Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [58]
Caldwell’s essay shows that a hairstyle can be transformed from a neutral grooming preference into a site of racial contest. Rogers may have been initially indifferent to her hairstyle, as the court suggests through the Bo Derek comment. But that does not weaken her right to resist the airline’s demand that she cover it. I have no desire to put a pink triangle button on my bulletin board at work. But it would be perfectly logical for me to fight for such a pin if my dean asked me to take it down. The button would then be freighted with social meanings it did not have before.
To think about what those social meanings might be, we can now ask why it was so important to American that Rogers not wear cornrows, even to the point of suggesting she literally cover them with a hairpiece. As litigation does not provide incentives for employers to be forthright, I looked to grooming manuals written for corporate employees. Republished in 1988, John T. Molloy’s perennially popular New Dress for Success contains some frank styling advice for racial minorities: “Blacks selling to whites should not wear Afro hair styles.” Molloy also tells African-Americans to “wear conservative pinstripe suits, preferably with vests, accompanied by all the establishment symbols, including the Ivy League tie.” Similarly, he tells Hispanics to “avoid pencil-line mustaches” and “any hair tonic that tends to give a greasy or shiny look to the hair.” He advises them to eschew “any articles of clothing that have Hispanic associations, and anything that is very sharp or precise.”
Molloy explains why racial minorities should engage in such appearance-based covering:
It is an undeniable fact that the typical upper-middle class American looks white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. He is of medium build, fair complexion, with almost no pronounced physical characteristics. He is the model of success; that is, if you run a test, most people of all socioeconomic racial and ethnic backgrounds will identify him as such. Like it or not, his appearance will normally elicit a positive response from someone viewing him. Anyone not possessing his characteristics will elicit a negative response to some degree, regardless of whether that response is conscious or subconscious.
Success, it seems, is white and bland. Molloy describes the continuing vitality of white supremacy in American culture, a supremacy that requires racial minorities to bend behavior toward Anglo-conformity. Indeed, Molloy says racial minorities must go “somewhat overboard” to compensate for immutable differences from the white mainstream. After conducting research on African-American corporate grooming, Molloy reports that “blacks had not only to dress more conservatively, but also more expensively than their white counterparts if they wanted to have an equal impact.”
Molloy’s statement—that racial covering soothes fears of racial difference—is historically well supported. If we travel back to more racist times, we see racial minorities escaping discrimination through covering. Law professor Ariela Gross describes how “acting white” could save a black from a life of slavery in the antebellum South. In so-called race-determination trials, individuals who would have been classified as black under a “one-drop-of-black-blood” rule were often deemed white by judges and juries so long as they behaved in ways associated with whiteness: “Doing the things a white man or woman did became the law’s working definition of what it meant to be white.” Some of the conduct the courts found salient has a chilling contemporary resonance—individuals were deemed white for their association with and acceptance by whites, for the gentility of their demeanor, and for the straightness of their hair. For these individuals seeking to escape slavery, no less than for Mungin or Rogers, covering was rewarded.
We cannot assume American wanted Rogers