Angela Green, weeknight anchor for WNCT in Greenville, N.C., posted a video this week to her Facebook account on the topic of natural hair, asking whether or not naturally curly hair should be straightened.
The video has since gone viral, with nearly 1 million views, and has sparked a passionate debate among Facebook users.
“The topic is natural hair in the workplace. Very sensitive to a lot of people. I’m natural. As many of you may or may not know, I’m biracial. My mother is from Thailand and my father is Black. See my hair? Straight. Y’all comment about it all the time. But if I were to go natural, my hair would be curly. But for right now, we’re not going to do curly hair because my bosses like it that way, so that is what we are going to go with,” Green said in a video taped on her cell phone.
She then introduced 19-year-old Madison, a broadcasting intern at her station. Green asked Madison what she was told about her hair, and Madison replied, “Too big and I needed to straighten it. Straighten it out. It would be distracting.”
Green said, “Distracting, well that is a very interesting word. But in the world of TV we see it all. It just depends in what market, what audience you’re looking for right now. And really, your bosses and what they allow you to do. My advice is straighten for the sake of the school project. Depending on what market you get in, when you’re older, that is something that you have to deal with. But in the workplace, just for this one, my suggestion was to just straighten it out just to please everybody. But everybody won’t roll with that answer. What would your suggestion be to Madison and other young professionals rocking their natural hair?”
Green’s comments are not anything new. The debate of natural hair and big curls has been raging since practically the beginning of the television age. But she does bring up a point that seems to be a bit of a gray area in the debate, and that is that many women refer to “natural” hair as hair that is not chemically treated, and so “natural” styles can include straightened styles as well.
What do you think, Grio fam? Should Green have told young Madison to straighten her hair? Or should society just learn to get over its natural hair hangups?