Judge Milian’s Hair-raising Comments

A clip from the People’s Court, starring Judge Marilyn Milian, is currently going viral and causing a great deal of controversy. It is unclear when the episode aired on television, as Milian retired from the show during the 2022-2023 season; however, it was released on their YouTube channel a year ago.

The episode is labeled “Having a Bad Hair Day,” and it is likely that the backlash may cause a few hairs to stand up on the back of the Georgetown grad’s neck.  The clip in question is of Judge Milian telling the plaintiff, who is not pictured, “You can’t tell me when your hair is wet, it gets to 8 to 9 inches shorter.”

And oh boy, did that send the natural hair girlies into a tizzy—and rightfully so.

Far too often people with higher degrees talk (I’m talking to you medical professionals) down on Black people as if they are experts on us and we are mere novices to ourselves. Shrinkage is not some secret. Every Black woman has stories of white people asking if their hair was real or educating them on their own hair, and being extremely wrong with their explanations of us, to us.

It wasn’t just the judgment, but it was the literal judgment.

Milian was outright dismissive of something that was so foreign to her that its explanation must be wrong. Marilyn Milian is Cuban, and even though she is a white Cuban, if you have ever been to Cuba you’d know, Cuba is Black AS FUCK.

While white Cubans are notorious for their racism and desire to be treated like Anglos, it is unfathomable that she has had so little contact with Black people that this was her takeaway. She clearly is getting a blow-out herself, so why wouldn’t she assume that her curly hair being shorter would not yield similar results with even tighter curls? But when people are convinced they know more about you than you know about yourself, they don’t need logical reasoning, because they’ve abandoned it already. 

The clip going viral is not even the worst part of the episode.

The plaintiff shows a picture of her hair in “its natural state,” which she repeatedly tells the judge several times. In the picture, the woman has a great deal of hair, but it is not straightened, leading the judge to question whether her hair, specifically from the same timeframe as the picture, could also reach down her back, as previously mentioned. The plaintiff shows the judge a picture of her hair straightened, at which point the judge, who has far less hair, asks not only when the picture was taken, but if it’s the plaintiff’s real hair. She then chastises the client by asking her the same question several times, “And those aren’t the extensions you talked about?” she says, with a grin on her face that can only be attributed to feeling smarter than you actually are.

When the woman affirms that it was her real hair, the judge is still incredulous. Judge Milian rephrases the question because she doesn’t like the answer: “Okay, the picture that you have has sew-ins?” To which the plaintiff replied that there were not, she then immediately commanded the plaintiff to find a picture without sew-ins, even after the woman had explained numerous times that the picture was of her hair without sew-ins.

It felt more like Judge Milian was shocked that a Black woman could have long hair, and more specifically, down her back. 

In response to the clip, social media users have flooded her comments and are not letting up. Some TikTok users have even used the soundbite from the viral clip as they show their hair’s shrinkage, many using the hashtag #blackgirlmagic.

Black women are not the default, so that comes with a lot of explaining who we are to people hellbent on believing their own version of us. Milian is smart but not smart enough, because anyone worth their weight in knowledge would tell you, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know. Milian’s attitude was brimming with the same microaggressions which make Black women, including those with 8 to 9 inches of shrinkage, feel compelled to hide our hair.

Judge Milian has been on the bench for quite some time, and if she really paid closer attention, Black hair could educate her on length and what real growth could look like.