On September 15th, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals completed a claim from a 2014 ruling that had said that racial discrimination basically had nothing to do with hairstyles. They said that racial discrimination had to do with characteristics instead. It was a 3-0 ruling that dismissed a lawsuit that was brought to the court by the Equal Employment Commission or EEC.
The EEC basically said that, "prohibition of dreadlocks in the workplace constitutes race discrimination because dreadlocks are a manner of wearing the hair that is physiologically and culturally associated with the people of African descent."
This situation has been brought to the spotlight because in 2010 a woman named Chastity Jones got a job with a company named Catastrophe Management Solutions, an insurance claims processing company in Mobile, Alabama. This company had offered her a job but asked that she cut off her dreadlocks before she started with the company. Apparently Chastity's hairstyle violated the company's grooming policy. The company had expressed that their grooming policy was racially neutral and that they require their employees to dress professionally. They considered dreadlocks to be messy.
The thing about their claims as to why they have an issue with dreadlocks is that their grooming policy is clearly not racially neutral. The majority of people who have dreadlocks are African Americans. So the fact that they are claiming that their grooming policy is neutral is a pile of bullsh*t.
Personally I think their request is ridiculous. Her hair should have nothing to do with her professional work skills. Chasity's hair is not a hindrance to her and it certainly isn't a hindrance to other workers. I think her hair shouldn't have even been a deciding factor in whether she would be professional enough for the job.
Her hair is apart of her cultural identity and by telling her to cut her dreadlocks off is essentially stripping away who she is. The fact that the Federal Courts sided with the insurance company just goes to show what race our justice system actually favors. We live in a society that caters to institutional racism and even colorblind racism.
The problem with both of these things is that no one seems to be shedding a light on these situations. No one is trying to fix this and it's mainly because the white population benefits from the advantage they have in society and if the the white people who are in positions of power tried to do something, the Black race would no longer be as oppressed as they are now.
We need to work together among all races to fight for equality because Black people as the oppressed society can't make a change on their own without the help from the white race. With the white race on our side, we can achieve anything. We need to stop discriminating people based on silly things such as hair.
