A proposed law raises the question of racial discrimination based on physical appearance in relation to hair, particularly in the professional environment.
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“My appearance does not justify my skills” launches Kenza Bel Kenadil, 257,000 subscribers on Instagram, 692,600 on TikTok, in one of her videos titled “Our hair is professional”. In this video, she wears several Afro hairstyle styles: “Even with my hair like that, I’m totally professional.” In the comments, Kenza Bel Kenadil encourages her subscribers to share their stories about their hair at work and she refers to the proposed law on hair discrimination, supported by the Guadeloupe MP Olivier Serva (Liot group). He hopes for a committee examination of the laws during the month of March.
Concretely, the transpartisan bill plans to add to discrimination based on physical appearance the specific criterion of hair discrimination, “in particular the cut, color, length or texture of their hair”. The text proposes to add this supplement to the Penal Code, the Labor Code as well as the Civil Service Code.
Although MP Olivier Serva specifies that he also wants to protect bald men and blonde women from discrimination at work, upon reading the explanatory memorandum, we understand that it aims in part to fight against racial discrimination at against people perceived as non-white. In fact, so-called textured hair “includes wavy, frizzy, frizzy, curly hair”, according to Daba Diokhané, founder of the Dioka platform, which claims its expertise on textured hair, and is mainly the hair of women and men categorized on a daily basis as black, mixed race or Arab.
Curly hair deemed “unprofessional”
The first argument put forward by the bill is that of discrimination in business. “Today, according to a study conducted jointly by Dove and LinkedIn in the United States where ethnic surveys are authorized, two thirds of women of Afro-descendant change their hairstyle before a job interview. Their hair is 2.5 times longer likely to be perceived as unprofessional” it is written. The United States and the United Kingdom have already legislated on hair discrimination.
In France, without the possibility of producing ethnic statistics, these figures do not exist, but examples abound. Among the most publicized, there are the comments and insults against Audrey Pulvar on her unstraightened and then braided hair which prompted the former journalist to respond in 2018 on X: “We have the right, as black people·e, to change your hairstyle whenever you want?”
A year later, Sibeth Ndiaye, then government spokesperson, was in turn mocked for the supposed lack of seriousness of her hair worn natural during her transfer of power, on April 1, 2019. Sociologist Juliette Smeralda analyzed this sequence during an interview with franceinfo: “Frizzy hair, which is not worn by those who represent power and who design the clothes and hairstyles of power, is not tolerated by those who have reserved an absolute right to this space. The same ideological foundations pit the private against the public, the man against the woman, the dominant against the dominated.
Carmen Diop, occupational psychologist and doctoral student in sociology at Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint Denis University, studies the professional condition of black women graduates in France and their social experience. She confirms it: among her research interviews, the injunction to have a “professional” hairstyle comes up frequently. “A woman told me: ‘I censored myself, I wore wigs, I did weaves’, she relates. Another, a team leader in IT, had internalized this injunction so much that when she recruited black women, she told them not to work with their natural hair or with braids because they are symbolically assigned to black people. .
Same observation for Daba Diokhané, which lists salons suitable for textured hair through a label awarded by Dioka: “I regularly have subscribers who tell me that they can’t go to work with their afro or their curls if they aren’t perfectly defined. And often, they straighten them to make it look more professional.”
However, if certain hair is considered “unprofessional”, weaves, braids with additions, glued wigs or even straightening and straightening using chemicals are not natural. Worse, these hairdressing procedures can carry health risks and are, for some, expensive and painful. This is also the second argument put forward by MP Olivier Serva based on a study by the American National Institutes of Health (NIH), published in October 2022 and cited by The world. The study reveals that the risk of contracting uterine cancer is 2.5 times higher in women who use hair products to straighten their hair than in those who do not use them.
Addressing the taboo of racism
Thus, whether it is adopted or not, this bill is far from being anecdotal, according to Carmen Diop who sees it as an opportunity to show that “taboo subjects end up re-emerging.” “This racism which is based not on a religion or a culture but on physical characteristics” is part of. She adds : “Forcing people not to keep their hair as it is is a way of denying them for what they are.” THE The third and final argument of the bill is self-esteem and dignity.
In addition, the initiative of MP Olivier Serva finds an echo in an increasingly strong trend for women as well as men to leave their hair natural and escape the aesthetic standards imposed on a part of the population. It is the “Nappy movement” which began in the 2000s. In France, the Black Beauty Bag blog created in 2007 helped explore the issue of hair discrimination. And this follows today on the side of products and hairdressers, “even if it’s still timid on the trade fair side”warns the founder of Dioka. “Of the approximately 100 000 hair salons in France, only around a hundred deal with all hair textures (…) while we are in an increasingly mixed society.