Yes Niece! Four-Year-Old Leila Danai Had Something To Say After Classmate Made Fun Of Her Hairstyle At School

A TikTok video of a young Black girl’s confident response after a classmate made fun of her hair has gone viral.

Four-year-old Leila Danai from Florida was telling her mom Mildred Munjanganja about her day at school on their drive home. In the video, Danai proudly stated, “Owen said he didn’t like my hair, but I said, ‘I like it!”

You can hear her mom in the background, emphatically stating “Good!” before asking for more details. “He said, ‘I don’t like that hair, it’s crazy,’” explained Danai. “And I said, ‘My mommy made it. If you don’t like it, I’ll keep it for myself.’”

“Oh, baby! I’m so proud of you,” her mom said. “You stood up for yourself. That’s what matters. What matters is that you like it — it’s your hair.”

But as Munjanganja told TODAY.com, “self-confidence begins at home.” “She’s always been very emotionally mature and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I don’t modify my language for Leila. I talk to her as if I would an adult — we just talk about age-appropriate things,” said Munjanganja. “My goal is to prepare her to navigate the world around her because I can’t always be there to protect her.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened to a young Black queen. Back in 2019, Nashville’s Promise Sawyer endured after a similar incident where she was bullied by her classmates after wearing her hair in a natural Afro style to school. “But she wasn’t going to let the criticism get her down and returned to school the next day with her ‘fro out and fluffed to the heavens, bullies be damned,” Allure reports.

Sawyer made her own video, which ended up going viral, to pump herself up, “Don’t allow anyone to steal yourself,” adding “Don’t give them that much power.”

A 2022 study by researchers from Arizona State University (ASU) found that “[l]arge numbers of Black girls reported verbal teasing or bullying because of their hair, starting in preschool or kindergarten.”

Senior author of the paper and associate professor of psychology at ASU Marisol Perez said, “These girls should not have to be resilient…We all need to do a better job celebrating natural hair – in the media, in school settings, and in the beauty industry, which financially benefits from girls and women thinking they need to alter their hair.”