Will We See Dreadlocks in the Supreme Court?
A woman who was fired from her new job almost as soon as she got it claims she was the victim of unlawful employment discrimination based on her race and is asking the US Supreme Court to hear her case. If the justices decide to take the case, they will have the opportunity to decide whether being fired for having a particular hairstyle could amount to racial discrimination.
Chastity Jones was hired in 2010 at Catastrophe Management Solutions (CMS), an insurance claims processing company in Mobile, Alabama. At the end of a meeting with HR, Jones was told that she couldn't keep her dreadlocks as an employee with the company because "they tend to get messy." Her job offer was then rescinded when she refused to cut her hair.
Jones filed a complaint of unlawful workplace racial discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Such complaints must first be filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which after investigating the complaint may either take up the cause on behalf of the employee or issue a "right to sue letter" giving the employee the freedom to pursue the case on his or her own behalf. In this case, the EEOC sued the company on Jones' behalf in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Alabama.
The EEOC complaint was dismissed by the court under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) for failure to state a claim under which relief can be granted. Specifically, the complaint did not allege that Jones' dreadlocks hairstyle, even though culturally associated with race, is an "immutable trait" characteristic of a certain race, as required by legal precedent. The dismissal was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
CMS also argued that its "grooming policy" was "race-neutral," requiring that employee hairstyles "reflect a business/professional image" and prohibiting any "excessive hairstyles," which happened to include dreadlocks along with other "excessive" hairstyles.
CMS is urging the Supreme Court not to take the case on procedural grounds. They allege that Jones was not technically a party to the original lawsuit, which was between the EEOC and CMS, and therefore she lacks standing to file the appeal. Jones has moved to intervene in order to file a petition for a writ of certiorari. A response in opposition to the motion and a reply to the response in support of the motion have been filed. The case is Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Petitioner v. Catastrophe Management Solutions, number 14-13482.
