Last year, I remember scrolling through my Facebook feed and coming across an article about two black students being suspended for their hair. I remember the way my heart sank to hear the all too familiar rejection we face in regards to being in our natural state. From being mocked for “big lips” and “wide noses” all throughout our history, to the present day lack of acceptance of thick, kinky hair types and our protective hairstyles commonly lumped together under the term “weave.”

I decided to return to natural for the first time since I was four a few months before I stumbled across the article and it made me look in the mirror at what I'd become proud of and just think...

What would I do if I was kicked out of school for my hair? As a child? My three beautiful nieces all have little puffs in their hair, what would they think of themselves if their teachers told them how they were born is not acceptable enough for class?

Stories like that became more prevalent. At one point it seemed like every day I saw discriminatory against black hair in school on the news. That is when I realized how badly we are failing our black youth.

Our society has only recently been so open in arms to black representation in the media, so growing up we didn't have a lot of that. Almost all of my dolls were white and the celebrities that were always on the TV or in commercials or ads always seemed to be white. On my little kid shows, aside from a few, the “popular” girls always seemed to look the same and the sassy loud sidekick did too. This was what I was used to seeing, so this was my normalized view on race.

I told my mom one day that I wanted to be white and she was shocked. She asked me why and I remember saying “because they're prettier."

That's what I had been taught already purely through microaggressions and I was no older than six. I would later grow to experience blatant racism that took a huge toll on my self-esteem. I, like so many other black youths, was conditioned to believe that somehow a lighter complexion was synonymous to a more beautiful completion. I would rub lemon juice on my face trying to lighten up my dark brown skin. When I got to college and met many other black children who grew up in predominantly white areas like I did, they shared very similar experiences with me. It's a failure to our black children to let them get through their whole youth thinking they are not enough.

We set the bar of “helping the situation” too low. We have told ourselves that not adding to the fire somehow aids in extinguishing it. We know already that anti-blackness is very prevalent in our country. Just in the time as recently as your grandparents' youth, we didn't even allow black Americans to sit within a close proximity of white ones. It's no surprise that prejudice and racism has not gone away. It's our job to protect our youth from this.

Prepare them for what they will face by reinforcing every day that the richness in their melanin is what makes them beautiful.

Teach them how to manage their natural hair and grow it to lengths we're told aren't possible.

Remind them that they're magic and nothing can take that away.

We come from kings and queens but let our children walk around feeling like they're peasants.

The recent Natural Movement has been promoting love and acceptance for natural hair, with festivals like Afro Punk making headlines and natural gurus taking over the internet, our hair has never had such open arms to fall into. The movement was a pivotal reason for my decision to cut my hair. I was tired of the chemicals and the burns, I wanted my hair to flow freely like it was intended to.

Now I share this with the little black children in my life. I give my nieces head wraps and Bantu knots and twist outs. They love when I play with their hair. They should never feel like it's a burden or a crime and hopefully, they never will. Our job now is to make a pathway for them so that they may prosper without that insecurity. We need to send the message that yes, our hair is GORGEOUS. It's amazing. It defies gravity. It is a lot of different things, but one thing it's not is a distraction.

And we are failing our children if we are teaching them that it is.