Eva Mckend Wikipedia, Bio, Parents, Education, Wiki, Photos
Eva Mckend Wikipedia, Bio, Parents, Education, Wiki, Photos – Eva McKend, a WCAX-TV anchor, sported wavy chestnut-coloured hair for two years. This past January 13, when she gave the 11 p.m. newscast, her hair was a tangle of unruly dark brown curls.
On the WCAX website, someone questioned, “What happened to Eva’s hair?” Another spectator remarked to McKend that she appeared to have been rolling in hay backstage. Many people commented on her beauty in emails and Facebook posts.
Female broadcast journalists in particular are used to getting unsolicited fashion advice from complete strangers. However, McKend, who is the only black television anchor in Vermont, takes exception to comments made about her hair.
McKend is an anomaly already. She is a lady of colour who resides in a largely white state and works in an undiversified field. According to the Radio Television Digital News Association, 23 per cent of the employees in television newsrooms countrywide in 2016 were persons of colour.
Additionally, there is a history of black female reporters receiving criticism for their hairstyles. Despite the editors’ requests for her to wear a wig, Melba Tolliver, a New York TV reporter, reported the wedding of Richard Nixon’s daughter in 1971 wearing a short Afro.
She was removed during the editing process. In 2012, a local TV station meteorologist in Louisiana named Rhonda Lee was dismissed for her response to a Facebook post that had criticised her Afro. Black TV hosts still don’t frequently display their natural hairstyles.
McKend’s gesture in such situation is more than just a fashion decision. Her revelation counts as a cultural statement, despite the fact that she claims the choice to wear a wig then remove it was a personal one. A weave can cost up to $800.
We have this standard in the professional world, and I’m going against it. I’m changing things, McKend admitted. Being the lone black person at any of the three stations in the state comes with a unique set of blessings and burdens.
McKend, a bubbly 27-year-old, has already broadened the editorial scope of WCAX. She has covered stories involving the state’s first hijab-clad cadet from Norwich University, alleged racial profiling by the Bennington police, and one of the state’s first farms run by African Americans. She’s also developed a reputation for pressing political leaders with difficult questions. She is “fearless,” according to her supervisor, executive producer Roger Garrity of WCAX.
The Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity’s executive director, Curtiss Reed Jr., summed up McKend’s strategy thus: “If people are going to evaluate her by her hair, they have utterly missed out on her journalistic excellence. She has a keen sense of news, especially stories that affect communities of colour in the state.
Culturally speaking, Vermont is much far from McKend’s upbringing in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. When she was a young girl, her sales-working mother and her Guyana-born father, a retired carpenter, divorced. McKend remained close to her father despite living with her mother.
She received a full scholarship to attend the exclusive Birch Wathen Lenox School from kindergarten to grade 12. McKend pestered her peers in high school to take part in regular dialogues about diversity.
“I distributed flyers across the school. I would make an effort to talk to white children at lunch by saying, “Listen, you really got to go to this thing, man.” People would roll their eyes when they saw me coming, she recalled. But eventually some youngsters started to show up.
McKend, a self-described “social butterfly” who was chosen to lead the student council her senior year, didn’t always feel comfortable at school. I really had a lot of self-esteem issues being a black lady in that white environment, McKend said. A white boy who she asked to the prom stated he would get back to her. She said, “He never did.”
Also, Read