racism

Discrimination Against Afro-textured Hairstyles

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Rock musician and pop culture icon Chuck Berry in 1958, sporting the “conk” hairstyle popular with many African-American men at the time. (NPR)

Caused by the uniquely flat shape of the follicle, Afro-textured hair is nearly universal in ethnic groups across the African continent, and can also be found among certain peoples in the South Pacific and Oceania. It is thought that the curly shape is an adaptation to hot climates, since it allows for a better dissipation of heat, as opposed to straight hair which is better at retaining heat. Though there is no true consensus on the origins of the hair’s unique characteristics, the societal significance of Afro-textured hair is very clear. Discrimination against hairstyles natural to African-Americans has been of particular concern in recent years, but the practice has existed since the very beginning of the African diaspora in North America.

The various tribes of West Africa, the place of origin of the vast majority of African-Americans, had varying traditions and customs associated with one’s hair. Long, intricate braided hairstyles were often used to denote wealth or status within the tribe, and could be a source of pride for an individual. Not unlike other cultures, the more ornate one’s hairstyle, the important that person likely was. However, after the capture and forced relocation of millions of West Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade, male slaves would often have their hair shaven by their new European masters. In addition to being a remedy to the terribly unsanitary conditions endured by the slaves, the shaving of Black hair was meant to remove their individual identity, as well as their cultural one. Female slaves would sometimes also have their head shaven, especially those who were employed in outdoor work. These female field slaves commonly used headwraps to protect against the harsh sunlight, a garment that even became mandatory in some jurisdictions or plantations. Discrimination and regulation of Black hair became just one of many tools employed by slaveowners to remove the slave’s identity, and to reduce him or her to mere property rather than an individual.

After the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves in 1865, Afro-textured hair, like many aspects of African-American life, continued to face discrimination long after the chains had been broken. Minstrel shows, a common form of entertainment in America both before and after emancipation, typically featured a white actor donning blackface and an Afro-textured wig. These shows featured songs, plays, sketches, or other acts which caricaturized those of African descent. Jokes made at the expense of Afro-textured hair was among the several ways in which minstrel shows or racist popular entertainment could portray Black Americans as strange, inferior, or even subhuman. Beginning in the 1920s, a new hairstyle known as the “conk” became popular among male African-American leaders and public figures. The style featured an aggressive straightening of the hair, which was usually achieved through the use of a homemade hair relaxer containing lye, a substance capable of causing severe chemical burns if handled improperly. Civil rights leader Malcolm X famously denounced the hairstyle, as he believed a subservience to white society was symbolized in a desire to reject one’s natural hair texture, even at the risk of serious physical harm. Regardless, the notion of straight hair being more “proper” or “professional” continued to exist in American society through Jim Crow movement and beyond.

The rise of the Black Power and Black Pride movements in mid-20th century America prompted a widespread change in the attitudes towards Afro-textured hair in many Black circles. The increasingly popular “Afro” hairstyle became a symbol of pride in one’s heritage, and a defiance to the status quo. Public figures such as popular singer Billy Preston passively helped usher Afros into popular culture, others such as political activist Angela Davis explicitly used the hairstyle as a way of representing the struggle towards racial equality. Discrimination against hairstyles found in Black Americans, activists such as David argued, were symbolic of and fundamentally equivalent to other forms of discrimination. The Afro was perhaps the first major movement against an American beauty standard largely shaped by white culture and white individuals. Though the Afro eventually fell out of fashion, flat-tops, dreadlocks, cornrows, and a plethora of other natural hairstyles entered mainstream Black culture, thanks mainly to Black public figures who embraced them, even if they faced intense backlash from both in and outside the community.

Even decades after the initial movement towards an embracing of Afro-textured hair, it can be argued that discrimination against natural hairstyles continued to exist in schools and workplaces throughout America. These institutions typically claim a certain standard of proper dress, which, in their eyes, makes no room for certain hairstyles which embrace the individual’s natural hair texture. Rogers v. American Airlines, a federal court case in 1981, upheld a American Airlines dress code that banned the braided cornrows of one its employees, Renee Rogers. Rogers cited Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bans workplace or employment discrimination on the basis race, and argued that a ban on her cornrows constituted racial discrimination*. Cornrows, Rogers argued, were culturally significant to Black Americans due to its history and featuring of natural African hair texture. The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in favor of American Airlines, rejecting the cultural significance of cornrows, and asserting that because Rogers’ hair could technically be altered, it could be subject to regulation by an employer. The ruling in Rogers is now subject to much criticism and debate from modern scholars, with many seeing the court’s interpretation of Title VII as too narrow, and that it did not appropriately consider the cultural factor behind Rogers’ hairstyle.

The CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair) Act was signed into law by California governor Gavin Newsom in 2019, the first act explicitly banning discrimination in any state. Similar legislation has been passed in various other states, including New York, the state in which Renee Rogers first faced bans against her hair. Louisiana, a state with a troubling history of race relations, became the first to mandate training and familiarity with Afro-textured to become a licensed barber in its state. As of August 2022 a CROWN Act at the federal level has passed through the House of Representatives, and is awaiting a vote in the Senate. This is the second time the CROWN Act was introduced to the US Congress, but a Senate vote against it in 2021 ended the bill’s first attempt at being passed into law. Though the fight against discrimination against Afro-textured hair may seem to be reaching its end, the significance of hair in shaping Black culture and American race relations will likely continue for the time being, just as it has done for generations.

*Discrimination on the basis of sex was also claimed, as the banning of cornrows was alleged to have affected neither white nor Black men.

Eugenics in America Part III: Native American Women

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Cartoon from US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW), encouraging American Indians to have a sterilization procedure. Left depicts tired parents with many children and only one horse, right depicts happy, active parents with a single child but many horses. (Akwesasne Notes, via UC Berkley Law)

Since the arrival of the first European colonists, the indigenous population of the Americas, especially in the more sparsely populated tribes in modern-day Canada and the United States, has been in grave danger due to the multitude of threats posed by colonialism and its legacy. Among these threats, the most commonly known in popular history are likely the deadly smallpox epidemics or the forced relocation of tribes onto reservations, both of which happened largely until the late 19th century. But a far more recent concern about the civil rights and autonomy of American Indians was brought to light well within a human lifetime from the present day, when tens of thousands of Native American women were coerced into dangerous and effectively irreversible sterilization procedures. The number of women sterilized, though small in the context of the total US population, is massive when taken as a proportion of the Native American population; far higher in any other ethnicity in the United States.

In 1955, the Indian Health Service (IHS) was founded after the authority to oversee Indian health concerns was transferred from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (then known as the Office of Indian Affairs) to the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The IHS aimed to provide necessary care to the millions of Native Americans living on reservation across the country, and was, in fact, successful in ensuring that more people had their healthcare needs properly addressed. However, most the doctors of the IHS were not Indians themselves, and some thus held the same prejudice against Native Americans that many others did at the time. Many were under the belief that Indians were inherently intellectually and morally inferior, and that they could not be trusted to manage their own health. These assumptions, though problematic in and of themselves, became especially concerning just a decade after the founding of the IHS, when the Service began to provide family services to its patients.

The United States government had long been concerned about the extremely high birth rates in many Indian communities, with some tribes averaging up to 4 children for every adult mother in 1970, double that of the America’s white population. Many attributed the problems of poverty, drug abuse, and overall social decay to the rapidly rising Indian population. The family service program was meant to advise patients about different methods of birth control, but the prejudice against the Indians—taking the form of a flawed dynamic in which the doctors had a superior intellectual and authoritative position on their patients—became very apparent as many patients were coerced into receiving treatments they would have otherwise refused. The two most common procedures for women were tubal ligations (colloquially known as “getting one’s tubes tied), in which the Fallopian tubes are blocked, and the far more dangerous hysterectomy—the complete removal of the uterus. Both procedures were extremely difficult or impossible to reverse and are considered permanent forms of birth control.

Despite the extreme consequentiality of the procedures being done, patients often did not have an interpreter through which they could clearly communicate with their doctor, while the doctors themselves often omitted any mention of a procedure’s permanency or other long term effects. Several Indian women later interviewed also claimed that the IHS, as well as other welfare agencies, threatened to cut their benefits should they choose to have another child. Perhaps the most coercive technique, however, was the threat of losing one’s children to foster homes, adoption, or boarding schools—a fear deeply rooted into the culture of Canadian and American Indian tribes.

Jane Lawrence, from her essay, The Indian Health Service and the Sterilization of Native American Women, American Indian quarterly via University of Nebraska Press.

A young Indian woman entered Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri’s Los Angeles office on a November day in 1972. The twenty-six-year-old woman as Dr. Pinkerton-Uri for a “womb transplant” because she and her husband wished to start a family. An Indian Health Service (IHS) physician had given the woman a complete hysterectomy when she was having problems with alcoholism six years earlier. Dr. Pinkerton-Uri had to tell the young woman there was no such thing as a “womb transplant” despite the IHS physician having told her that the surgery was reversible. The woman left Dr. Pinkerton Uri’s office in tears.

Estimates for the number of American Indian women sterilized in the 1970s are almost dumbfounding, ranging from 25 to 50 percent of the total population. Dr. Constance Redbird Pinkerton Uri, a Choctaw/Cherokee physician of the IHS and advocate for Indian interests, stated that the mass sterilization was not motivated by a desire to reduce the native population, but by a flawed idea that the solution to poverty was to limit the number of children a family could have. Others, however, such as Northern Cheyenne tribal judge Marie Sanchez viewed as a modern form genocide; a continuation of the injustices perpetrated by the United States government against Native Americans. Whatever the motive was, it was clear that the sovereignty and welfare of America’s Indian Tribes were in grave danger, and justice began to be demanded as many Indians rallied under the larger Red Power movement, which advocated for greater Indian self-governance and reduced influence from the American federal government. The largest victory of the movement was in 1976 when the Indian Health Care Improvement Act was passed, transferring the power of managing the IHS to the tribes themselves, with many IHS facilities having since been taken over by regional tribe authorities.

Throughout the history of the United States, the balance between the power of the federal government and the interests of the country’s indigenous people has redefined, tested, and broken several times over. The question of what place, if any, that American Indians have in the vision of an equal, prosperous country continues to be asked today. The mass sterilization of Native American women in the 1970s is just one example of how easily power can be abused, and how easily that abuse can ignored or forgotten.

Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871

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Bodies of massacre victims (LAPL)

Ignorance. Violence. Lynchings. Death. These are all ideas deeply scarred into the minds of the American public, especially when thinking of the racial violence that plagued the country following the Civil War. While such violence is most commonly associated with discrimination against African-Americans in the South, the causes, consequences, or even existence of racial violence against other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States may be unfamiliar to the general public. The Los Angeles Chinese Massacre of 1871 is an event unfortunately forgotten by popular history, that provides a sobering view into the struggles of American immigrants who came to the country during a time where nativist and racist sentiments were pervasive in society.

By the 1870s, there was a small, but growing population of Chinese-Americans residing almost exclusively on the West Coast. The California Gold Rush, as well as jobs in the mining and railroad sectors provided the prospect of economic prosperity to what would become a community of hundreds of thousands of migrants and their descendants. However, in 1871 Los Angeles, the local Chinese population could barely be considered a community at all, with less than 200 people, most which were men staying temporarily for work. Despite their small presence, the white population of LA held many of the same resentments towards the Chinese as the rest of the American public did, usually stemming from accusations that the migrants were taking their jobs, lowering their wages, and generally undermining the work of white labor unions.

With resentment brewing for years, the accidental death of a rancher was all it took for the tension to boil over into all-out violence and destruction. After Robert Thompson was caught in the crossfire of an incident allegedly involving two Chinese gangs, a mob of livid Angelenos quickly formed, obviously looking for blood. The mob, consisting of both whites and Mexicans, easily numbering in the hundreds, ravaged the city’s tiny Chinatown, looting and burning businesses and homes, and killing any Chinese that crossed their path.

Via Cecilia Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Times (1999):

One by one, more victims were hauled from their hiding places, kicked, beaten, stabbed, shot and tortured by their captors. Some were dragged through the streets with ropes around their necks and hanged from a wooden awning over a sidewalk, a covered wagon or the crossbeam of a corral gate. Finally, 15 corpses — including those of a 14-year-old boy and the Chinese community’s only physician, Chee Long Tong — dangled in the City of the Angels. Four others died from gunshot wounds, bringing the death toll at the hands of the mob to 19 — 10% of the city’s tiny Chinese population.

The Los Angeles Chinese massacre of 1871 is considered to be the largest mass lynching in American history. Eight rioters were convicted of manslaughter, but would all be released after appealing the decision. As disturbing a tale as it is, the massacre provides insight to both larger issues of xenophobia and anti-immigrant views during the time, as well as to present concerns about violence and prejudice towards Asian-Americans as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. More recent incidents such as the murder of Vincent Chin or the Atlanta spa shootings demonstrate that the ignorant ideas that cause violence not only continue to exist, but that they continue to have deadly consequences.

As a result of recent events, the issues faced by many Asian-Americans have been put well into public view. However, the long and troubling history behind those issues is more difficult to discuss, and therefore seldom is. But by maintaining a productive, open, and understanding dialogue about the uncomfortable topics from the past, we can come closer to finding solutions to problems of the present.