A vintage ad for a relaxer brand, Raveen, featured a smiling Black woman sporting a sleek bob haircut and a smart double-breasted business suit. “Was It Her Résumé?” the copy read, “Or Raveen?”
For many Black women at the time who may have flipped past the ad while sitting under the dryer at the salon on a Sunday afternoon, Raveen—which has since been discontinued—was communicating a gentle warning: Wear your hair in its natural state and risk not landing the job.
Although the ad’s messaging featured six little words, it carried a big message, one that all Black women know to be true. Chemically straighten your hair within an inch of its life and maybe you too can be as happy, successful, and well-dressed as the woman in the photo.
It’s even advice this very magazine perpetuated in the past, by labeling Afros and locs as hairstyles too inappropriate and too “political” for the corporate world.
Women have always—always—had to deal with societal pressures to look a certain way. But if you’re Black in America, the stakes of that pressure are higher: Conformity is, often, a means of survival. While it’s true that in 2020 you probably won’t see an ad hawking racialized standards of professionalism as blatantly, the insidious policing of Black hair by workplaces—just like the violent policing of Black people by law enforcement—is very much alive and well.
As our nation reckons with the deeply rooted institution of anti-Blackness and white supremacy within our government policies and our police departments, we must recognize that those same roots can be found in how our places of work consider our hair, which for decades has been used to deny us jobs and promotions.
When companies enforce certain restrictions pertaining to “acceptable” hairstyles—no matter how vague the language—racial undercurrents will always persist, since definitions of “professional” and “neat” are fully subjective and based on Eurocentric standards of attractiveness, which includes “conventional” light skin and straight hair. And this isn’t just a standard preferred in modern-day workplaces. Opinions around Black hair have existed pretty much since America’s inception. In the 18th century, British colonists likened African hair to sheep’s wool, while enslaved people who had looser-textured hair and lighter skin—likely the result of rape by white plantation owners—were given more privileges, like working in the home instead of the field.
Thus began the complicated, violent concept of “good” and “bad” hair—a concept that was virtually nonexistent in precolonial Africa. An Afro can make you a militant; locs could mean you’re antiestablishment and smoke weed. Wearing weaves and wigs might indicate you’re high-maintenance. After hundreds of years, it’s still hard for some people to untangle Black hair from these stereotypes. For Black women, our hair—curly, kinky, big—always carries meaning, even if it’s not what we want or who we are. While a messy topknot can be considered chic on white women, even at work, a Black woman wearing a kinky puff would be considered unkempt. There is immense pressure for our hair to always be done and our edges to be laid, and if we wear our hair natural, there had better be curl definition and no frizz.
This bias is precisely why the Crown Act (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) now exists, a culmination of decades of resistance by Black women against the bigoted assumptions about our hair. The law, first passed in California in July of last year, bans race-based hair discrimination in workplaces, schools, and housing—something that’s still perfectly legal to do in all but seven states.
It’s a long-overdue initiative. While the federal Civil Rights Act passed in 1964 includes Title VII, a provision that prohibits employers from discriminating against workers on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion, there hasn’t been an antidiscrimination mandate that explicitly applies to Black hair. That’s not for lack of trying, though: In 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court refused to reconsider a lawsuit against insurance-claim processor Catastrophe Management Solutions (CMS) that had been dismissed in lower courts. In the suit, Chastity Jones, a Black woman, said she had experienced racial discrimination when CMS allegedly rescinded a job offer because Jones refused to cut off her dreadlocks.
Still, the Crown Act hasn’t been a panacea. Because it has passed in only a small handful of states—not nationally—disturbing stories continue to surface in places where hair discrimination is still not illegal. For example, a Texas school district voted to uphold a grooming policy on locs that would have barred a Black student from attending his prom and graduation. And in Massachusetts this July, a Supercuts employee told a mother who brought her three biracial kids in for an appointment that “they do not cut Black people’s hair.” (The hair chain has since fired the employee and stated that racism would not be tolerated.) And those are just two incidents that made headlines.
But progress is being made. Many Black women are no longer accepting racist standards of beauty, especially at work. We’re choosing to wear our hair how we see fit. That may be in its natural curls or relaxed. It may be in a wig, a weave, or braids. Some women see their hair as a connection to their ancestors. For others, it’s a form of expression. For others still, it’s a matter of simply looking cute. Our hair, however we style it, has no impact on our ability to be leaders and do our jobs.
We are not our hair, and our hair is our own.
No one understands the importance of those words and the message behind the Crown Act more than the six women on our cover, each of whom describes unpleasant experiences on the job. They’ve worked in industries as varied as retail, restaurants, and the military. While no two stories are alike, together they highlight just how pervasive the issues surrounding Black hair really are.
And while it’s critical for these women—and all of us—to remember these instances, it’s also imperative to move beyond them by embracing the culture-shifting moment America is facing right now and confronting an inconvenient truth: It’s not really about hair, and it never has been.
June 30, 2013, started like any other day for Farryn Johnson. She was working as a waitress at a Hooters in Baltimore and had just gotten her hair colored a medium-brown shade with blond highlights. But when she went in for her shift, her manager did not approve. “He was adamant that I needed to take the blond out,” says Johnson. The reason? Highlights didn’t look “natural” on Black women.
Despite the fact that other staffers had highlights, Johnson says she continued to receive written warnings about her hair. Then, ultimately, she was fired.
Johnson believes the discrimination went beyond hair color. In the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaint she filed, Johnson stated that Black waitresses were not allowed to wear their natural curls and were advised to straighten their hair before work or they wouldn’t be allowed to work their shift. Although Hooters denied Johnson was fired because of her hair, the company was ordered by an arbitrator to pay her lost wages and compensatory damages.
After the incident, Johnson, 32, says she became increasingly aware of how rampant hair discrimination actually is and why it needs to be forbidden under the law. “The Crown Act is not just about Black hair, but also civil rights,” she says. “It’s about the right for Black people to have freedom and equality. The right to define our beauty through our own eyes and not someone else’s. The right to not allow others to diminish or devalue our heritage.”
Johnson now works for Netflix, a company she says has a great “come as you are” culture. “I was actually hired with blond highlights in my hair,” she says. “I never worry about being criticized or mistreated because of my hair or overall physical appearance.” She’s also a member of Netflix’s inclusion and diversity task force, which aims to increase diversity among production crews that work behind the scenes for shows and movies.
If the experience has taught her anything, it’s that if a business is going to make a decision about your capabilities based on your locs, your Afro, or the fact your hair isn’t straight, it’s probably not a place you want to work anyway. “A good company is not going to judge you by your physical appearance. They're going to focus on your work experience, intellect, abilities, and what you can bring to their team,” she says.
Hair discrimination is now illegal in Baltimore, thanks to the Crown Act. As for Johnson? As a California resident, she’s also enjoying the freedom of being able to switch up her hair regularly, however she chooses: “I am happy to say that I continue to flourish.”
Few hairstyles have instant name recognition like the anchor bob. You know the one: It’s sleek, shiny, and full of bounce, but only in the way hot tools can create. And for Black women, it’s a look that takes a lot of time, money, and—in instances like Brittany Noble’s—difficulty to maintain.
“To save money I would try to do my own hair,” says the journalist. “I would wash my hair once a week. I would flatiron it. I would use a hot comb to go over it. I would basically be putting heat in my hair every day to have that fresh look on TV. To help, sometimes I would use a sew-in or wigs—or a half-wig that I would create myself. But a good sew-in costs about $700 or $800. It’s just really expensive.”
It’s in large part why newscasters of color have been making headlines in recent years as they’ve pushed back against the traditional standard of what’s considered “on-air hair.”
Noble is among the many who decided to embrace the versatility of her natural hair on camera. But in 2018 she was fired from the local news station she worked at in Mississippi, and she recently filed a lawsuit against her former employer on the grounds of racial and sex discrimination, including allegations about her hair.
According to the official complaint, Noble claims she was told her natural hair looked “unprofessional.” (In its answer to the complaint, Nexstar Broadcasting, the news station’s parent company, counters that she was told her “hairstyle was unprofessional”—not her “natural hair”—and that she “could wear her hair however she liked, if it looked professional.”) Noble’s suit also claims management had “stopped including her in station promotions and events” and that she was told news stories she pitched were “not for all people.”
A representative for WJTV and Nexstar provided Glamour the following statement: “WJTV-TV and Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc., maintain a strict zero-tolerance policy, which prohibits harassment, discrimination, or retaliation of any type. Allegations that Ms. Jones’s [Noble’s former, married name] employment was terminated for her choice of hairstyles have no basis in fact and are vigorously denied. Ms. Jones’s employment was in fact terminated for excessive absenteeism and for her failure to return to work and fulfill her contractual responsibilities after exhausting all available leave time. We stand by our decision to terminate Ms. Jones’s employment and vehemently deny her latest publicly stated version of reasons for her dismissal.”
Nexstar also denies all of Noble’s other allegations of discrimination included in the lawsuit.
Noble, who is now 33, has since moved back to her hometown of St. Louis. She hasn’t been on air in two years but hopes to return soon.
While the anchor bob as the norm is starting to change—in great part thanks to the #NaturalHairOnAir movement—Noble says presentation policies are only one of the many ways Black journalists are still held back in newsrooms in general. “We have to come to a reckoning within media because it’s not enough to just have Black faces on TV anymore,” she says. “We have to have [Black] people making the decisions.”
Noble hopes that with more states adopting the Crown Act, the focus will be on the work that needs to be done and stories that need to be told. “If I want to wear my hair straight, no one should judge me," she says. "And if I want to wear my hair natural, I should have that right.”
“For a long time growing up, my family had the impression that America was this place where you could be yourself. It was almost outrageous. Like, ‘Oh, my goodness, Americans do whatever they want,’” says Rachel Sakabo, 36, who moved to the U.S. from the Congo when she was a baby. “But you scratch off the shiny paint, and underneath it’s just dull and constricting, and it’s not okay.”
In 2016, Sakabo said she was fired from her job at a luxury hotel in New York City. She says that, despite wearing locs in her job interview and training courses, she was asked if she could “unlock” her hair once she started working the front desk. According to Sakabo, she told them, “I cannot unlock them. I can take them out by shaving off my hair.”
Roughly two weeks later, she says, she was called into a meeting, where she says she was told she was “not a good fit” for the hotel. “In my gut, I believe that was what it was about,” says Sakabo. “I got along with everyone. It just didn’t make sense.” Starwood Hotels, which at the time owned the hotel she worked at, denied that Sakabo was fired for her hair.
“The accusation is absolutely false. We are very proud of our excellent record for diversity and inclusion,” read a statement a Starwood Hotels spokesperson issued to the Daily Mail in 2016. “By policy, we are unable to discuss specifics about the reason for an associate’s separation from employment, but can say it had nothing to do with what has been alleged.” Glamour contacted the new owners of the hotel but did not receive a response to requests for comment.
Sakabo says she tried launching a GoFundMe to raise enough money to hire a lawyer but ultimately couldn’t afford to pursue legal action against the hotel. “I essentially fell into a black hole, keeping it 100% honest. I was not in a good place after that,” she says. “I remember being on the train and having to pass by the station I used to get off at and [basically] having an anxiety attack. It was just a bad, bad, bad, bad time.”
Sakabo now works as a doula. “They essentially treat me like family,” she says of the private practice in Brooklyn. “I came comfortable as I am, and they accepted me, as opposed to other jobs where I felt like I needed to come in with my headscarf or my natural hair from the start, so they knew who they were hiring.”
For Sakabo, the Crown Act is a sign of great progress, but it also comes with a certain level of sorrow. “This is our reality as Black individuals—that we will be judged for every little thing, down to our hair,” she says. “We have to make laws so that we can be accepted. It’s bittersweet and bullshit at the same time.”
How a person wears their hair is deeply personal, and Sakabo says for some the advice to just “be yourself” doesn’t address the obstacles many will face when trying to get a job. “Not everybody out here can just pick themselves up from their bootstraps. Not everybody has that opportunity, right? So as a Black person, my initial thoughts are survival. I want you to survive. And that fucking sucks,” she says. “This is the advice that I would give [young Black people today]: Go in educated and make sure they know who you are and that you’re secure in yourself. Don’t ever feel like you need to do anything to conform to the standards of those people who were never going to accept you, even if you straightened your hair or didn’t straighten it.”
At 21 years old, Destiny Tompkins is resolute in what she will not tolerate at a job. “Because I’ve been through the trauma, I know that I want better,” says Tompkins, who recently graduated from college with a degree in screenwriting, playwriting, and theater performance. And that’s an environment she can thrive in that doesn’t “come at the cost” of her self-respect.
In 2017, when she was 19, Tompkins’s (white, male) manager at a New York Banana Republic told her that her box braids were too “urban” and “unkempt” for the brand’s image and that he couldn’t give her more shifts until she took them out.
In a message she shared on Facebook that’s since been deleted, Tompkins said she felt so “uncomfortable” and “overwhelmed” by the situation that she left in the middle of her shift. “When I tried to explain to [my manager] that it was a protective style for my hair [because] it tends to become really brittle in the cold, he recommended that I use shea butter for it instead,” she wrote. “I have never been so humiliated and degraded in my life by a white person."
In less than two days, the post was shared more than 34,000 times. And although the manager was fired after her story garnered significant media attention, Tompkins says the incident has had a lasting impact—far past the news cycle of her story.
“I struggle trying to work in retail or food anymore because of that specific experience,” she says, noting that she’s now hyperaware and cautious of any industry that has explicit rules on how employees should look.
“As a Black woman, I’m learning to just love my hair,” she adds. “So when someone tells me that it’s still not good enough for their image, I ask myself, Do I care to fit into this image? Or do I care more about how I feel about what’s on my head?”
The trauma of the incident also followed her back to school, where she says she was bullied by other students and accused of being “extra about being Black” after her story went viral. “I often heard from people that I’m overreacting because of my Banana Republic experience,” she says.
Still, Tompkins firmly believes standing up for your dignity at school or work isn’t an overreaction. “Once you settle for that little bit of disrespect, then it leads into having to deal with that disrespect every day on different levels,” she says.
That’s why she wants to continue to raise awareness about hair discrimination and the legislation that could legally protect women from going through the experience she did. “I think it’s time that we are able to be our complete selves without criticism, without critique, without being questioned for it,” she says. “It's not fair that everyone gets to live so peacefully, so free, and then when it comes to Black people, it’s always a problem.”
As for what the future holds, Tompkins says she’s looking ahead and not allowing her college retail job to color the view she has of herself: “I know I will guide myself to the opportunities in spaces that are meant for me to be my authentic self.”
The last thing Gale Young-McLear, 45, wanted was to worry about her hair. She wore it in locs, since it was quick and easier to style. But then, in 2013, the Coast Guard updated its grooming policy. Once allowed so long as they did not interfere with issued military uniform headgear, locs had suddenly, for seemingly no reason, been deemed as not “compliant”—and were therefore prohibited.
Gale’s wife, Kim, 36, who was also in the Coast Guard, wasn’t having it. With no valid health or safety concerns to point to, Kim argued, the new regulations put an undue burden on Black women. “How we are groomed, with our hair, is a part of our professional evaluation,” says Kim. “So if our hair is not ‘in compliance’ per a racist regulation, then a supervisor has full discretion to downgrade your evaluation.”
The ban wasn’t exclusive to the Coast Guard; at the time all branches of the military used similar language to ban the style. Meaning, if Black women in the military wanted to rise in rank, they would need to spend more time and money getting ready each morning—which, according to Gale’s experience, many did. “At times I kind of felt like an outcast because I was not perming my hair,” she says, noting that the Coast Guard already has a small percentage of Black officers. “It’s that feeling that if you want to belong and succeed within the organization, then you need to wear your hair this type of way.”
In 2014, after 10 months of lobbying—in which Kim delivered an intensely researched presentation on how locs could be worn in identical approved hairstyles as non-Black women—she was successful in getting the Coast Guard to change its policy. Women in other branches of the military took notice and reached out to Kim for mentorship on how they could follow suit. Now the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marine Corps all allow locs and other protective styles in regulation.
Although the battle started over hair, Gale and Kim always felt it was about more than that. They hope their story will encourage others to speak out against unjust policies—even if they aren’t personally affected by them. “We shouldn’t accept any type of discrimination, period,” says Kim. “And it shouldn’t have to be occurring to yourself or someone you’re close with to feel like you should step up and do something about it.”
“It goes back to feeling valued, being valued, being heard by others,” adds Gale, who retired at the rank of Commander in 2019. “Each of us, regardless of what community we belong to, have a responsibility to get outside of our bubbles, take the blinders down, and empathize with what other people may be going through.”
Hair discrimination is racial discrimination, period. Together, we have the power to end it. To demand the Crown Act gets passed in your state, sign the petition.
Ashley Alese Edwards is the U.S. partnerships manager in the Google News Lab and a freelance writer who covers the intersection of culture and beauty. She is based in New York City.