“The white women in the group really needed the information and guidance of the people of color who were leading the group, but those people were exhausted by the white people”
Photo: Sean De Burca/Getty Images When the call came asking if we’d take another foster daughter, I said yes right away. My partner and I had just finished fostering her cousin, another baby girl, who was reunified with her mom after nine months. A week later our former foster daughter’s mom asked if we might foster her niece, a new baby girl who was also going into foster care. We didn’t ask about her race, and I can’t remember now if we had any guesses or assumptions about what it would be.
The group was heavy on hair care, but true to its name there was, indeed, lots more. The admins, who were women of color, patiently taught more than 6,000 members not to dress our kids in clothes with monkeys, alligators, raccoons, or watermelons on them, long before H&M got in trouble for it.
Renita MarFe was one of the original admins of Not Just Hair, which was created in 2014. From the start, she recommended products, gave out homemade styling cream recipes, and suggested styles that would be appropriate for hair of different textures and lengths. MarFe, who has two adult children, got involved in the transracial adoption community when her longtime white friends became foster parents and fostered a black child.
Over the next nearly three years, there would be many more conversations like this in Not Just Hair. As the members grew into the thousands, it became a lively place with several new threads every day, each gathering dozens and sometimes hundreds of comments. There were tutorials, product reviews and demos, and recommendations for everything from a braider in Belgium, Pittsburgh, or Utah, to black dermatologists, and barrettes that won’t fall out.
Renita MarFe and another former admin, Nikki Pride, identified these pile-ons as some of the worst things about a group they loved. MarFe said, “If someone came in unknowing or hadn’t learned yet, sometimes they would get piled up on. We ran away a few people that way.” Pride noted, “You had those who felt the need to prove their ‘wokeness,’ and it ended up being an exercise of ‘I’m the best ally.
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