Do we really need a law that bans discrimination based on hairstyles?

The House recently passed legislation to ban race-based hair discrimination in employment and against those participating in federally assisted programs, housing programs and public accommodations. The House voted 235-189 on March 18 to pass the CROWN Act, an acronym that stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair.” The bill’s goal is to protect against bias based on hair texture and styles, including dreadlocks, cornrows, twists, braids, Bantu knots and Afros. The bill is headed to the Senate, under the auspices of Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who sponsored that chamber’s version.

More than a dozen states already have such laws in place. California was the first to pass the CROWN Act in 2019. I raise four objections to this legislation. 

The first is that it is unnecessary. It speaks more to the inferior ways many Black people feel about their natural hair texture than to the literal ways in which they are discriminated against in workplaces for having such hair texture. The question is, why now, in this progressive era, when myriad beauty standards are accepted more than ever, is such a policy being advanced? I believe this is an issue of some Black people wanting to raise their self-esteem more than it is about any real workplace discrimination.

Second, the idea of “hair discrimination” is a complex phenomenon that would need to be coupled with workplace decorum that itself could not be decoupled from dress codes that most corporations have in place. People are not just free to wear, for example, their torn jeans and T-shirts, halter tops or flip flops to corporate/business work settings. In other words, few of us can dress “as we simply feel like dressing.” There is a dress code protocol in place for most businesses. 

Now, if in the reasoned judgment of an employer, a particular style of wearing one’s hair — we are not talking about neat braids and coiffed and combed naturally un-textured hair, but, rather,  uncombed, matted hair that renders the wearer looking disheveled — that is, on looking at the person’s hair one feels as if it needs to be combed and groomed, then an employer would have the right to apply his or her dress code protocol, under which hair grooming would fall regardless of race or gender. If Black people with naturally untextured hair wear their hair in a manner that looks anything but neatly styled, employers have the right to demand they alter their dress code, (in this case, hair would be a sub-category of such a code).

Third, it is simply a violation of property rights for the state to try to regulate how businesses demand that their employees comport themselves while on the job. Lawmakers are making a profound mistake here. The workplace is not primarily a place for one to express one’s “unique” individuality. One is a paid contractor or employee — uniformed or not — in the service of one’s employer, who has the right to determine in the name of his or her company’s image, what constitutes company decorum and the dress protocol that upholds it.

Fourth, this form of workplace regulation by the state sets a bad precedent. What next? If the so-called rights of individuals “to just be their unique selves” — which is characteristic of the language around the CROWN ACT — supersede the rights of employers to determine what they believe to be appropriate based on their brand, the aesthetic values and styles that suffuse their businesses, their own sense of what constitutes elegance and refinement and how they want to see those tastes reflected by their employees, then corporations and businesses will lose their sovereignty and autonomous status to be self-determining entities that can make decisions without violating the individual rights of others. Then every whim, desire and emotional longing of individuals could be enacted into law and enforced against others.

In America, each person gets to choose his or her conception of the good for himself or herself. No one can place obstructions — least of all, the state — in the way of such existential constructs. But your right to construct a conception of the good does not automatically translate into a right to force another into accepting your conception of the good as part of their conception of the good also. On your own property, in the public sphere, there ought to be no discriminatory practices against conceptions of a good life that do not violate the rights of others. 

Hairstyles based on hair texture are a matter of taste. Americans are beyond the pale of discrimination on that basis — and have been so for a long time. In an era that promotes radical body acceptance, and in a milieu in which any form of body-shaming is strictly taboo, the CROWN Act is superfluous and hyperbolic.

Jason D. Hill is professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago specializing in ethics, social and political philosophy, American foreign policy, and moral psychology. He is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center. Dr. Hill is the author of five books, including  “What Do White Americans Owe Black People: Racial Justice in the Age of Post-Oppression.” Follow him on Twitter @JasonDhill6.