Tuesday, October 19, 2010

"I Love My Hair!"


From NPR:
A little Muppet girl has started a sensation. The unnamed puppet with an afro sings a love song to her hair.

"I Love My Hair" debuted on the Oct. 4 episode of Sesame Street. It was posted on the show's YouTube page — and then women began posting the video on their Facebook pages.

African-American bloggers wrote that it brought them to tears because of the message it sends to young black girls.

Joey Mazzarino, the head writer of Sesame Street, is also a Muppeteer who wrote the song for his daughter. Mazzarino is Italian. He and his wife adopted their 5-year-old daughter, Segi, from Ethiopia when she was a year old.

Mazzarino says he wrote the song after noticing his daughter playing with dolls.

"She wanted to have long blond hair and straight hair, and she wanted to be able to bounce it around," he tells NPR's Melissa Block.

Mazzarino says he began to get worried, but he thought it was only a problem that white parents of African-American children have. Then he realized the problem was much larger.

In writing the song, he wanted to say in song what he says to his daughter: "Your hair is great. You can put it in ponytails. You can put it in cornrows. I wish I had hair like you."

3 comments:

Katie said...

This is fantastic! I haven't seen this yet. Thanks for sharing it. I'm going to pass it along.

Steph said...

I saw this story on NPR. I can't wait to watch it when I get home. How wonderful! I especially love that it was made by a dad.

Anonymous said...

But why does it take a white dad (I'm assuming given that the info say's he's Italian) to get the world to agree that black hair is beautiful ... why haven't we listened to black parents say the same thing?