This article presents a duoethnographic, critical arts-based research project, which began as a pre-recorded, on-demand presentation for the 2021 National Art Education Association Annual Convention. This is an edited, expanded print version of the authors' conference session examining hair as text and sites of identity/respectability politics, positionality, rites of passage, liminality, and selfhood.

Video recording featuring esteemed guest panelists, Tameka Ellington, Ph.D., Cheryl D. Holmes Miller, and Terresa Moses, M.F.A., this second installment of the 2044 series highlights the ways that working against anti-Blackness through the lens of Afrofuturism and Critical Race Theory allows for the examination and enactment of decolonizing design bias and white default. This session brings questions of Black agency, stereotyping, bias, representation, appropriation, commodification, and the dangers of pathologizing Blackness in design. Panelists discuss anti-racist practice in design education through forms of resistance and resilience.