LORENA FARIA SAID: "I’m tired of hearing my grandparents telling me to comb my hair."

Ever since I was little, I lived through the “dictatorship of straightening”: when I was 7 years old, I went through my first chemical relaxing process, something I did for the next 20 years. Only after having my hair totally damaged by a badly done procedure, finally I got tired of it. Two friends were essential in this process: one black woman who was going through the process of transition, and a redhead who always thought black hair was powerful!

Nonetheless, it wasn’t so easy to accept my frizzy locks. The criticism came mostly from my family, especially my grandmother … Every time I went to her house, I heard the words, “Why don’t you use a comb on that hair?” It hurt, but even when, one day before the defense of my master’s thesis, when I had a different haircut to emphasize the volume, I heard someone say: “But don’t you think that it’s really big?”

So in the end, to stop “attacking black hair” is not easy. In any event, today, better understanding the question of empowerment, I realized that it doesn’t simply mean to acknowledge your curls or to straighten them, since women are empowered and straightening doesn’t represent a rejection of her identity. Other things, besides the personal issue, bother me even more and involves the work that I develop every day with education: I’m tired of seeing few blacks attaining places in federal schools! I’m tired of seeing the devalorization of black popular culture by public power! I’m tired of seeing black students suffering covert racism in schools!