Bravo’s reboot of The Real Housewives of New York has brought the diversity to the show that we all needed, because what’s a show about New York without highlighting the experiences of Black women?
Well, The Root has an exclusive clip for you about one lady that you might not have known is also Black in the cast. Nope, it’s not Sai de Silva, the Afro-Latina blogger from Brooklyn, or the Somali model Ubahh Hassan. It’s Brynn Whitfield, the flirty girl whose tagline is “I love to laugh, but make me mad and I’ll date your dad.”
In the upcoming episode of RHONY, Whitfield brings the cameras into one of the most universally loved Black spaces of all time: the hair salon. Here, she reveals that she is actually a biracial woman and talks about her natural hair journey.
The youngest of the RHONY housewives—even though she’s not married—was raised by her white grandmother in Indiana. Her mother is white and her father is Black, but he was not in the picture growing up, leaving the job of her hair—which she compared to Rudy Huxtable’s when she wore it down and it poofed up—to her grandmother, saying, “My poor grandma didn’t know how to figure it out. I would go to school and the kids would make fun of me because I went to an all-white school in Indiana.”
Luckily, her grandmother worked as a unit secretary for a hospital and one of her best friends was a Black woman who told Brynn’s grandma about her hair salon called Bradley’s. There, Whitfield would spend all day on the weekend getting her reddish afro relaxed, which became her routine for a decade.
On social media, you have to dig to find information about Whitfield’s racial makeup, as there are only a couple of photos sprinkled in the timeline of her natural hair. In the comments, she’ll get asked to rock her afro, but she responds that she’s not quite ready to do so, crediting her damage from years of relaxers to prolonging her natural hair journey.
As the conversation is rolling in the scene, the housewife sits in the styling chair at Nadia Vassell Salon, a Black hair care salon in SoHo, New York. Vassel, who is detangling the half-natural, half-chemically trained hair. Vassell chimes into the conversation saying, “The Black hair salon is a community.” Maybe being with two other Black women on RHONY, she’ll feel more confident to lean into her Blackness, and maybe even show off that beautiful ‘fro!