Recently, there was a great deal of social media outcry when a protective-style-policing Karen decided it was her duty to remind black women of our “natural African Black beauty” and encouraged us to stop “spending so much money on their hair to look white”. To Karen, we say mind the business that pays you, ma’am.
What is so wonderful about black hair is its versatility and black people’s tremendous ability to transform it into complex styles and looks; like Mystique armed with a detangling brush and some gel instead of mutant skin.
What Karen is naive to (or perhaps deliberately blind to) is the years of whitewashing and pressure to assimilate forced upon black people.
After centuries of being told our hair must be “straight” and “well-kept” in order to be professional, we have exposed the true root of the issue. Dress codes and hygiene standards created by white America impose a standard upon black and brown people which frowns upon and even criminalizes Afro-centric hairstyles.
When was the last time a white child was suspended from school for wearing braids? Not as often as young black girls who are “1.5 times more likely to be sent home because of their hair” according to the CROWN coalition.
When was the last time a white woman lost her job because her employer didn’t “like” the hair that grew directly out of her scalp? Just last year, after facing criticism for her natural hair, a former news anchor in Jackson, Mississippi was fired from her local news station. And this isn’t just a one-off instance. 80% of black women reported, “I have to change my hair from its natural state to fit in at the office.”
On top of that, black people have to work against inherently racist algorithms that label black hairstyles as “unprofessional”.
And if that isn’t enough, we have to work against the constant spread of information like “black hair is dirty” “black hair smells bad” “black people don’t wash their hair enough” creating the subconscious bias that black hair is therefor unhygienic.
That’s why organizations like the CROWN coalition are so important. The CROWN coalition created the CROWN act to end hair discrimination and squash misinformation like this exactly where it starts.
The CROWN act aims to make it illegal to discriminate against a person in the workplace or in schools because of their natural or protective hairstyle.
The C.R.O.W.N. (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act has been enacted in seven locations: California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, Colorado, and Washington. Their goal is to enact the CROWN act in all fifty states; to support this goal; you can sign the petition.
