It’s Still Legal to Ban Dreadlocks in the Workplace
On Monday, the Supreme Court denied Chastity Jones a chance to argue that the company she worked for who told her to get rid of her dreadlocks infringed on her rights. Jones, an African American woman, has been trying for nearly a decade to have her case heard and says that there is racial bias at play in such corporate grooming policies. In 2010 Catastrophe Management Solutions offered Jones a job, on the condition that she get rid of her dreadlocks. She filed a complaint with the Equal Opportunity Commission, who filed a lawsuit against the company in 2013. In 2014, an Alabama federal judge ruled that civil rights laws only apply to unalterable traits like race and sex. The decision was upheld in 2016 by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Jones says that if the Supreme Court was able to recognize the role stereotypes play in sex discrimination cases like Price Waterhouse v. Hopkins, the same reasoning should apply in racial discrimination cases as well.
See "It’s Still Legal to Ban Dreadlocks in the Workplace", Nadra Nittle, Racked, May 18, 2018