By Priscilla Mensah
Recently, the United States House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, which stands for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair. Effectively, the act prohibits race-based hair discrimination on three levels: in one’s professional employment, in federal programs, and in public accommodations. This act still needs to be passed by the Senate for it to officially be law nationwide. Even with just the House’s passage, however, the act still represents an important step made by legislators to tackle head-on discriminatory practices regarding hairstyles and hair presentation that has existed in our nation for decades, if not centuries.
By confronting this discriminatory history and ongoing pattern of race-based hair discrimination, lawmakers are more fully embracing the great diversity of our country, which for me is a welcome and long overdue undertaking. It invigorates me to think that we are moving towards a moment in time where it is conceivably possible for one to wear their hair in twists, afro styles, braids, and the like without having to wonder if doing so will hurt their chances of being employed. In the best-case scenario, this act will lessen social stigmatizations associated with wearing ethnic hairstyles in addition to doing away with race-based hair discrimination in the employment sector.
Also, I hope this act gets the ball rolling on making religious head garb – such as the hijab or “scarf,” as I have always simply called it as someone who wears one – socially and professionally accepted. I know it is technically legal for people to wear religious head wraps, but often the line demarcating between what is legal and what is allowed and encouraged in practice gets blurred.
To make matters worse, many groups are often left out of this legal accommodation allowing for religious headwear because people sometimes fail to realize that the hijab is not just worn by one group of people or ethnicity.
For instance, African Americans – and other races and groups of people for that matter – are Muslims as well and thus eligible for such an accommodation. Despite this fact, I can remember being in grade school and being told by a school administrator to remove my scarf because “I ain’t no Muslim.” Adding insult to injury, I was also told in the same school by yet another school official to take my scarf off because they too did not believe that I was Muslim.
Being informed by my personal experiences, seeing firsthand how a law does not necessarily guarantee acceptance or practice, I’m well aware that the CROWN Act will probably not magically change the state of things overnight. Also, the study of history has taught me that the full and complete impact of laws often take time to be meaningfully felt.
Nevertheless, it is my genuine hope that this CROWN Act recognizes more generally the greatly diverse and multiplicity of ways that hair can be professionally presented. Supreme Court Justice nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, presents a perfect example of this. Brown Jackson’s locs are always immaculately styled and provide one example of the many ways that ethnic hair is and can be styled in both the workplace and in other realms.
Yes, the timing of the act’s passage may appear to some, myself included, to be somewhat suspect given that Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination confirmation hearings are currently underway. Still, the potential benefits and far-reaching implications of the act far outweigh any eye raising, opportunistic political correctness associated with it. The importance of CROWN Act’s ability to, at the very least, lay the groundwork for a more diverse and accepting workplace cannot be understated.