Black Hair Discrimination Timeline

A multimodal explication on “History of Black Hair, Implicit Bias, and Workplace Grooming Standards” by Crystal Powells (2018) in the form of a timeline presentation.

Explanation 

For Assignment 2, a multimodal explication, I have chosen the journal article “Bias, Employment Discrimination, and Black Women’s Hair: Another Way Forward” by Crystal Powell, a Victim Rights Attorney from BYU Law School who specializes in natural hair victims’ civil rights. I chose this article because it relates to my prior passion for the Black Hair Movement, and I wanted to learn more about the history of hair discrimination in America. This article matched the criteria for what I was looking for because it shares a historical analysis on hair discrimination in the U.S. in Section 2 of the article which gives context onto why grooming policies in the workplace reflect racial stereotypes that originated from white supremacy. Most of these points were made in section 2, “History of Black hair, Implicit Bias, and Workplace Grooming Standards”, of the article so I only focus on communicating the main points from that specific section.  

To do so I decided to communicate the main points through a timeline presentation to organize the content from the article in chronological order. I thought this would be the best at making the information more understandable to the reader/viewer because timelines are easy to follow, and it fits well with the theme of history. Along with the timeline PowerPoint I created a voice over to further explain the key points because a presentation format comes with the disadvantage of having pictures as the focus point and not many words for aesthetic purposes. Therefore, a voice over and images makes the content more engaging and informative. I thought of just doing a blog post, but I favored the idea of creating something that reflected my personality and creativity. 

Voice-over Script 

Introduction 

In this PowerPoint presentation I have gathered several images to share the history of Black hair discrimination in America and how its legacy still impacts today’s policies and social ideologies. This information mainly comes from Crystal Powell’s journal article, the “Bias, Employment Discrimination, and Black Women’s Hair: Another Way Forward” (2018), but specifically from the section, “History of Black Hair, implicit Bias, and Workplace Grooming Policies” (Powell p. 937-943).  

I focus on this section of the article only because Powell, a Victim Right Attorney who specializes in natural hair rights, provides a detailed historical analysis on the origins of hair bias and racial stereotyping.  

Contents 

With that being said I present to you a timeline that will mainly summary these 6 eras; BCE, the 1700s, the 1800s, the early 1900s, the early 2000s, and then closer to the present day. I highlight these points of time only because they closely reflect the periods Powell mentions in her analysis.  

Timeline 

BCE: Biblical 

Powell opens the section with the assertion that Women’s connection to hair started as a spiritual connection because many religious concepts and traditions that date back to BCE or BC mention the significance of hair for a Woman in religious text. For instance, Powell presents the bible verse: 

But that if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering. (Corinthians 11:15) 

Another example of hair being significant in other religions and cultures Powell mentions is Muslim women practices and African traditions. Muslims consider hair an essential feature of a women’s identity and covering it is an act of modesty (Qur’an: An-Nur: 31). In ancient African traditions hair has also played a vital role in women’s beauty, wealth, marital status, religion, and rank. According to Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, “Hair Story: Untangling the roots of Black Hair in America”, the way hair was worn fore told the geological origin of a woman because each clan had its own unique hairstyle.  

1700s: 400 years of slavery 

 Powell asserts that “the explicit inferiority towards Black hair was one of the many traces of slavery, it characterized a large part of the denigration and dehumanization of Black people under slavery. For staters, transatlantic slavery changed the meaning of hair for enslaved Africans because shaving their heads was “the first step the Europeans took to erase the slave’s culture” (Byrd & Tharps, 10-11) and alter Africans’ relationship to their hair. Acts like this during slavery created the negative stigmas towards Black hair, such as, the relation to Black hair was to have “slave hair” (White, 45). The stereotypes around Black hair created during slavery transformed into becoming social status identifiers in the 1800s. Hair was considered to be a telling feature of negro status, more than the color of the skin (Byrd & Tharps). 

1800s: Jim Crow 

During this time “the feminine beauty ideal was characterized as requiring ‘long straight hair, with fine features,” (Byrd & Tharps). As a result mixed women were treated different than Black women which revealed the benefits of having a hair texture that more closely aligned and easily shaped to the hairstyles worn by White women. For these reasons, Black women sought to straighten and “contort their hair to approximate White women’s hair” (Powell, 941), in order to access better opportunities. 

1900s: The quest for “Good Hair” 

Straightening hair which meant getting rid of “nappy” hair became a necessity for survival in American economy for Black women. Conforming to “white hairstyles” was a way Black women could access better opportunities that was reserved for white people only. Due to these circumstances, Powell concludes that “the quest for ‘good hair’ has been so visceral that today it is a multi-billion-dollar industry” (Powell, 943). Profiting off Black women’s fear of being alienated for fitting negative stigmas towards texturized hair set off in the twentieth century when the first female millionaire, Madam C. J. Walker made a fortune from inventing products designed to straighten the texture of Black hair. “Products were marketed on a philosophy of ‘cleanliness and loveliness’, which in turn seemed to emphasize the underlying mirror view that Blacks were unclean and unkempt” (Byrd & Tharps).  

2000s: Grooming Policies 

The rejection of Black textured hairstyles is seen in grooming policies explicitly banning braids, locks, and unusual hairstyles, or in policies that seem generic by banning unkempt, uncleans, or extreme hairstyles. For years federal courts have consistently ruled that when an employer chooses to hire or fire a Black woman for wearing her hair in a braid, twist, plait, cornrow, lock, or blonde, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act — meant to protect individuals against employment discrimination on the basis of race—does not apply (Powell, 934). In the article, Powell mainly refers to the 2016 decision in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) v. Catastrophe Management Solutions (CMS) as an example of such cases. In that case, EEOC sued CMS, a Mobile catastrophic insurance claims company, on Chastity C. Jones behalf, alleging that CMS had engaged in race discrimination which is in violation of Title VII when they revoked their offer of employment because Ms. Jones refused to comply with their race-neutral grooming policy which required cutting off her dreadlocks. The court’s ruling reinforced institution’s ability to micromanage Black women, specifically in the workplace by deeming it legally and socially acceptable for grooming policies to disproportionally impact Black women.  

This is exactly what Powell highlights to be the main problem with workplace grooming standards. Is that their “arbitrariness tends to be rooted in gender and racial stereotypes that put minority women at a disadvantage” (Powell, 943). Disadvantages such as lower chances of being hired, higher chances of being fired, and even adopting negative internalization towards texturized hair. A psychological impact Powell mentions is Black women’s “hair dilemma”, a burden to negotiate how to present their racial identity considering that American culture views straight, long, fine hair as the norm and as the ideal of women, while tightly coiled hair is categorized as unacceptable, unprofessional, deviant, and too political (Caldwell, 396). 

Present Day: CROWN Act 

For centuries Black women have been forcing their hair into the dominant White culture, so when they stop, it is seen as unusual and extreme to others who are not Black. “While society may have incorporated its longstanding bias against Black hair as almost normal, it is the law that is expected to act as a check against societal bias and make opportunities, particularly in employment, equal” (Powell, 946). Since Title VII has failed to achieve that mandate for Black women the 2019 CROWN Act, which stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair, was much needed. Although the CROWN Act is still being debated over on the federal level.  

References 

Ayana D. Byrd & Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America 2 (2001).  

“Mobile Catastrophic Insurance Claims Company Sued by EEOC for Race Discrimination over Hair Policy.” US EEOC, 30 Sept. 2013, www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/mobile-catastrophic-insurance-claims-company-sued-eeoc-race-discrimination-over-hair. 

Paulette M. Caldwell, A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender, 1991 DUKE L.J. 365, 396 (1991)  

Powell, Crystal. “Bias, Employment Discrimination, and Black Women’s Hair: Another Way Forward.” Brigham Young University Law Review 2018.4 (2019): 933-68. ProQuest. Web. 16 Nov. 2023. 

1 Corinthians 11:15 

Qur’an: An-Nur: 31. “Surah An-Nur – 1-64.” Quran.Com, quran.com/an-nur. Accessed 17 Nov. 2023. 

. Rosette & Dumas, supra note 9, at 407–08; see Daniel S. Hamermesh & Jeff E. Biddle, Beauty and the Labor Market, 84 AM. ECON. REV. 1174, 1183 (1994)