The problem is summed up by a white mannequin head.
It’s the one Chloe Streit uses in her Calgary classroom.
The Grade 11 student says high school cosmetology students are not taught how to work with Black hair — aside from relaxing treatments — and are only provided with white mannequins to practise on.
She is petitioning the province to update its curriculum to be more inclusive. It had more than 3,600 signatures as of Tuesday night.
“If a Black client walked in and said, ‘I want to get my hair braided in cornrows,’ we’d have to tell them, ‘Sorry, you’ll have to find that somewhere else,'” Streit said. “That in itself is oppression.”
It’s a problem Badria Abubaker knows all too well.
She worked on the same white mannequin when she was in high school before deciding to drop the class.
“After Grade 10, I was like, ‘I can’t go back,'” Abubaker said.
“It’s discouraging. You don’t want to go back where you can’t see yourself. I can’t implement this in my life because it’s not made for me.”
Instead, Abubaker went on to make a documentary exploring the politics of Black hair and the relationship women have with their hair.
“The culture I grew up in, you call someone, you go into her basement, like your auntie, to get your hair done,” Abubaker added.
“You can’t just walk into the hair salon and be like, ‘Oh, can I get my hair cut?’ ‘No, no, we don’t do your hair.'”
She wants to see more instructors of colour in cosmetology classrooms and have students learn more about the historical context of products like relaxers.
“It was made to assimilate. The less Black you look, the more you’re closer to European,” Abubaker explained.
“So you straighten your hair and its associated with a higher status. You can see that today in the workforce. If you want to be taken seriously, you’re not going to wear your natural hair, you’re going to tuck it away, you’re going to slip it back because it’s not considered kempt.”
In Julietta Raoul’s northeast Calgary salon, there’s another white mannequin with straight auburn hair and green eyes.
Raoul supports the petition, saying there is a growing demand for stylists who can do natural hair.
“One of the overwhelming things is knowing that there are so hairstylist interns who cannot do every texture of hair,” Raoul said.
“Because there is now a growing demand for clients having natural hair, it makes it a lot more difficult to be able to find a salon and only knowing how to do straight hair limits the stylist.”
Raoul has been doing hair professionally since 2000, and while she is fully certified in Alberta, she said her best education came from studying in Atlanta, Ga.
“I was able to practise on hair that is of all different textures and actually be able to get a feel and know what are some of the differences are,” Raoul added. “The greatest variety of texture is in Afro hair. For example, my client right now has three textures in her hair.”
In a statement to Global News, the Calgary Board of Education said it’s aware of the petition and is exploring how to incorporate the suggestions into future cosmetology courses.
“As a learning organization, we have a responsibility to support our students, staff and families as we learn to confront racism and disrupt old patterns of thought and behaviour in our schools and workplaces,” the statement read.
“We know we have work to do to better understand how we can make our courses more inclusive and respectful of our students and their experiences.”
The province wouldn’t comment directly on the petition or the availability of mannequins but said it made curriculum changes last September to bring more diversity to the cosmetology classroom.
“The hairstylist provincial apprenticeship committee continues to be mindful of ethnicity, gender, religion and sexual orientation, including the natural hair movement when reviewing and maintaining training standards and evaluation products,” read a statement from the Ministry of Advanced Education.
But these women say there’s still more to be done.