Department or Program
Philosophy
Second Department or Program
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Abstract
Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act bans employment discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin. Employees use this to challenge workplace grooming policies regulating their appearance while on duty. To determine what aspects of appearance fall under protected identity characteristics, courts reference “immutability”, defined as attributes that cannot be changed or are essential to an identity group. This thesis centers around cases of black women who faced employment discrimination because of hairstyling, in which courts treat hair as unprotected because of its “mutability.” In doing so, courts ignore the gendered and racialized ideals surrounding “professional” hair and its exclusion of socioculturally black hairstyles. Through analysis of anti-discrimination law, the concept of identity, and the historical importance of black women’s hair, I form a three-part argument: 1) the purpose of anti-discrimination law ought be to combat discrimination on the basis of oppressive hierarchical evaluations; 2) the “immutability” understanding of identity, and the notion of fault it relies on, excludes agential enactments of identity, leaving marginalized populations vulnerable to implicitly biased discriminatory action; and, 3) insofar as the “immutability” criterion for identity prevents anti-discrimination law from fully combatting discrimination, it ought be removed. Instead, I posit a two-part approach to identity emphasizing the importance of both how individuals are passively identified (i.e. identification absent agent action) and actively identified (i.e. identification based on agent action), the validity of which I demonstrate through the ways black women have been historically perceived and identified by others.
Level of Access
Open Access
First Advisor
Stark, Susan
Date of Graduation
5-2019
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Recommended Citation
Jackson, Kayla K., "Passively Black, Actively Unprofessional: Beyond a Fault-Based Conception of Black Women’s Identity and Hairstyling in Title VII Jurisprudence" (2019). Honors Theses. 299.
https://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/299
Number of Pages
99
Components of Thesis
1 pdf file
Open Access
Available to all.