Black women in Puerto Rico suffer painful racism against natural hair. Will new law change things?
When Cynthia Collazo Pacheco was a 5-year-old girl growing up in Puerto Rico, she begged for a perm. After being called names like “monkey” in school, she’d come to think of her natural Afro-textured hair as a problem. But even a perm didn’t fully resolve the hate. “I would receive a lot of abuse from my classmates and comments about ‘smells like burnt hair,’ my hair, being called ‘dry,’” Collazo Pacheco told theGrio. “I hated my hair because I didn’t even know how […]