HAIR OUT OF PLACE
One woman shares the confidence-sapping impact of racist hair discrimination
I’ve fantasised about ripping my hair out of my scalp for as long as I can remember, wishing my fluffy, upright afro would shed and regrow with long, straight locks that swished as I moved. I can’t pinpoint exactly when these thoughts – which
I feel such shame about as a Black woman who is proud of her heritage – first sprouted, but I know that my unhappy relationship with my hair is rooted in the fact that, from an early age, people treated me differently because of it.
I was just 16 and job hunting for the first time when I began to realise that my natural hair wasn’t welcome in many workplaces. If you’re not a person of colour, it can be hard to relay the eeriness of walking into a majority white space – being sized up in seconds at the same time as feeling both disregarded and invisible. I’d liken it to walking into a party – late – where everyone else is friends, their heads turning as you make an entrance.
These emotions bubbled to the surface when I interviewed for a sales associate role at a local boutique. Every other member of staff was a carbon copy of the manager – tall, blonde, white. I was already feeling increasingly out of place when she asked if I could tie my hair back into a sleek bun. It was an impossible request, which I answered truthfully. I didn’t get the job and the rejection stung.
You may think that I was simply being judged on merit; that my skills and experience were perhaps inferior to the person who ultimately landed the role. But, over the course of a decade in the labour market, potential employers have made it clear time and again that my natural hair was the reason I wasn’t being hired; calling the way in which it grows upwards, rather than downwards, ‘unkempt’; insisting it wasn’t compatible with the workplace uniform, or not the ‘right look’ for the brand’s aesthetic. Even neatly woven braids weren’t considered ‘tidy’ enough.
These comments triggered anger and frustration, exacerbated by experiences outside of the interview room that made me realise subtle hair discrimination was everywhere. It’s present in the use of ‘normal’ to describe non-afro hair, and the words ‘tame’, ‘unruly’ and ‘manage’ branded on products designed for hair like mine; and the lack of models who looked like me. By not meeting Western beauty ideals, I not only felt ‘othered’, but a failure, too.
For Black women especially, hair isn’t just hair, but an outward representation of identity. Being rejected time and again because of its texture and style amounted to being repeatedly told – albeit subliminally – that my authentic self was unacceptable. When I did eventually get a job at my local Greggs – the compulsory hairnet removed the issue of hair – it wasn’t one I was excited about. But I needed to earn a living.
I started wearing a weave when I was 18 and, for the five years I wore one, it stole both time and money from me. I hated myself for catering to expectations that I knew were fundamentally flawed, but I felt I had no choice but to adapt to make myself more ‘acceptable’. This was about survival – I needed to work to live.
Depressingly, my cynical move worked. When I wore my hair straight and sleek, my interviews went better – I got callbacks and offers. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out the correlation. Between the validation from hiring managers and colleagues
‘Rejection amounted to me being told that my authentic self was unacceptable’
praising my long flowing locks, I fell into a trap; by moulding myself to fit in, I was trying to hold myself to standards imposed by a value system that automatically views my natural attributes as inferior. There’s no right or wrong way for Black women to style our hair – and experimenting with weaves can be fun – but it has to be on our own terms. And altering myself in desperate pursuit of acceptance impacted my self-worth and my mental health. When I went for promotions or looked elsewhere for a step-up in my career, I was racked with anxiety over my – or, more accurately, someone else’s – hair being ‘perfect’.
It’s taken several years of therapy for me to begin to heal. To realise that ‘professionalism’ can perpetuate racism; that it’s interwoven with every unspoken rule and standard that favours a specific group. I’m proud of my natural hair, and the journey I’ve been on to accept it, but I’m not about to share a picture of myself. Despite being illegal since the 2010 Equalities Act, hair discrimination remains rife. And living in a society that holds whiteness as the standard means that, as a Black woman, I’ll always face discrimination; I’m unwilling to risk further restricting my own progress by giving potential future employers the power to identify and label me as a ‘troublemaker’.
For now, I work for an organisation that allows me to show up to work as me, afro included. This is my act of quiet defiance against the racist forces that made me believe my beautiful, natural hair precluded my ability to excel at work.
To find out more about efforts to challenge hair discrimination, visit halocollective.co.uk