African American Hair: Glamour gets sued for upper management remarks

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The incident that Rosenberg is talking about involves Ashley Baker, a white former associate editor at Glamour, who touched off a firestorm of controversy last summer when she told a roomful of female attorneys at law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton that afro-style hairdos and dreadlocks are Glamour "don'ts."

" 'No offense,' she sniffed, but those 'political hairstyles really have to go,' " reported American Lawyer magazine, which first broke the story.

Stripped of its appalling delivery, was Baker's observation wrong?

"Black hair is sensitive," said Anna Holmes, the managing editor of Jezebel, a celebrity, sex and fashion blog for women, which followed the Baker story closely. "What Baker said was inappropriate, but was she inaccurate? No. She hit a nerve ... society is uncomfortable with ethnic hair and it is uncomfortable about race. And it's tough talking about all of it because emotion gets in the way."

Over the years, lawsuits have been filed against companies for discriminating against black employees for their ethnic hairstyles. Corporate-image experts, both black and white, subtly advise black women to remove their braids, dreadlocks and other ethnic hairdo before interviewing at corporate jobs, experts confide
  • added January 07, 2008
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