‘The Hair Tales’ Untangles Black Hair’s Role In Female Identity

Oprah Winfrey told Tracee Ellis Ross that she was good at what she was doing.

As the time, Ellis Ross was having a discussion with Winfrey.

Their discussion is part of The Hair Tales, a series that takes an honest, layered look into the sometimes tangled roots of Black hair culture and the role it plays in female identity. The through line is delivered with a mix of intelligence, humor, style, joy, and justice.

Ellis Ross as an Executive Producer of The Hair Tales, as is Winfrey, along with Michaela Angela Davis. Taking viewers on a revelatory journey via the personal tales of six phenomenal women who give broader context to societal and historic themes, the series features Emmy nominee Issa Rae, Grammy nominees Chlöe Bailey and Chika, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, and black-ish star Marsai Martin.

On her work interviewing subjects for the series, Ellis Ross says, “I love hearing people’s stories. I love being an audience. love being a warm, receptive, safe space for people to tell their truth.”

She knew she was excelling in that role when, “Oprah told me I was good at it,” she says with a laugh, and explains, “In the middle of me talking to her, she said, ‘you’re really good at this,’ and I was like, ‘What now? Did that get recorded?’”

The Hair Tales is part of The Onyx Collective, an initiative by Walt DisneyDIS
Television, formed to produce projects from creators of color and other underrepresented groups.

The inspiration for the series came from Ellis Ross realizing, “I feel like so many others, I can chronicle my journey of self-acceptance through my journey with my hair.”

She adds, “My realization about myself was that I was part of a vast community who also weren’t seeing themselves, and it played into the larger story, historically, about how black people have been seen in this country and how the culture of beauty and the industry of beauty has not necessarily mirrored back the reality of who we are.”

Davis agrees with this sentiment, but adds, “Often Black women’s hair and Black women’s existence is positioned like a problem that we have to solve. There’s history, there’s memory, there’s hysteria, there’s ancestry. So, we’re getting at all of it [in the series]. And, that’s the beauty of it, when we get to tell our own stories, we get to tell them inside the complexity in which we actually live, not having to shapeshift around the narrow narratives that the culture had constructed for us.”

Speaking about how she’d like the series to resonant, Ellis Ross, says, “I hope that with Hair Tales what we do is help [people to understand and] really grasp the expansiveness of who we are. We’re using hair in this show as an onramp into our souls, to explore the largeness of our humanity. And, I hope that Hair Tales really offers a new definition of beauty, that beauty is a reflection of self, the imprint of the soul, instead of an idea that is concocted from history and systemic limitations.”

‘The Hair Tales’ is available for streaming on Hulu.