Hollywood and the hair and makeup of black actresses

Last Week Tonight aired a segment about hair-based discrimination and hair as a part of identity, which reminded me of Yvette Nicole Brown’s tweets last year. She tweeted about her challenge with getting a stylist who can do her hair on set. The first problem is that the stylists have to be in the union to get work. But, the unions make it hard for stylists specializing in black hair textures to get into the union in the first place. Basically, the union’s logic is if you can do white hair, you know how to do all hair. However, if you do black hair textures, you don’t know how to do all hair… Riiiiiiight.

So black actresses come on set and risk having their hair and makeup botched because they don’t have stylists who have the training to do their hair and makeup. Black actresses often have to bring their own hair and makeup supplies and style themselves. Alternatively, they get their hair done ahead of time in the hopes of avoiding on-screen hair and makeup catastrophe.

Meaning that black actresses work harder to land roles and then they do their own damn hair and makeup too!

Identity politics

I’m very late to the game on this one, but in all the times I listened to political pundits talk about identity politics, I never really understood what they meant. I’m realizing how often it is a conservative tactic to frame a debate in a way that centers their experience and beliefs. And more importantly, to frame a debate as though one type of experience is the “norm” and all others deviate from the said norm. This excerpt from Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men really drove it home for me:

These white men have in common the following opinions: that identity politics is only identity politics when it’s about race or sex; that race and sex have nothing to do with ‘wider’ issues like ‘the economy’; that it is ‘narrow’ to specifically address the concerns of female voters and voters of colour; and that working class means white working-class men.
[...]
And I labour this point because it is exactly their whiteness and maleness that caused them to seriously vocalise the logical absurdity that identities exist only for those who happen not to be white or male. When you have been so used, as a white man, to white and male going without saying, it’s understandable that you might forget that white and male is an identity too.
- Caroline Criado Pérez