Standing Up for Our Crowns: Why I'm Standing With Kris Mayes

Standing Up for Our Crowns: Why I'm Standing With Kris Mayes

By Chrystal Allen-O'Jon, MBA

For generations, Black women have been told that our hair, just as it grows from our heads, was something to be fixed. Many of us sat in a kitchen chair or a salon seat as young girls while a relaxer was combed through our hair. We felt the burn and called it beauty. We trusted the names on the box. We trusted that someone, somewhere, had made sure those products were safe.

That trust is exactly why the lawsuit Attorney General Kris Mayes filed this September matters so much to me and to so many women I know.

On September 10, Arizona became the first state in the nation to sue over alleged cancer risks tied to chemical hair relaxers. The Attorney General's office filed a consumer fraud lawsuit against L'Oréal and its SoftSheen brand, the makers of products like Dark and Lovely and Optimum. The suit alleges the company sold and marketed these relaxers, primarily to Black women and even to children, without warning customers about research linking the products to uterine and ovarian cancer. The state is asking for penalties, restitution for consumers, and a court order requiring a warning on the label if the products continue to be sold.

Think about what that means. A warning label. That is all so many of our mothers, aunties, and daughters needed to make an informed choice. Instead, according to the lawsuit, a company leaned on decades of discriminatory beauty standards placed on people of African descent and, in the Attorney General's words, "put profits over the safety of women and children."

Thousands of women and families have already filed their own lawsuits against L'Oréal, Revlon, and other relaxer manufacturers. Those women have been carrying this fight one case at a time, often while carrying a diagnosis too. What makes Arizona's action different is that our state's chief legal officer stepped in on behalf of all of us. She didn't wait for someone else to go first. She went first.

I want to be clear and fair: this case is still in the courts, and the companies deny that their products cause cancer. That is exactly why it needed to be filed. Questions this serious about the health of women deserve to be answered in a courtroom, under oath, with the evidence on the table, not buried in a marketing budget.

I have spent more than 30 years in community service, and I have learned that leadership is not measured by what someone says at a podium. It is measured by who they are willing to stand up to, and on whose behalf. Taking on one of the largest cosmetics companies in the world on behalf of Black women is not the easy path. It is the right one.

That is why I am supporting Kris Mayes, and why I am asking my neighbors across Maricopa and Pinal County, and throughout Arizona, to give her another term as our Attorney General. This fight is just beginning, and I want the person who started it to be there to finish it.

To every woman who has ever sat in that chair and felt the burn: you were not wrong to trust. You were owed the truth. Someone in our state government finally said so out loud.