By The Star Staff
The Senate passed a local version of “CROWN Act” legislation late last week banning discrimination on the basis of hair texture and styles such as braids, dreadlocks, twists and knots in the workplace and public schools.
The bill would declare public policy against racial discrimination based on the various protective hairstyles and hair textures that are associated with race and national origin identities. Likewise, the measure seeks to disavow discrimination based on hair styles and normalize diversity.
Puerto Rican Independence Party Sen. María de Lourdes Santiago Negrón said people often believe such discrimination does not exist. She said often people believe from a privileged position that racism does not occur.
“The hearing on this bill was to me, a very eye-opening one,” she said.
She noted that a Senate employee complained that her two children were told not to show up in school “until they cut their afros.”
“Telling someone, I don’t want you here with that afro or those dreadlocks, is racism,” she said.
University student Alanis M. Ruiz Guevara, who pushed for the bill, said in hearings that discrimination against Afro hair and protective hairstyles -- which are hairstyles, often associated with Afro-textured hair, that are designed to minimize exposure of the hair to environmental elements -- is not a personal one, but a systematic one that has been silenced by a racist culture. In addition, she related an anecdote about an experience she had after arriving at an academic institution with cornrow-style braids.
“These types of attacks are common within educational institutions, in which racism is encouraged under their regulations,” Ruiz Guevara said. “Where even male children who wear their hair Afro-frosted are required to have it short, thus prohibiting African hairstyles.”
There are similar laws in the United States, such as the “Creating a Respectful And Open World for Natural Hair” (CROWN) law.
Department of Labor and Human Resources adviser Nahiomi Álamo Rivera said current laws already prohibit racial discrimination in the workplace and that the bill was not needed.
Natalia Alexa Colón Díaz, whose practice focuses on employer labor law, stressed that, from a legal perspective, employers have the prerogative to manage personnel according to their operational needs, but emphasized that they should not discriminate in employment.
Santiago Negrón said that as of now, there are anti-discrimination laws that do not cover hairstyles.
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