About This Case Study

In workplaces and schools across the United States, people are turned away, sent home, disciplined, or passed over because of their hair — specifically, the natural textures and protective styles most common among Black people, such as Afros, locs, braids, twists, and knots. The rules that produce these outcomes rarely mention race. They speak instead of "professionalism," "neatness," or a tidy appearance, and they present themselves as standards that apply to everyone equally. The CROWN Act — short for Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair — is model legislation, first enacted in California in 2019, that names this pattern as racial discrimination and prohibits it by extending civil-rights protection to hair texture and style. This case study works primarily with a 2023 report from the Economic Policy Institute that lays out the evidence of hair discrimination, its costs in the workplace and the classroom, and the spread of CROWN Act protections across the states.

On its surface, a dress code or grooming policy is a neutral administrative rule. This case study asks why such a rule should be an object of racial analysis at all — and answers by drawing on the unit's account of the body as a site where racial meaning is produced. Jasmine Nichole Cobb argues that Black hair is racialized through both look and feel: the textures ascribed to people of African descent are read, judged, and handled in ways that make Blackness visible and tactile at the very surface of the body. To regulate hair, then, is to regulate race — without ever having to say so. The analytical move is to read a "neutral" grooming standard as an instrument: to ask what work it does, whose bodies it disciplines, and how race operates through it precisely by going unnamed. You will examine how hair discrimination is described and measured, and then analyze how a rule about appearance can hold a racial order in place.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• Jasmine Payne-Patterson, "The CROWN Act: A Jewel for Combating Racial Discrimination in the Workplace and Classroom", Economic Policy Institute (2023) — the main reading.
• The campaign's own site, The Official CROWN Act, for the model legislation, the coalition behind it, and the research it cites.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency: this case study describes the legal landscape as of 2023–2024. The CROWN Act's status in Congress and the number of states that have adopted a version were changing as it was written; check for the current status before relying on specific counts.

Before you read, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• Where have you encountered rules about "professional," "neat," or "appropriate" hair — in a workplace, a school, a dress code, a job interview? Whose hair did they seem to have in mind?
• Can a rule that never mentions race still operate by race? How would you tell?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Discrimination, Described (8–10 minutes)

Begin with the EPI report. Working from it, write a precise description of hair discrimination as a set of specific practices — not a vague sense that bias exists. The report and the research it draws on document concrete mechanisms: grooming and appearance policies that prohibit or penalize natural and protective styles; the disproportionate judgment of Black women's hair as "unprofessional"; workers sent home or denied opportunities; and students disciplined under school dress codes. List the specific forms the discrimination takes, and where it happens — hiring, the workplace, the classroom. Then note what the report establishes about its scale and its costs: how Black workers, and Black women in particular, are affected, and what economic and educational consequences follow. Pull the specific figures from the report rather than relying on impressions.

For groups: each member compiles the list and the findings individually. Do not share yet.

Phase 2: From Grooming Rule to Racial Rule (10–12 minutes)

A rule that polices appearance rarely announces what it is really sorting. Re-read with attention to how race enters a policy that never names it, and work through:

1. The neutral surface. Grooming and "professionalism" policies present as race-neutral — they bar "unkempt" or "extreme" styles, not any particular group's hair. Where, concretely, is race doing the work? Identify how standards written in neutral language come to target the textures and styles most associated with Black people.
2. Look and feel. Following Cobb, attend to the fact that what is policed is not only a chosen style but the texture of the hair itself — how it looks and how it is imagined to feel. What does it mean that the surface of the body becomes the thing read and ranked? How does that differ from being judged for a deliberate choice?
3. The cost to those it targets. Drawing on the report, identify the burdens the "neutral" rule imposes: the pressure to chemically straighten or heat-style hair, the expense and the documented health risks, the time, and the message about which bodies count as professional. Who pays, and in what currencies?

For groups: divide these three among members, then reconvene to compare.

Phase 3: Reading Hair Regulation as Racialization (8–10 minutes)

Now bring the unit's frame to bear: the body as a site where racial meaning is imposed from the outside and reclaimed from within. Holding that against what you have gathered, ask:

• How does regulating hair regulate race without naming it? What does the case reveal about how racial meaning attaches to the body's surface, and why that attachment is easy to deny?
• Why is hair an especially effective site for this work? What can an appearance policy accomplish that an explicit racial rule — now unlawful — cannot?
• Where does the frame fit the evidence well, and where does it strain? Consider the CROWN Act itself as an act of reclamation and resistance rather than imposition; consider the limits of a legal remedy; and consider how gender shapes the harm, given that Black women are most affected.

For groups: spend the first half on the first two questions together; spend the second on where the frame strains.

Phase 4: The Rule in Circulation (optional, 5–7 minutes)

Find one contemporary example of hair being regulated or contested — a school dress-code story, a workplace policy, a court case, an advertisement, or a widely shared social-media incident. Analyze it briefly: what styles or textures does it target or defend, what "neutral" language does it use, and what work does the rule do for whoever enforces it? Does your example confirm the reading of hair regulation as racialization, or complicate it?

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Beneath its language of neatness and professionalism, the regulation of hair is a way of __________. It does its work through an "appearance" rule rather than an openly racial one because __________. The part of this analysis I find hardest to hold steady is __________.

Write the most specific version you can.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the phases in order, keeping brief notes. The list of specific practices and findings from Phase 1 and the "neutral surface" analysis from Phase 2 are the central artifacts.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 is individual; Phases 2 and 3 work well collaboratively. If time is short, the closing reflection can be individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• The CROWN Coalition's site collects the model legislation, a map of where it has been adopted, and the Dove CROWN Research Study, whose survey data on how Black women's and Black children's hair is perceived and penalized sits behind much of the reporting on this issue.
• For the cultural and historical depth behind the law, see Jasmine Nichole Cobb, New Growth: The Art and Texture of Black Hair (Duke University Press, 2022) — this unit's Key Scholarship — and Ayana D. Byrd and Lori L. Tharps, Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America, rev. ed. (St. Martin's, 2014).
• The "professionalism" standards at issue here are often analyzed through respectability politics and Patricia Hill Collins's account of "controlling images," which describe how appearance norms encode race and gender together; readers pursuing the topic can follow that scholarship to see how a grooming rule connects to a larger structure of representation.