Moulya Subbaramaiah Week 2

A Hair Piece: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Gender

Paulette M. Caldwell

In A Hair Piece, Paulette Caldwell uses the landmark case of Rogers v. American Airlines, a case revolving around the American Airlines’ alleged neutral ban on employees’ braided hairstyles at work to uncover the ways in which its employers used grooming standards to discriminate against African-American women at the intersection of race and gender. Renee Rogers, a black woman worked for American Airlines for about eleven years. Her duties required a substantial amount of passenger contact, including greeting passengers, issuing boarding passes, and checking baggage. The Airlines had a policy restraining from wearing an all braided hairstyle in certain employment categories. In 1980, Rogers arrived at work with her hair braided and filed a discrimination suit against American Airlines contending that its grooming policy constituted gender and race discrimination. The Court dismissed Rogers’s claim and provided two reasons that guided their decision. First that the grooming code did not regulate on the basis of any immutable or permanent characteristic and secondly, that the policy applied equally to both race and sex. Caldwell perceptively posited that the judgement erred in that it was based on the assumption that racism and sexism existed and operated individually and independently from each other or what Caldwell writes as the legal assumption of a race-sex correspondence or parallel. Unfortunately there is little appreciation for African American beauty outside the community. This lack of appreciation can have a devastating effect on self-esteem. Who or what is considered beautiful is very subjective. All cultures have various standards of beauty and body decoration and all these aesthetic parts of a human being is integral to their self expression and it is imperative that they be protected.