The (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette
The most irritating fact about the Indiana General Assembly having two bills prohibiting race-based hair discrimination is that such a law needs to exist in 2024. As presidential and congressional candidates debate the future of American republicanism, the last thing on anyone’s mind should be having to defend a child or adult sporting dreadlocks, tight cornrows, a colorful weave or an Afro.
Yes, this debate is most certainly about race, which, again, is disconcerting as we’re nearly a quarter-way through the 21st century and more than 500 years since the first Africans were brought to Virginia and indentured.
Authored by Indianapolis Democratic Sen. Fady Qaddoura, Senate Bill 94 would ban discrimination based on certain physical traits such as hair texture and protective hairstyles historically linked to race.
Similarly, House Bill 1124, authored by Rep. Vanessa Summers, D-Indianapolis, seeks to prevent discrimination based on physical traits traditionally associated with race, such as hair texture and protective hairstyles.
We’re unsurprised that the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana has publicly backed both bills.
“Hair is a prompt that too often reveals the bigotry of people who imagine themselves to be upholding professional ‘standards merely’ — standards that too often treat textured hair and protective styles as unsuited for the office, classroom, and board room,” the union opined on its website.
While SB 94 and HB 1124 were referred to committees that have yet to act, we doubt the GOP supermajority will allow hearings in either chamber during the short session. Given what’s known about hairstyle bias, we wish they would take this form of discrimination seriously, mainly how “texturism” affects Black girls and women in school and the workplace.
Since its founding in 2019, the Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair (CROWN) movement has sponsored several workplace research studies. Last year, 2,990 female respondents were surveyed; the findings attest to both the level of discrimination and fear:
• Black women’s hair is 2.5 times more likely to be perceived as unprofessional.
• Nearly 66% of Black women change their hair for a job interview. Among them, 41% changed their hair from curly to straight.
• Black women are 54% more likely (or more than 1.5 times more likely) to believe they must wear their hair straight to a job interview to be successful.
• Black women with coily/textured hair are twice as likely to experience microaggressions in the workplace than Black women with straighter hair.
CROWN’s 2021 survey highlighted that the next generation of Black women and men is already finding America continues to have a bias against non-Eurocentric interpretations of beauty:
• 53% of Black mothers say their daughters have experienced racial discrimination based on hairstyles as early as 5 years old.
• 66% of Black children in majority-white schools have faced race-based hair discrimination.
• 100% of Black elementary school girls in majority-white schools (who report experiencing hair discrimination) experienced discrimination by the age of 10.
Liberal pablum? Wokism? Hardly, when you consider that since 2019, more than half the states in the union have enacted anti-hair discrimination laws.
Last May 27, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the antonymous example of a “woke” politician, signed into law legislation that broadens the Lone Star State’s definition of race discrimination to include discrimination against an employee’s hair texture or protective hairstyle.
Texas joined 22 other states in prohibiting hair discrimination, including blue state leaders New York, California and Illinois, and GOP strongholds such as Tennessee, Arkansas and Louisiana.
We can’t believe we’re suggesting this, but the Indiana GOP should look to Texas for clarity. Then, get moving on Qaddoura’s Senate Bill 94 and Summers’ HB 1124.
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