'The Hair Tales' Examines the Stories Behind Black Womanhood
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Every woman has a hair story. No matter the texture, the length, whether it’s healthy or damaged, all Black women can tell you the stories of their lives through their hair. In the new Oprah Winfrey Network and Hulu original series The Hair Tales, host and executive producer Tracee Ellis Ross interviews the current generation of hair icons about their lives through the lens of their crowns. The episodes—which feature guests including Winfrey (another of the show’s executive producers), Issa Rae, and Representative Ayanna Pressley—go to depths that speak to every Black woman’s soul, touching on the personal, the familial, and even the political throughout their conversations.
Each episode is intimate; the beginnings of interviews feel like peeks into the guests’ childhood diaries, as they recall hair role models of their youth and the lessons they internalized from how people around them treated their styles. Interstitial scenes include commentary from hair care experts and activists, as well as anecdotes from a bustling salon of women who touch on everything from the confidence gleaned from a Big Chop to new names for controversial terms (“nappy” splits the room between resentment and empowering reclamation). All the elements come together to create a show that doesn’t sit you down for a lecture, but rather treats the cultural and emotional baggage around hair with empathy and love.
When asked about her hopes regarding the impact of the series, Ross hopes that individuals and the beauty industry as a whole will also treat Black women with love and whole empathetic care. “I really hope that everybody gains a deeper respect and love of Black women from The Hair Tales and that it really helps everybody to stop seeing us as our parts and see us as whole powerful important beings that tip the scale on mostly everything. Culture, elections, politics, economy, family.” In addition to being a vision of a more just future, her answer is also the perfect explanation of the series itself. The Hair Tales brings the essential, healing space of a salon to the small screen.
Below, Ross speaks to BAZAAR about the intentional and organic elements of the series’ development, the stories that came up in multiple interviews, and her own hair tales.
The show is about hair, but also it's about being a Black woman, identity, perception, mental health. Why did you decide to have these conversations through the lens of Black hair?
My experience in my life has been that hair and my hair has been like a portal into my soul. I think some of that comes from, culturally and societally, the way Black women's hair has been treated and talked about. Most of us have gained this really inextricably tied relationship to our hair. I could chronicle my journey of self-acceptance through my hair.
We intended this series to be a love letter to Black women that offered—for the first time, 'cause I don't remember it happening anywhere else—an intimate celebration, discovery, and exploration of the humanity of Black women, using hair as a metaphor and an organizing principle to express the expansiveness of who we are. And also, to give our humanity and our experiences context. We so often are decontextualized in our lives and aren't able to see who we are and how we are in relation to our history, to each other, to our community, and to the world. So this was an intentional opportunity for us to tell that story, and hair felt like the right entrance way in.
When you were planning the series, were there some specific subjects you wanted to highlight or conversations you wanted to have? Or did everything just come out very organically?
A lot of it happened organically, but there was a lot of intention in the process of developing this show for TV and really figuring out how to create a sense of intimacy from a television show. How do you honor the sacredness and the weight of this kind of conversation and this subject matter? How do you allow this sharing of Black womanhood to be our story?
In terms of subject matter, because of how intentional we were and how we built the team with Black women in front of and behind the camera, then the job was to get out of the way and let it unfold. In the interviews, [executive producers Raeshem Nijhon and Carri Twigg] and I really worked so diligently together as a team to come up with questions. One of my favorite questions for Ayanna was, "Tell me about your freedom. Teach me about your freedom." So after the building of the questions, of the structure, of the choosing of the people, we allowed the themes to emerge.
What was amazing is how many similarities were across all the stories. I found so much comfort in that and how we all seemed to be wounded by similar things. We all seemed to have shame in similar areas. We all had scissor stories, and things like that. Then there were all the magical surprises of how people expressed things, particularly and unexpectedly, some of the things that were shared in the salon that were magic. There was no scripting in there; there were no questions posed. It was just like, 'Go ahead,' you know, and the cameras were rolling. So the subject matter emerged organically.
You have become a hair icon, but I wanted to go back to, like, your own days of self-discovery, when you were in your 20s working in fashion and modeling in New York. Where was your hair journey at that point?
Oh, my God, my hair was just fried and dyed and done. I didn't know what to do with my hair. I posted in my story the other day, a picture of 18-year-old me in Paris, and someone was like, "Oh, my God, your hair looks so amazing." I was like, "Did it though?" In my 20s, I was in and out of wearing my hair naturally. As I got towards my late 20s, I really did embrace my natural texture and had figured out what products to use and what would work best and things like that.
My journey with my hair, it was hard-wrought. I really can chronicle my self-acceptance through my journey with my hair, figuring it out and figuring myself out, and discovering strangely that my hair can actually do anything if I condition it and honor it. Like me. I can do anything if I treat myself well, and I really do the work to get myself there. I would say from, like, 12 to 25, it was just tough.
Isn't that for everyone? I'm 28, and I'm coming out of that.
Yeah. Those are tough years. I hope that they are not as tough now for people in that age range as it was for me when I was in that age range, because now there are more products. We see ourselves mirrored back to ourselves more frequently and often. Pattern exists. I hope that it is not what it was.
I also wanted to ask you one of the excellent questions that you ask your guests: Who are you outside of what the world expects of you?
That is also one of my favorite questions I came up with. Oh, goodness, who am I? … That's so interesting. Sometimes I'm a really quiet, shy girl, but I think mostly I'm, like, a homebody. I'm a homebody who likes to cook and take baths.
Regarding the beauty industry as a whole, how do you want this project to help propel the industry forward? What does a world look like where Black women aren't solely or so much defined by their appearance?
I really hope that everybody gains a deeper respect and love of Black women from The Hair Tales and that it really helps everybody to stop seeing us as our parts and see us as whole powerful important beings that tip the scale on mostly everything. Culture, elections, politics, economy, family.
One of my deeper missions is really to change the beauty industry's false belief that Black hair care is a niche market and that we should not have all the choices and possibilities that everyone else has. Also, the belief that our hair is so different, that no one can understand it. It just needs moisture, people. That's the biggest thing to me, that across the board from the executive offices to the shelves in retail, there will be a better sense of diversity and inclusion and a foundational effort made to create a more equal playing field in those who are creating products and what's on the shelves.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You Might Also Like
