...A recent study by the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair (CROWN) coalition shows a black woman is 80 percent more likely to change her natural hair to meet social norms or expectations at work. And, black women are 50 percent more likely to be sent home or know of a black woman sent home from the workplace because of her hair.
The political symbolism of policing black hairstyles dates back to the 1800s as a stand-in for a kind of black identity that doesn't want to assimilate, Noliwe Rooks, professor of Africana studies at Cornell University told USA Today earlier this year.
"It’s at the moment of when you had large numbers of African-Americans leaving enslavement and the Great Migration, so there was more contact between communities on more equal footing," said Rooks, author of Hair Raising: Beauty, Culture and African American Women. "The narrative is ‘You just don’t look civilized. You just don’t look professional. "
Read the entire artilce in USA Today.
