90s Tag

It took 28-year-old Anita Grant greater than 20 years to let anyone outside of her close family see her natural hair. The Toronto, Canada native said it was because she’d seen mainstream media tout euro-centered beauty standards that made her feel like, as a black girl, she had to cover—a notion not unusual for her neighboring sisters within the US and beyond. Black women’s hair has been some extent of critique for hundreds of years. As TIME’s Areva Martin identified, the hate reached way back to when as when the US’s parent country, Britain determined that African hair was closer in texture to sheep’s wool than human. This wasn’t lost on Grant. Growing up, she found solace in reading popular 90s...