1st Mrs. New Jersey With ‘Locs’ Fights To Change Beauty Standards

ESSEX COUNTY, NJ — When TaNisha Fordham learned she was the first Mrs. New Jersey United States winner with “locs” in her hair, she was shocked. But now, the arts teacher and activist is trying to use her recent pageant win to raise awareness about the “negative and misinformed images” popular culture has about beauty.

Fordham – who lives in Bloomfield and teaches theater and film at Newark Collegiate Academy in Newark – captured the Mrs. New Jersey United States title last month. In doing so, she broke ground for the pageant, which is a great honor, but is also something that raises a lot of questions about how American society judges beauty in the first place, Fordham told Patch.

“I don't know how I feel about being the first winner with sisterlocks,” Fordham said, referring to a technique that uses a tool to interlock small sections of hair. “My blackness and hair and frame seem to be more of a thing to other people than it is to me.”

But if someone else can look at Fordham and find his or herself in the kinks of her hair or curves of her frame and feel better about their own looks, she knows that she’s doing “God’s work,” the educator said.

This isn’t to say that Fordham is thrilled with how her hair seems to have stolen the spotlight from her pageant victory and diverse artistic efforts, which include working on the Oscar-nominated “My Nephew Emmett” and the film, “Go Black Boy Fly.”

“I hate that I have to feel like my hair is the big statement and not how passionate I am about my students, or how dope my marriage (of 10 years) is with my husband, or my Oscar nomination, or my residency with Rutgers… all of these are amazing blessings to me,” Fordham said. “But my hair has stolen the narrative.”

Fordham is trying to turn the lemons into lemonade, however, as she prepares for future pageants.

“The standards of beauty – the conventional standards of beauty – are still alive and well,” Fordham said. “But inner beauty has always and will always steal every show… it's a law of the land. So, even as I prepare for nationals and I have all kinds of opinions from all kinds of people about what I should do concerning my weight, and hair and attire – and I appreciate all of the feedback – I’m going to spend most of my time getting my head, spirit and heart in a place that I am best ready to shine and serve.”

Part of that effort is speaking out against the negative perceptions of beauty that people absorb from watching the shows and movies they love, she said.

“I find that as a culture so many of us are informed by the images and ‘truths’ that we see on television and in film,” Fordham said. “But many of those ‘truths’ are only part-truths at best.”

“I’m a black girl - my blackness and my ‘girlness’ are two things that you can see with the naked eye,” Fordham continued. “But you can’t see my love for Jesus with the bare eye, you can’t see my master's degree, you can’t see my love for hiking and the outdoors. As a matter of fact, most of the things that are most important to me, you wouldn't be able to see those things by looking at me with the naked eye.”

Fordham’s quest to change beauty standards is encapsulated in a new documentary she’s been working on called “Queen,” which confronts the idea of minority women in pageantry, particularly against the backdrop of what she called “Trump's America.”

“I started shooting this documentary after sitting in a room one day as a group of people talked about (without any regard for my being there) black women being loud, angry, ignorant, uneducated, overly sexual, materialistic and “unchurched,” said Fordham, who has a strong Christian upbringing.

“I wasn't angered by this conversation… I was totally crushed and saddened,” Fordham recalled. “These people must've never met my grandmother or mother; they couldn't have possibly known my college professors, and worse they had disregarded their experiences with me, which were completely contrary to the ‘truth’ they had accepted.”

These misinformed perspectives are widespread, and that’s why Fordham believes in a simple truth: people should create “honest art” and invent their own imagery systems.

“It’s important that we as a national community and as individuals in a national community take it upon ourselves to investigate the images presented to us by meeting people, and building relationships with people so that our entire perspective about someone or some group isn't only based from what we see in a movie,” she said.

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