Orlena Nwokah-Blanchard: For me, what I observed was the idea that people thought that the movement was too trivial. Many people though that something like hair, which is an extension of our body, is just a thing that people can just cut off, and it will grow back, and therefore, that was too

trivial of an issue to associate with this social or economic advancement of a race of people. Someone said to me, “how can you make an argument about legally protecting natural black hair? Why can’t I then protect a blue mohawk?” The kind of challenges that

we got were to compare hair as it grows out of our head, as it is an extension of our Blackness and our African heritage, and liken it to different choices that people who are not historically oppressed people or historically oppressed in this country, and how they choose to wear their hair. Many people trivialized the subject of hair being a racial characteristic and the idea that we should be able to protect our social and economic standing.

Jollof rice