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This week, the City of New York, through its Commission on Human Rights, officially banned discrimination based on hairstyle, making it one of the rare municipalities in the country to codify the link between prejudice and personal presentation. What this means, essentially, is that employers, landlords, school principals, gym owners, club managers and other institutions and gatekeepers who engage in a persistent form of racism that renders certain judgments of how African-Americans wear their hair, will now be subject to penalties and civil damages should they harass, threaten, fire or deny admission or affiliation to anyone based on a particular set of grooming choices.

While it may defy belief that such a clarification would be needed in such a progressive part of the world at the close of the second decade of the 21st century, examples of bias expressed through rules or policies against cornrows, Afros, Bantu knots and other means of wearing hair that do not conform to European standards, in fact, abound.

Curly hair, coiled hair, black hair is a trigger, it seems, that reveals the bigotry of people who don’t understand themselves as bigoted, people who just imagine themselves as upholding “standards.”

Two years ago, for instance, a young black woman working at a Banana Republic in Westchester County was told by a white male manager that her braids were not “Banana Republic appropriate,” that they were too “unkempt” and “urban” and that he would not be able to schedule her for more shifts unless she took them out. When she told the manager that they protected her hair from becoming coarse in cold weather, he suggested she try some shea butter. Ultimately, he was let go.