US Court Decides Dreadlock Ban Is Legal

In today’s racism, a court ruled that not hiring someone based off of their dreadlocks is legal. What a big surprise this happened in Mobile, Alabama a state that has a wide variety of blatantly racist practices and incidents in the past.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently ruled against a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Catastrophe Management Solutions, effectively ruling that refusing to hire someone because of their dreadlocks is legal.

The lawsuit was filed by Chastity Jones who has locks and wasn’t hired by Catastrophe Management Solutions.

Jeannie Wilson, a human resources manager for CMS, commented on Jones’ dreadlocks during a private hiring meeting to discuss scheduling conflicts, telling Jones, “they tend to get messy, although I’m not saying yours are, you know what I’m talking about.”

The resource managers comment is hilarious but let's examine this. In my opinion, this is blatant racism for a couple of reasons. How would Jeanie Wilson know how locks tend to get messy if she doesn’t have dreadlocks? Also what does her hair being “messy” have to do with the quality of a job she would be capable of doing? The only reason Chastity even got a chance to sue for discrimination is from the resource managers comments, Jeannie should've just kept her blatant racism quiet and just not hired her to begin with. This is what happens most of the time.

From the name of the of the company “Catastrophe Management Solutions" it sounds like they clean things up after an accident. I would like to examine this story with more context of where she was going to work and what the job would be. Even if her hair would be a hazard on the job, she could tie her hair up. This is the practice with people with long hair on food service jobs. Locks are no more messy than people with long straight hair. If I was her lawyer my argument would've been "if you can’t have locked hair you shouldn’t be able to have long hair at all on this job".

This ruling, like many other “legal” decisions, were based on perceptions and culture. It is unfair to have anyone that never had dreadlocks, regardless of their race to judge this case. If you have never had dreadlocks how do you know what their effect is on the job performance mentioned? I’m willing to bet the judge on this case was not a minority either. This sounds like a legal loophole to allow jobs to discriminate on people, who are mostly black that have locks. Employers already get away with being discriminatory practices based off of names, now we can add hairstyles to the list. This woman probably shouldn’t have worked at this company anyway. She would’ve been constantly running into problems at this job because of their discriminatory practices and subtle racism.

The reason they didn’t hire her in the first place is that she didn’t adhere to their racist practices. If she would have shaved her hair, she would probably be employed and liked at this job to this day, because she allowed and conformed to blatant racism. People who are racist love when people conform and say nothing. Hairstyles are part of the culture and culture is sometimes based on race that is undeniable in the United States. I don’t agree with this decision, sounds like a 2018 Jim Crow law. That's my take do you think it is racist not to hire someone because of their hairstyle?