair everyday! I won’t have any hair left!’”

While Parsons’ path to relearning and loving her natural hair is a heart-warming story, the damage she endured at the hands of these hairstylists is unacceptable. Then again, neither is the fact that over 30 years after Fresh Prince aired its first episode, black actresses are still dealing with hairstylists that cannot and sometimes will not work with their hair.

Gabrielle Union was fired from America’s Got Talent in November of 2019 after only one season on the show. She claimed that her rotating hairstyles were deemed “too black.” Monique Coleman was forced to improvise with headbands on the set of High School Musical because stylists were unable to do her hair properly and messed up the front of the style. The lack of resources and education surrounding black beauty in the entertainment industry is abysmal.

Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the first black union hair stylists in Hollywood. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, he shared an anecdote about one of his first jobs in the industry.

He was asked if he could style white hair, a question he says was a ploy to keep minority stylists out of the union. Once he demonstrated that he was more than capable of the task at hand, he was met with relief from the head of the department.

“Blacks have to do Black hair and they have to do white hair. Whites, all they have to do is white hair,” he said.

As simple as that statement is, it is incredibly profound and continues to sum up the industry 50 years after Stevenson’s Hollywood debut.

Natural hair education, as well as holding white stylists to the same standards as stylists of color, is imperative to truly make the entertainment industry more inclusive. Black actors and actresses should be able to enter a hair and makeup trailer without worrying about whether or not their foundation will make them look grey, or if their hair will be damaged by a confused stylist.

Fashion model Youma Wague recently created a hair workshop following a negative experience she had while shooting for a Gucci x Dapper Dan campaign. Meant to educate stylists in the industry on the ins and outs of natural hair, Youma’s Natural Hair Workshop is both a sensitivity and technical training program, targeted towards stylists wishing to provide better service to their clients.

Workshops like this one, along with other initiatives urging white stylists to expand their knowledge of hair to include those that do not look like them, are just the first step in ensuring that these decades worth of nightmare hair stories will finally end.

Written by Simi Iluyomade

Header: Karyn Parsons as Hilary Banks via Getty Images