Earlier this month, a former South Fulton police officer filed suit against that city, saying his superiors had forced him to choose between his job and the dreadlocks he had grown for 20 years.
According to a report by my colleague Rosie Manins, the lawsuit contends that Milton Myrie should have been able to keep his locs on religious grounds because he is Rastafarian. But, he alleges, police department officials never told him that. They misled him when they told him he had to cut his hair to serve on the police force, he says. It wasn’t until two years later that he found out from the city’s human resources staff that he could have applied for an exception.
Credit: Milton Myrie
Credit: Milton Myrie
Myrie resigned from his job, found another one, and has accused the city of violating the federal Civil Rights Act and its own CROWN Act, a local version of the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair laws designed to protect workers who express their culture through their hair.
The courts will determine if Myrie’s case has merit or not. But we already know hair bias is nothing new.
Since Africans were first enslaved in America, society has been telling us that the natural hair of Black people is wild and unattractive. In this Eurocentric country, people of color have lost out on jobs, been punished at schools and viewed with suspicion because of their coils, curls, twists, braids and locs.
Black people aren’t the only ones who have suffered discrimination because of their hair. A friend of mine who is white and Jewish said when she was younger, in an effort to fit in with peers, she went to a Black hair salon to straighten her hair with chemical relaxers that are now the subject of health-related lawsuits.
In the 1960s, the long hair of American youth was associated with counterculture and can still draw a glare in some circles today.
But studies have found that it’s African American women who bear the brunt of hair biases.
Back in the 1700s, Black women in Louisiana were forced by law to wear head scarves at all times to conceal their hair. That legacy has continued.
Dove’s 2019 CROWN research study found that 80% of Black women said they feel they need to change their hair from its natural state to fit in at the office. Black women who wear their hair natural may be perceived as making a statement by not conforming to society’s straight-hair standard.
We should all have the right to wear our hair however we choose. Employers shouldn’t weigh in on hairstyles, unless there are health or safety concerns. That said, I’m also aware that wearing certain hairstyles will sometimes bring consequences. Even as states and cities move forward with legislation addressing hair bias, society does not yet have a mindset that embraces all hair textures, colors and lengths.
I stopped chemically straightening my hair in 1999, and I can assure you, I wasn’t making a statement. I was tired of paying hundreds of dollars for chemical burns, scarring alopecia and lifeless hair.
Once, after my natural hair had reached full capacity, I was strolling down the street in New York when a man told me he loved my hair and my “Erykah Baduism.” I’m not a singer. I’m not vegan. But something about my hair signaled to this man that I held a similar worldview as the neo-soul artist.
Black people know too well the assumptions made about us because of our hair.
More than 40 years ago, the issue of hair discrimination landed in federal court. In the 1970s, a Black woman was denied a promotion because her supervisor said she could not represent the company while wearing her hair in an afro. Federal courts determined the woman was entitled to wear an afro under the Civil Rights Act.
But other hairstyles commonly worn by Black people — dreadlocks, braids, bantu knots — aren’t protected, unless worn for religious reasons. If it’s a hairstyle — as opposed to hair texture, which is the way it grows out of your head — then requiring a person to change it isn’t necessarily considered hair discrimination.
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
The problem is, the standards used to judge whether a hairstyle is acceptable — whether it’s “traditional” or “professional” or a person appears “cleanly groomed” (common words used in school or workplace dress codes) — are Eurocentric.
In some states that have a CROWN Act, the language is vague. A Texas school that has suspended at least three students since 2020 for wearing dreadlocks recently asked the court to clarify whether the CROWN Act law “prohibits grooming policies addressing the length of a male student’s hair.”
I don’t expect non-Black people to understand the history or intricacies of Black hair, and I trust that some of those people don’t have the desire to discriminate against others. This is why we need CROWN Act legislation that is comprehensive in addressing areas of culture that have long been left to interpretation.
Currently, 24 states have versions of the CROWN Act and at least 40 cities nationwide. Georgia is among the states that do not have a CROWN Act.
At the federal level, a bill stalled in the senate and has not been introduced in the current legislative session.
A federal CROWN Act could give all Americans the legislative support to wear their hair in the way they want, without worry about missed opportunities or discrimination.
Whether we can give ourselves that freedom, by wearing our hair in styles that express our own standards of beauty, is then up to us.
Read more on the Real Life blog (www.ajc.com/opinion/real-life-blog/) and find Nedra on Facebook (www.facebook.com/AJCRealLifeColumn) and Twitter (@nrhoneajc) or email her at nedra.rhone@ajc.com.
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