It’s perfectly legal for companies to refuse to hire someone based exclusively on the fact they have dreadlocks, according to an 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last week.
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As described in the opinion, a representative for the company, Catastrophe Management Solutions, told Jones following an in-person interview that she could not be hired by the company if she maintained her dreadlocks, since “they tend to get messy”.
“We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge that, in the last several decades, there have been some calls for courts to interpret Title VII more expansively by eliminating the biological conception of “race” and encompassing cultural characteristics associated with race”, he wrote.
A neutral grooming policy to prohibit the wearing of dreadlocks can not constitute race discrimination, the employer argued successfully. However, Helgi Walker, one of the lawyers for the insurance claims processing company in question said this second ruling is a reaffirmation of the fact that employers “may establish and enforce race-neutral grooming policies”.
But the appeals court, in its September 15 ruling upholding the lower court’s decision to dismiss the case, said that racial discrimination had to be based on characteristics that were unchangeable and that dreadlocks did not meet that definition. The justices said that while hairstyle can be associated with a person’s heritage, the HR managers actions were not discriminatory because hair is a physical characteristic you can change. It also asserted that the “hairstyle can be a determinant of racial identity”.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued the company on Jones’ behalf, claiming that its grooming policy “constituted discrimination on the basis of Ms. Jones’ race”.
“If it was a naturally occurring dreadlock, you could say that was unlawful because it was a direct characteristic of their ethnicity”. “That doesn’t mean it’s not unfair or unreasonable, but it’s unlikely that it would be racial discrimination”.
“Under Victorian legislation, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a characteristic from birth, it can be a characteristic based on a matter of choice”.
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She said decisions handed down by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal show that Victoria had a broader interpretation than the U.S. in regards to discrimination.
