Unraveling the legal threads entangling race in America / UCLA Today: In law schools and ethnic studies centers across the nation, Renee Rodgers is a familiar name. She’s the one-time African American employee of American Airlines whose hair had a classic all-American look — except it fell to her shoulders in tight braids instead of single strands.
Rodgers has become a national symbol of gender- and race-based employment discrimination ever since a federal district court upheld the right of American Airlines in 1981 to prohibit her from wearing her hair in braids to conform to the company’s grooming standards for employees. In one of its many sweeping opinions, the court claimed that Rodgers’ fashionable hairdo was not the product of natural hair growth but an artifice unrelated to her cultural heritage.
