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Out of all the commentary surrounding last night’s vice presidential debate, the only opportunity there will be to see Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence have discourse about the topics affecting Americans, actor Lakeith Stanfield chose to point out an issue he had with Harris’s hair. I kid you not.
In a now deleted Instagram post, he shared a screenshot from the debate of Harris and Pence and captioned it, “I don’t like her hair, but other than that this is better than the last one but still sad.”
It seemed comments were initially allowed on the post, but they were eventually turned off because people called him out for using his platform to speak on the looks of a Black woman. He tried to double down on his comments though, telling people, “You won’t pressure me into speaking how YOU think I should speak” and “Just because she’s a woman doesn’t mean i have to like her hair wtf.” He also reposted an old video of him speaking on his love of Black women, but inevitably, he deleted the offending post altogether on Thursday morning.
While most people found his comments to be incredibly disrespectful, others said he was just joking and that people were taking his statements too seriously. Personally, I just saw them as useless, and to me, that’s a problem.
Here we have the first Black woman to be in the running for vice president. She performed well, despite the traps set before her by a question-dodging, truth-twisting Pence. She’s smart, educated, experienced and even if you aren’t a big fan, she could do a much better job than her counterpart, whose coronavirus task force has been as trash as the overall response to COVID-19 by the Trump administration. With all that is at stake in this upcoming election, this is not the time to distract. This is not the time for bored celebrities to point out things that will do nothing but foster negative conversations about her appearance as opposed to the issues that matter and her ability to handle them.
But most importantly, as someone who has stood up for Black women in the past, it was just not smart for Stanfield to use his platform, as pointed out, to put attention on her hair. Perhaps he meant that he didn’t like that she was wearing her hair straight as opposed to in its natural state, but this is the same hair she’s had for quite some time now and that she’s not about to change just because a man she doesn’t know isn’t fond of it. And no, this is not new. Black people have picked apart the hair of public figures, even their children, for years now. It wasn’t okay then, and it’s not okay now.
We don’t all have to like everything just because people tell us we should. Hell, I had my own thoughts about Pence’s makeup but I’m not about to share them. And I know people on social media discuss, in jest, everything they see from top to bottom during important events. Still, Stanfield knows better. Again, as someone who has attempted to uplift the beauty of Black women in the past, he knows how sensitive conversations about Black women’s looks and hair can be. Why he wouldn’t be more careful, I can’t put my finger on. But the backlash is a prime example of why men must stop worrying about what Black women do with their hair. You shouldn’t care if we wear weaves, if we wrap pressed or permed hair every night, if we constantly pull our hair back in dry ponytails or sport an afro. It will never be your business.
I don’t think all of this is worthy of Stanfield being canceled, as I see some desiring, because he has advocated for Black women on more than one occasion. I’m sure he will learn from this. If it’s not that he should use his platform of nearly one million followers to focus on the bigger picture, or to not double down on foolishness just because you want to be contrarian, then hopefully, at the least, he’ll learn to stay out of women’s business.
Check out all the things people had to say about his comments on Twitter by hitting the flip.
