In 2010, Chastity Jones eagerly accepted a job offer from Catastrophe Management Solutions as a customer service representative. The offer, however, came with one catch—she had to cut off her locs. Jones refused, and the company rescinded its job offer. The company’s hiring manager reportedly told Jones, “They tend to get mess
y.” The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed a suit on Jone's behalf in 2013 and lost. In 2016, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court’s ruling and dismissed the case.
Chastity’s case was not isolated, she and many other Black workers and students have been subject to this kind of discrimination for over 40 years now.
So how did we get here?
African hair texture is so versatile. It lends itself to an array of styles. Therefore, because the hair can do so much, a strong and lively hair culture emerged. Not only was it a form of expression through the overall appearance but it also acted as a visual language, the same way Ichimoku would be used in Japan. Many historians state that “a lot of early western observers were struck by the diversity and creativity of the hairstyles'' therefore recognizing its significance to the black community. This is believed to be the catalyst for the shaving of heads of all Africans during the beginning of the slave trade, utilizing this as the first step to stripping black people of their culture. Moreover, many slave masters used black hair as a justification for slavery. “African people were not seen as fully human.”One of how this idea was advanced was that, unlike European people, Africans didn’t even have hair – they had wool, like livestock. Later, after slavery was abolished, Tignon laws in America were introduced, which essentially required black women to wear tignon scarves over their curls to signify that they were apart of the slave class, whether they were free or not. This narrative of African textured hair being inferior, inadequate, and associated with non-humanity transcends centuries and eventually led to the evolution of many hair relaxing methods.
The end of the 19th century brought the invention of the hot comb, which was essentially a comb that was used to straighten kinky hair. Madam C.J. Walker, a black woman, popularized the comb, and “by the mid-1920s, straight hair had become the preferred texture to signal middle-class status.” As a result, Walker became the first female African American millionaire. Although some historians have applauded Walker’s business acumen, others have looked down upon her for perpetuating the idea that straight hair leads to social and economic advancement. For better or worse, she offered black women an avenue for increased societal acceptance in an era when songs mocked the hair texture of African Americans, "comparing it to wool and often describing it as nappy".
Where are we at now?
Though there are many laws such as the CROWN Act that have been passed (states that it is against the law to discriminate against hair texture as it is a form of racism), there are many existing and detrimental biases towards African textured hair. In western culture among our generation (Millennial's and Generation Z), this bias is translated through a more diluted lens of a hierarchy of types of curly hair. Think of it like this;
In the "hierarchy of hair types", which comes from a western beauty standard, the most Afro-textured hair is the most reviled. The looser curl of many people with mixed ancestry is perceived as the beauty standard of black hair and is more comparable to the type of curly hair that some white people have.
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