Relaxed or Naturalista

A five-year-old girl. A bottle of relaxer. A promise that will bind two best friends for the next seventeen years.Dawn loves her daughter Aria fiercely, and she is exhausted. Between a single mother’s schedule and a world that still reads natural hair as unprofessional, a relaxer feels like the only mercy she has time to offer. Her best friend sees it differently. She sees a little girl in tears at a kitchen table, and a beauty standard neither woman chose for herself.What begins as a Saturday afternoon disagreement over #TeamNaturalista versus #TeamRelaxed becomes something far bigger: a reckoning with respectability politics, inherited fear, scripture read two different ways, and the real headlines, a wrestler forced to cut his locs on a mat, a news anchor fired over braids, that make Dawn’s caution impossible to dismiss as vanity. One promise, made to spare a child pain, will quietly reshape both women’s mornings for the next seventeen years, long after the law finally catches up to the argument they had in that kitchen.Now Aria is grown, cap and gown ready, her hair entirely her own for one more day, and the question neither woman ever fully settled is still sitting between them.One conversation will make you ask yourself: is intra-racial discrimination, judgment from within our own community, any easier to forgive than the kind that comes from outside it? What would you do?Relaxed or Naturalista is Best Friends Short Reads, Volume 2.