RIGHT SPEAK: White Woman Fired for Having Black Hair: Can White People Be Discriminated Against Over Their Hairstyles?

White Woman Fired for Having Black Hair:

Can white people be discriminated against over their hairstyles?

The CROWN Act was one of the many ridiculous spinoffs of the BLM era. Around half of the states in the country have since passed a “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair” (CROWN Act) protecting black people from supposed discrimination over their hairstyles.

But in another example of the law of unintended consequences, the CROWN Act may be about to get a real workout from a white woman who was fired for wearing a black hairstyle.

In September, the Baltimore Rock Opera Society announced that it was hiring Kelly Carnes as its executive director, citing her 21 years of experience and her work with the Smithsonian and the Kennedy Center. In the publicity photo, Carnes appeared to have some sort of Cruella de Vil hairstyle in which one side of her hair is black and the other is white, possibly foreshadowing the racial hair drama soon to get her fired and become a national news story.

Since the Baltimore Rock Opera Society puts on cheesy rock theater productions, this shouldn’t have been a problem, but then Carnes went to Burning Man and decided to style her hair in braids to keep the dust out in the desert air. Members of BROS, who are mostly white, were offended by the braids, which they considered to be cornrows, a black hairstyle.

1 in 5 people in Baltimore are living in poverty. Less than a third of high schoolers can read at grade level. Chances of being a victim of a violent crime are 1 in 62 and chances of becoming a victim of a property crime are 1 in 24. Also, the city is so overrun by rats that the Norway rat is its unofficial mascot. A white lady in a hairstyle, some argue are just Dutch braids and others claim are cornrows, would seem to be a fairly low priority for Baltimore. But not for the Wokes.

While black people can use white hairstyles, white people using black hairstyles is considered to be ‘cultural appropriation’ and a crime just short of calling the police or asking to speak with the manager. The Baltimore Rock Opera Society, which is reportedly on the verge of bankruptcy, posted an Instagram message stating, “we have received many heartfelt and concerned messages from members of our community regarding a video circulated on social media showing our new Executive Director, who is white, wearing cornrows at a recent BROS public event. We share the weight of these concerns and take this matter seriously, and the Board has been in continuous conversation about them since Monday morning.”

Carnes was told to write an apology letter and forced to resign; she is considering a lawsuit under the CROWN Act which could well be enough to finish off the struggling organization.

But the organization, which has been operating in a net negative income, is mostly run by volunteers and its board members are resigning, promised to form a “working group for Culture, Community Voice, and Racial Equity (working title)” to boost DEI at the mostly white group, and announced that it was going to revise its “Anti-Discrimination Policy to more clearly address cultural representation and dress” to discriminate against its new employee’s hairstyle.

The wording implied that the Rock Opera Society had spell out to write anti-discrimination policies that prohibited people of certain races from wearing particular hairstyles. None of the establishments targeted by CROWN Act enforcement had ever done such a thing or would have contemplated doing such a thing as specifying that black employees can’t wear their hair in braids. It took woke discrimination to set out which races can wear their hair in which way.

The Rock Opera Society might not survive long enough to be sued, and it may not have enough paid employees to be successfully sued, but the case could serve as a test for the CROWN Act.

Maryland’s CROWN Act followed the usual template in many states of classifying hairstyles as a characteristic of race. Fire someone for having a messy or ugly hairstyle and you would be guilty of racial discrimination. But apart from a brief mention of “Afro Hairstyles”, the CROWN Act makes no mention of which specific race is being discriminated against and it does focus on “protective hairstyles” which are defined as a “hairstyle designed to protect the ends of the hair by decreasing tangling, shedding, and breakage, including braids, twists, and locks.”

Can a white woman be protected from being discriminated against over her hairstyle because of her race? The CROWN Act was calculatedly written to protect only one racial group’s hairstyles, but the legislators behind it never expected to deal with a racial hairstyle discrimination situation in which the fundamental problem was that hair was not attached to race, but detached from it.