NYC Hairstyle Guidance Cues Shift to Local Job-Bias Enforcement

Chastity Jones, a black woman who applied for a customer service job at an Alabama insurance processing claims company, said her job offer was rescinded after she refused to cut her “short dreadlocks.”

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sued Jones’ employer for race discrimination, but her case eventually was dismissed by a federal appeals court in Atlanta. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit—which said it was joining “every court to have considered the issue"—said hairstyle discrimination isn’t a type of racial bias barred by federal law because it’s a mutable, or alterable, characteristic. The U.S. Supreme Court ...