by Brittany Dandy

June 25, 2015

[WATCH] ‘Hair Freedom’ Explores Natural Hair Movement in The UK

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The natural hair movement has become a way of life for black women in the United States, sprouting beauty entrepreneurs, natural hair communities, and a powerful sisterhood-like movement. But what about the global diaspora?

[Related: Doctor Publishes Book to Empower Young Girls to Love Their Natural Hair]

According to Okay Africa, in BBC Raw’s doc, Hair Freedom, Black women in the UK discussed the natural hair movement in Britain, and why it’s so strange to call wearing your hair as it grows out of your head a “movement.”

YouTube content creator, Zindzi Rocque Drayton, shares the purpose behind her documentary.

“Natural hair is defined as Afro-textured hair that isn’t chemically straightened,”  she writes on the video’s YouTube page. “In our society, and throughout the world, straight hair is so normalized that a large number of black women chemically straighten their Afro texture. Touching on topics from rocking an Afro in the workplace, to the legacy of slavery, I find out the pressures and joys of women who have embraced their ‘natural hair.’”

The video addresses the sigmas of black natural hair in the workplace, particularly how having Afro hair can narrow job opportunities, or how some women find themselves having to explain the culture of their hair to white co-workers.

[Below: Watch these young women navigate their black beauty and culture]