NEW YORK — This week, the city of New York, through its Commission on Human Rights, officially banned discrimination based on hairstyle, making it one of the rare municipalities in the country to codify the link between prejudice and personal presentation.
What this means, essentially, is that employers, landlords, school principals, gym owners, club managers and other institutions and gatekeepers who engage in a persistent form of racism that renders certain judgments of how African-Americans wear their hair, will now be subject to penalties and civil damages should they harass, threaten, fire or deny admission or affiliation to anyone based on a particular set of grooming choices.
While it may defy belief that such a clarification would be needed in such a progressive part of the world at the close of the second decade of the 21st century, examples of bias expressed through rules or policies against cornrows, Afros, Bantu knots and other means of wearing hair that do not conform to European standards, in fact, abound.
Curly hair, coiled hair, black hair is a trigger, it seems, that reveals the bigotry of people who don’t understand themselves as bigoted, people who just imagine themselves as upholding “standards.”
Two years ago, for instance, a young black woman working at a Banana Republic in Westchester County was told by a white male manager that her braids were not “Banana Republic appropriate,” that they were too “unkempt” and “urban” and that he would not be able to schedule her for more shifts unless she took them out. When she told the manager that they protected her hair from becoming coarse in cold weather, he suggested she try some shea butter. Ultimately, he was let go.
More recently, state officials in New Jersey opened a civil rights investigation into the case of a black high school wrestler who was told by a referee that his locs violated competition rules. The wrestler, Andrew Johnson, resigned to getting his hair cut right before a match he would have otherwise been made to forfeit.
Along with the commission’s announcement on new enforcement guidelines, it said that in the span of just the past few months it had received many complaints of discrimination based on hairstyle. It is currently investigating seven cases, one involving someone who was fired from her job simply for wearing her natural hair down.
While this sort of discrimination is common in the retail sector, it is hardly exclusive to the sales floor. Recently, I spoke with Marissa Jackson, a deputy at the Commission on Human Rights, about her own experiences encountering disapproval of the way she put herself together during a past professional life.
Several years ago she worked as a summer associate at a prominent Wall Street law firm and routinely straightened her hair. “I went through a period of my life of wanting to fit in and straighten it,” she told me. After she graduated from Columbia Law School and studied at the London School of Economics, she came back to the firm with less of a compulsion to conform and decided to get locs.
This was hardly welcome. One partner would never talk to her or make eye contact. “There was this idea that I had tricked people and would be jeopardizing my career,'’ she told me. “'Oh, what are you doing? You should have straight hair!’ My white colleagues didn’t say this to me. It was my black colleagues who had internalized these racist ideas and were afraid of what this assertion of identity would mean.” She left the firm and went to work for a black judge.
The insidious irony here is that prestigious law firms and big corporations have made efforts to relax the workplace for decades. This usually played out in selective ways for a select group of people. Casual Fridays, which gained popularity in the 1990s, were the vehicle by which middle-age white men could more comfortably be themselves, accommodating expanding waistlines in pleated khakis and fleece vests. These were baby boomers, rebellious in their own minds, who were liberated from the suits that did not speak to who they believed they really were.
The rise of Silicon Valley startup culture gave white men — young white men in particular — even further license to express their authentic identities. When he began his career, Mark Zuckerberg could walk into any boardroom in the country wearing a hoodie, the style signature of fetal billionaires.
But how would a young black man be perceived, even today, in the same situation, styled in similar adolescent fashion and with hair that made him look like Questlove? Young black men are told to pull up their pants and look responsible if they want to earn a decent living; young white men have learned that they can rule the world looking like 15-year-olds who have been gaming for the past 36 hours.
The casual workplace is, in the end, just another manifestation of white privilege. In 1992, the city of Santa Cruz, California, with a population that was 79 percent white, passed an ordinance that made discrimination against appearance unlawful. Santa Cruz was the city of surfers and skateboarders and hackers in tattoos and piercings. Someone thought to protect them a very long time ago.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.