Tia Mowry says she’ll ‘never forget’ being denied mag cover for being Black
'I will never forget where I was,' she said, 'and I wish I would have spoken up. I wish I would have said something then.'
Tia Mowry-Hardrict told ET’s Unfiltered that she and her twin sister, Tamera, were denied the cover of a popular magazine at the height of their success because they were Black.
“So my sister [Tamera] and I wanted to be on the cover of this very popular [teenage] magazine at the time,” Mowry-Hardrict recalls. “We were told that we couldn’t be on the cover of the magazine because we were Black, and we would not sell.”
The actress told Entertainment Tonight that she would never forget that moment.
“I will never forget where I was,” she continued, “and I wish I would have spoken up. I wish I would have said something then. I wish I would have had the courage to speak out and say that wasn’t right.”
As the fight for racial justice and equality in America has entered a new era of awareness and action in America, Mowry-Hardrict was reflecting on her own challenges as a young Black girl in Hollywood in the ’90s.
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“I would feel insecure about my hair because being young and being in this business, I never saw girls like me,” she explained. “I never saw girls that, you know, were embracing their curls, or I never saw curly hair being portrayed as beautiful.”
Mowry-Hardrict has recently been embracing her natural-hair journey. She showed off her new short haircut, complete with grey hairs that belie her 42 years. She said that seeing the representation of “beautiful, curly hair and just beautiful Black women in all shades—dark, light skin, brown,” has been helpful in embracing her “natural beauty.”
The mother of two also said that she has been sharing the message of Black beauty with her daughter, Cairo, and son, Cree, aside her husband, actor Cory Hardrict.
“I’m always telling my beautiful brown-skinned girl that she is beautiful,” Mowry-Hardrict said, “and the same thing, even with my son. I tell him how handsome he is; I tell him, you know, he is smart. Because I know what it feels like for someone to devalue your worth, and I don’t want my children to ever, ever, ever feel that. And not have the strength, or the foundation, to not believe it. To believe that they are worthy.”
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