A coali­tion of actors wants to change how Hol­ly­wood sees hair

What does it mean to ​‘look pro­fes­sion­al,’ real­ly? This image — suits, pen­cil skirts, rig­or­ous­ly con­trolled coif­fures — is based on a pure­ly arbi­trary set of cul­tur­al pre­cepts dic­tat­ed cen­turies ago by capitalism’s rul­ing class, and we’re start­ing to see it break down at long last. It’s not just that the aver­age office has grown more amenable to casu­al but­ton-downs and jeans; there’s a larg­er ide­o­log­i­cal shift tak­ing place, reori­ent­ing pub­lic ideas about who gets to rep­re­sent the pic­ture of a work­ing person.

An item in Vari­ety this morn­ing details a bold effort from a coali­tion of actors hop­ing to rewrite the nar­ra­tive on appear­ance, their focus being on the pol­i­tics of hair. A peti­tion 160,000 SAG-AFTRA mem­bers strong has been deliv­ered to the Sen­ate, urg­ing them to pass the CROWN Act (Cre­at­ing a Respect­ful and Open World for Nat­ur­al Hair, which should make the acronym CROWNH, but that’s nei­ther here nor there) and pro­tect the rights of Black per­form­ers who just want to look how they want to look.

With an all-star line­up of sig­na­to­ries includ­ing Ker­ry Wash­ing­ton, Zoe Kravitz, Rosario Daw­son, Niecy Nash-Betts, and Don Chea­dle, the new leg­is­la­tion would address a prej­u­dice that’s hard­ened into indus­try prac­tice over a course of decades. In a busi­ness where judg­ing a per­son on their looks is fair game, such nat­ur­al hair­styles as dread­locks, curls, Afros, two-puffs, and any­thing else out­side the white norm of high-pol­ish, flat­tened thin­ness can bar an actor from jobs play­ing white-col­lar char­ac­ters. (Or worse, see them remand­ed to audi­tions for insult­ing­ly ret­ro­grade ​“ghet­to” roles.)

The CROWN Act would make dis­crim­i­na­tion on the basis of hair­style ille­gal, in keep­ing with a wider trend sweep­ing Amer­i­can life that’s already seen some schools revis­ing dress codes that unfair­ly for­bade nat­ur­al hair. The let­ter attached to the peti­tion makes clear that this isn’t just a Tin­sel­town con­cern, but a nation­al con­ver­sa­tion, stat­ing that ​“Implic­it bias­es toward Black work­ers and stu­dents based on their hair tex­ture, style and col­or are still the norm in fed­er­al offices and pub­lic education.”

The actors’ union hopes to lead the charge into a san­er future, where it’s under­stood that there’s no cor­re­la­tion between how one choos­es to wear their hair and their abil­i­ty to effec­tive­ly do their job. And because real­i­ty is down­stream of cul­ture, they could very well make a change; peo­ple assume that what­ev­er they see on TV is nor­mal, and so with enough time, we may advance to a new sta­tus quo under which no one bats an eye at a sci­en­tist in Ban­tu knots.