Читать книгу Bottleneckers - William Mellor - Страница 10
ОглавлениеJestina Clayton nervously approached the armed guard standing outside the US Embassy in Conakry, Guinea. The soldier’s hard gaze and automatic rifle were having their intended effect. Desperate for a visa to escape her war-ravaged home country of Sierra Leone, she, along with many others, had been sitting outside the embassy for three days. Absent the visa, she would be forced to return to a home devastated by civil war and, perhaps, to a terrible fate she had seen befall family members and friends. “Young girls, young women my age were being taken,” Jestina recalled.1 As a child, she narrowly escaped the same happening to her. “We were hiding in a building. My mother dressed me like an old person and then stood in front of me to hide me while the rebels took my best friend.”2
At the age when girls in the United States are just beginning fourth grade, Jestina was worried about whether she would live to see the next day: “I was nine when the civil war started, and for a long time it was just survival, making sure that . . . I’m alive the next day, that my family is alive, and that my friends are.”3 Jestina’s life of survival lasted for nine of the eleven years of Sierra Leone’s civil war.
The war in Sierra Leone began in 1991, forming the bloody climax of a postcolonial history marked by frequent coups, juntas, contested elections, and rampant corruption.4 By the time Jestina was born in 1982, the country had already suffered decades of political upheaval, economic turmoil, social distress, and the pauperization of its people.5 As she grew, her mother provided her as stable a life as possible and passed on elements of a cultural heritage she had learned as a girl, one of which was hair braiding. She learned to braid hair at the age of five, first braiding her mother’s hair and then spending her youth braiding for other girls and women.6 As a young girl and then as a teenager, braiding was more than a way to style hair for Jestina; it was also part of her identity. Little did she know what role it would play in her life in the years to come.
When the civil war erupted in Sierra Leone, her family spent the next nine years struggling to survive in and out of displacement camps, fleeing in the face of rebel soldiers. Constantly aware of the fate of other young girls, her mother insisted that Jestina find a way to escape. Reluctantly, Jestina tracked down the phone number of an aunt living in the United States and used funds her aunt provided her to travel to Conakry in neighboring Guinea—a trip of more than 160 miles—to secure a visa to escape to the United States.
And so it came to pass that this young woman of eighteen approached a US soldier at the embassy in Guinea, not as a naïve teenager seeking a cosmopolitan life in the United States but as a war-weary survivor leaving her family to avoid what had befallen so many females of her age. Through a stroke of luck, Jestina’s request to the embassy guard resulted in an interview, then a visa, and then, in relatively short order, a trip to the United States. On August 10, 2000, Jestina arrived in New York, where she lived with family for three years. She quickly set about seeking to provide for herself. She completed her GED in 2001 and began taking a course in computer literacy. All the while, she applied the knowledge she had gained through her cultural roots by braiding the hair of members of her family.
In 2003, Jestina got married and shortly thereafter moved to Utah, where her husband’s family lived. A year later, she enrolled at Weber State University to earn a degree in political science. Her husband, Paul, was also in college, and they began a family. Paying tuition for two, regular bills, and the expenses that go with having children added up quickly. Jestina and Paul were getting by, but just barely.
Paul worked at the local hospital, and Jestina tutored on her college campus and worked at the student newspaper. She secured scholarships for her studies, and members of her family helped when they could, but the couple had no money for even the simplest of luxuries such as eating at a restaurant. They considered applying for government support but ultimately rejected it. “It’s my responsibility,” Jestina explained, adding:
When you think about how I was raised, we did not get anything from the government. I felt like I needed to handle my own affairs. It was important that we do our best to take care of ourselves. We did not even take financial aid, no student loans. This was about ourselves, not getting handouts. There were times we wanted to give up. It was hard, and after we had our second child, it was pretty tough.7
Jestina and Paul lived a frugal existence, cutting every conceivable corner to provide for their family and pay for the schooling they knew would afford them a better life in the future, but despite their best efforts, more money was going out than was coming in. Jestina cast about for a way to earn extra money. It had to be something with enough flexibility that she could care for her family and continue her education. She also needed to be able to generate income immediately, without significant upfront training. It was then that a confluence of circumstances provided the answer. She would do the thing she had done her entire life—indeed, something African women have done for thousands of years—she would braid hair.8
THE ART OF HAIR BRAIDING
The highly specialized and intricate crafts of twisting, braiding, weaving, and locking natural hair into different styles are types of hair braiding mostly used by African Americans. Today, these distinct techniques are generally grouped together under the rubric of “natural haircare,” because they do not use any chemicals or artificial hairstyling techniques. The history of this type of hair braiding is thousands of years old.9
In African cultures, the grooming and styling of hair has long been an important social ritual. Elaborate hair designs reflecting tribal affiliation, status, sex, age, occupation, and the like are common, and the cutting, shaving, wrapping, and braiding of hair are centuries-old arts.10 Anthropologists have identified the symbolism associated with hair as particularly powerful and important in individual and group identity in numerous world cultures.11
When African captives were brought to America to serve as slaves, the symbolism of and emphasis on their hair was preserved,12 but by the nineteenth century the physical attributes of African Americans—their skin color, facial structure, and hair characteristics—had become freighted with negative connotations. Whites frequently referred to black hair as “wool” in order to differentiate it from the “superior” texture of white hair.13 Blacks were taught to view straight, light-colored hair as the paramount expression of female beauty, which led to racial self-hatred, shame, and pervasive hair straightening in the African American community, typically accomplished through chemical means.14
It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that natural African hairstyles began to reemerge. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Afros; dreadlocks; cornrows; and braids decorated with chevrons, beads, and mirrors became the symbols of black pride and a rejection of the white aesthetic that had for so long dominated the black sense of self.15 The effect of such symbolism was profound. As Roberta Matthews, an African American woman, now in her early seventies, recalled, “When I first saw a woman with an Afro, I was shocked. I could barely look at her. I almost fainted.” That was 1958. Yet, moved by the symbolism of natural hair, Roberta, too, began wearing her hair in an Afro two years after that encounter. The disapproval among her relatives was immediate and severe. “‘Why do you want to mess yourself up like that?’ they asked me. They thought I was awful.”16
Ever so slowly, the negative view of natural hair changed. Today, although still viewed with some skepticism both inside and outside of the African American community,17 natural hairstyles for African Americans have become so popular that natural haircare has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry, with specialized products and training. Braiding salons operate in cities large and small all over the country, and the number of women (and some men) who braid for money out of their houses may comprise even more people.
HAIR-BRAIDING BOTTLENECKERS
In 2005, Jestina was one of those women.18 When she fled Sierra Leone, she had already been braiding hair regularly for more than a decade. So, when she began looking for ways to make some extra money for her family, circumstances in her small Utah town provided the answer. Her community of about fifteen thousand people had no professional braiding salons, and there was demand for braiding services. Some families in her town had adopted African or Haitian children and had no idea how to style their hair.19 Jestina quickly picked up twelve to fifteen clients and made, in a good year, about $4,800.20 She braided in her home, mostly on Saturdays, while Paul cared for their children. “It’s not like it was bringing me millions, but it was covering groceries,” she explained.21
After earning her degree, she considered taking a job in an office but instead decided to open her own hair-braiding business.22 As Jestina recalled,
I did apply for jobs and had interviews, and I could make 12 to 16 dollars an hour, but the costs of childcare would have meant making about two dollars an hour, plus all of the family responsibilities and added stress, it was just not worth it. But if I could continue to braid, even though it’s not a lot of money, I could do it from home and I could care for my children and not add things in my life I didn’t need.23
So Jestina advertised her hair-braiding services on a local Web site and slowly began growing her business—until the day she received a fateful message.24 While checking her business e-mail account, she came across a chilling anonymous note: “It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license. Please delete your ad, or you will be reported.”25
Jestina was stunned. When she first began braiding for money, she had checked the required credentials and was told by a state regulator that she did not need a cosmetology license as long as she did not cut or use chemicals to style hair.26 Additionally, she had been braiding for years without a single complaint. Her modest income certainly posed no serious threat to established cosmetologists in town. And besides, she wasn’t even doing cosmetology. She thought, “I’m not using chemicals. I’m not doing cosmetology stuff”27—the practices the regulator had told her required a license.
To confirm what the regulator had said, she contacted the state cosmetology board, and this time the answer she got differed. To her disbelief, she was told she had to get a government-issued license requiring two thousand hours of training and the successful completion of a licensing test.28 That disbelief turned into dismay when she began calling cosmetology schools in her area: “I called about six schools along the Wasatch Front and they told me that they don’t teach braiding and that . . . if I want to specialize in braiding[,] I would have to get independent help with that.”29
Like Kim Powers Bridges, the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey, and Pastor Craigmiles, Jestina was caught in a bottleneck. To get the license and continue working, she would have to spend two thousand hours in classes that would cost her up to $18,00030 and teach her nothing about braiding but only about skills completely irrelevant to her work.
The cosmetology laws were not specifically designed to block hair braiders; indeed, they typically contain no explicit language about hair braiding. In this way, they are very different from casket laws, which were created for the express purpose of limiting sales of caskets to funeral directors. In hair braiding, the requirement to get a license is the result of the initial adoption of cosmetology laws in the early twentieth century, at which time African hair braiding as a specialization, let alone an occupation, was unheard of. As the demand for and supply of professional hair braiding increased in the latter half of the century, cosmetology bottleneckers did not bother to change laws in their own favor. They simply used the power of licensing boards, through the vehicle of license creep, to achieve their ends.
LICENSE CREEP
License creep is a phenomenon in which regulators expand the scope of an existing licensing regime to cover a different occupation—one that presents new competition to the established trade.31 In the case of hair braiding, license creep was the result of expanding cosmetology licenses to cover those who offer only hair-braiding services. Because regulatory boards that are established to oversee a licensing process are typically made up of current practitioners in a field and funded by licensees’ dues, the boards have tremendous incentives to adopt and enforce a broad interpretation of a license’s scope. The boards fight to preserve their power and the status quo rather than allowing seemingly complicated innovations that could disrupt the status of current service providers and force them to adapt or work harder. All too often, the result is that new business models or techniques are choked off as the would-be innovators are forced to undergo costly and irrelevant training or testing, or are effectively shut down with threats of fines, injunctions, or even criminal prosecution.
Hair braiding has not been the only target of license creep by cosmetologists and their regulatory boards. Also targeted has been the all-natural grooming practice of South Asian and Middle Eastern eyebrow threading, in which practitioners remove unwanted facial hair by forming a loop with cotton thread and then quickly brushing it along the face of a client to remove hair. Like hair braiding, this increasingly popular service has existed for centuries and requires no heat, chemicals, or sharp objects; it merely uses thread that it glides along the surface of the skin. Yet cosmetology boards in several states require that eyebrow threaders obtain expensive and irrelevant Western-style cosmetology licenses.32
Dentists, too, have joined the trend of license creep. In a number of states, dental boards and dental associations have pressed for laws that require entrepreneurs who sell, provide guidance, and host the application of over-the-counter teeth-whitening kits to be fully licensed dentists. Yet it is perfectly legal for someone to take the very same products home and use them without supervision. On average, a dentist can earn $25,000 annually by performing teeth whitening, and in states where nondental entrepreneurs can still whiten teeth, dentists routinely charge two to six times more than nondentists.33
Elsewhere, veterinary boards have tried to sweep the traditional practice of horse-teeth floating into their domain. Because horses’ teeth grow throughout their lifetimes, it is necessary to file them. Floating is a safe, proven, and painless procedure for doing this, and the trade has often been passed down in families through the generations. Although floating has been practiced for centuries without requiring a government-issued license, state veterinary boards in Minnesota and Texas blocked their less expensive—and often far-better-qualified—nonveterinarian competitors from offering the service. This bottleneck is imposed even though few veterinary schools provide significant instruction in dentistry, let alone teeth floating.
In yet another example, Texas regulators, at the behest of politically powerful private investigators, defined the practice of private investigation so broadly that it even included a variety of computer repair services, forcing computer technicians in the state to obtain a costly private investigator’s license before servicing computers—or else face steep penalties. Thanks to the fallout from a legal challenge, that bottleneck was cracked open and is no longer imposed.
BEATING BACK THE CREEP
A defining characteristic of license creep is the tenuous-at-best relationship between the targeted occupation—like hair braiding—and the requirements of complying with the licensing scheme imposed upon it. Indeed, in Jestina’s case, she found the incongruity so stark that she thought an appeal to the state board would be sufficient to resolve the matter. Armed with a detailed PowerPoint presentation, she displayed illustrations of the discrepancy for the state licensing board for cosmetology/barbering, esthetics, electrology, and nail technology. The board, made up almost entirely of licensed barbers and cosmetologists, remained unmoved.34 So, Jestina had two choices: to get a license or to stop braiding.
Jestina resolved to do neither. Marshalling what she had learned to get her newly acquired degree in political science, she allied with Utah state representative Holly Richardson, who had adopted several children from Africa,35 to introduce a bill in 2011 to exempt natural hair braiding from the cosmetology license. In support of the bill, Richardson noted braiding’s importance to several ethnic communities for which it is traditional. But the representative and Jestina were no match for the cosmetologists, who mounted an aggressive lobbying campaign against the bill, flooding Richardson with e-mails and letters and turning out in full force at the legislature.36
When Jestina arrived at the capitol to testify in support of the bill, she found the hearing room overflowing with cosmetologists and cosmetology students. The latter had been told to log their required hours for the day by attending the hearing rather than going to class, and their behavior soon grew unruly. “The chairperson told the people that if they did not calm down they would have to leave,” Jestina recalled. “It was very intimidating. We had a few supporters, but it was pretty intense.”37
The message of the cosmetologists was clear: “We encourage regulation,” said Brad Masterson, a spokesman for the Professional Beauty Association (PBA). “Why should everyone else who’s doing hair have to conform to requirements and not her?”38 The PBA is the nation’s largest cosmetology trade association, boasting more than seven thousand licensed professionals and 1,900 companies as members.39 Its thirty-one-member staff includes an office dedicated to “government affairs and industry relations,”40 and the association funds the work of a nine-member government-affairs committee primarily composed of salon owners.41
Like the Utah cosmetology board, the PBA saw and continues to see any activity involving the styling of hair as being in need of regulation. Any threat to its monopoly produces a swift and coordinated response. Through a legislative tracking system, the PBA watches bills in every state and issues advocacy alerts to engage members in the respective areas.42 Members can then use the system to lobby legislators through a letter campaign. In 2012, for example, approximately twenty-one thousand letters were sent to state officials through the system in response to legislation.43 In addition to the legislative tracking system, the PBA hosts an advocacy blog to draw attention to threatening legislation or even a whiff of deregulation. For example, when former US House majority leader Eric Cantor singled out cosmetology licenses as examples of employment regulation in need of reform,44 the PBA responded with an open letter about the importance of licensing and provided “information” about deregulation to Cantor’s office.45
For in-person lobbying, the PBA organizes and provides resources to state-level coalitions. On its Web site, the association provides a list of “state captains” who lead advocacy efforts in their respective areas and serve as the PBA’s “eyes and ears on the ground when it comes to legislative matters.”46 As a state captain in Louisiana explained, “If [deregulation] comes to Louisiana, we will need to drop our shears and drop our combs, because we will need to go down to the state capitol and fight this.”47
In Indiana, that is precisely what happened. In 2011, state representative Dave Wolkins introduced House Bill 1006, which sought to eliminate the cosmetology board. In response, the PBA produced a captain-led effort in the state to storm the capitol, amassing one thousand cosmetologists to attend the committee hearing and protest the bill, thereby prompting thirty thousand phone calls, letters, and e-mails to legislative committee members.48 In response, Wolkins pulled the bill from consideration, noting, “I knew it was going to be a difficult day when all the cosmetologists were downstairs and started cheering: ‘We’ve got scissors, yes we do, we’ve got scissors, how ’bout you?’”49
A longtime staple in cosmetologists’ repertoire of bottlenecking activities is, similar to that of funeral directors, the threatening description of the “parade of horribles” that will befall consumers in the absence of licensing. In the late 1990s, for example, Gordon Miller of the National Cosmetology Association, which is now part of the PBA,50 defended California’s cosmetology requirement for hair braiders by raising the specter of disease. “They’re working in an environment where diseases and where head lice can be transmitted from person to person,” he cautioned.51
More than a decade later, the parade of horribles continued to march on. For example, in an advocacy document titled “Beware the ‘D’ Word,” Myra Irizarry, the PBA’s director of government affairs, warned:
If deregulation of cosmetology were to become a reality, any person without any formal education would be able to practice cosmetology, putting consumers at risk of injuries, burns, infections, and the spread of diseases, such as hepatitis and Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus (MRSA), due to unsanitary practices.52
Indeed, in the frenzy surrounding Richardson’s bill to exempt braiders from Utah’s cosmetology license, cosmetologists warned state legislators of just such scourges. Brenda Scharman, a representative of a cosmetology school, chairperson for government relations of a Utah beauty school association, and PBA state captain, described how braiding could “cause dangers to the scalp, to the skin, [and] allergic reactions.”53 Tamu Smith, a salon owner in Provo, Utah, testified that braiding was dangerous due to its potential to “create permanent hair loss if it is not done correctly.”54 And Brandy Pierson, a licensed Utah cosmetologist, drew applause from the hearing’s audience when she cautioned the committee, “When you do hair braiding, if the hair is not properly done right or taken care of, mold can grow in the hair, considering the hair is a keratin and protein-based product.”55 Lost in all the hyperbole was the fact that braiders don’t use chemicals that can burn consumers’ skin or engage in practices that can lead to injury. Moreover, as is often the case, the Utah bottleneckers did not advance their assertions with evidence that licensing could or would protect against such dangers.
Had the state board simply required minimal training on sanitation practices commensurate with the negligible risks associated with hair braiding, Jestina would have willingly complied. But, for Jestina, the fight to unshackle hair braiders from the cosmetology license was no longer just about her. With her degree in hand, she could have easily found a job making significantly more money than braiding could provide and let the status quo prevail. But after witnessing the cosmetology board’s arrogance and watching helplessly as the bottleneckers wielded exaggeration and influence to manipulate the legislature for their own benefit—and ultimately killing Richardson’s bill—she could not walk away.
On April 26, 2011, Jestina filed a lawsuit with the US District Court for the District of Utah to challenge the state’s hair-braiding regulations. In it, she argued that the state’s requirements for obtaining a license had nothing to do with her job and infringed upon her constitutional right to earn a living.56 She hoped that the state would move to change the law under pressure of a lawsuit, but the board held firm. In characteristic bottlenecker fashion, lawyers for the state asserted that the regulations were designed to protect public safety, health, and welfare.57 In this case, the judge was unimpressed.
On August 8, 2012, US district judge David Sam wrote:
Utah’s cosmetology/barbering licensing scheme is so disconnected from the practice of African hair braiding, much less from whatever minimal threats to public health and safety are connected to braiding, that to premise Jestina’s right to earn a living by braiding hair on that scheme is wholly irrational and a violation of her constitutionally protected rights.58
In a similar message to the one Jestina had conveyed in her plea before the cosmetology board, Judge Sam pointed out that there was no good reason to require a person wishing to braid hair to complete hours of classes unrelated to hair braiding. As evidence, the judge noted that hair braiding of any kind was mentioned in only 38 of the 1,700 pages of texts commonly used in Utah’s cosmetology schools. “Most of the cosmetology curriculum is irrelevant to hair braiding. Even the relevant parts are at best, minimally relevant,” he wrote.59 In response to this issue, the state’s attorneys could not answer “which, if any, schools teach hair braiding.”60
Finally, although he did not use the term as such, Sam highlighted the role of license creep in the board’s actions. He noted that it was “undisputed” that the legislature never considered African hair braiding when it enacted the cosmetology act, which meant the board was “irrationally squeeze[ing] ‘two professions into a single, identical mold’ by treating hair braiders—who perform a very distinct set of services—as if they were cosmetologists.”61
It did not take a multiday hearing to discern the irrationality of the board’s position. Just days after news of the judge’s decision broke, a letter to the editor appeared in one of Salt Lake City’s newspapers that illustrated how plain to see the bottleneckers’ motivation was:
Let me see if I have this straight. After a ground school and approximately 50 hours of instruction and flight experience, a person can be licensed to take himself or herself and any other trusting soul into the air in a private plane. And after a short school, a few hours of instruction and a few more of supervised driving, a 16-year-old can be licensed to take his or her friends and hurtle them down a highway at a murderous rate of speed. But to get a license to touch another person’s hair requires 2,000 hours of supervised experience and school tuition approaching $16,000. And the Utah barber/cosmetology licensing board wanted to require that Jestina Clayton of Centerville obtain such a permit before being allowed to braid a friend’s hair! Makes sense to me. I cannot imagine why the court sided with Clayton instead of the licensing board. If public safety is indeed the issue, we have it all backwards.62
Perhaps sensing a lost cause, the state declined to appeal the decision.63
A QUARTER CENTURY OF BOTTLENECKING
From the time of the appearance of that threatening e-mail to the time of the release of Judge Sam’s opinion, Jestina endured three years of occupational uncertainty, lost wages, and emotional turmoil. Had she been the first braider to battle the bottleneckers, resistance by the board and inaction by the legislature might have been explainable on the basis of low levels of awareness and misunderstandings about hair braiding. But in 2009, Jestina’s dustup with Utah’s truculent cosmetology board was just the latest in a series of battles against cosmetology bottleneckers going back at least a quarter century to when Taalib din Uqdah began his fight against the District of Columbia’s cosmetology board.
Taalib’s battle began in 1989 when he received a series of sharp knocks at his salon door.64 It had been a particularly busy day, and the persistent knocking was an unwelcome interruption. When he answered the door, Taalib found himself face to face with an enforcement officer from the DC Board of Cosmetology who demanded to see his cosmetology license. He replied that he had not realized that he needed one and promised to apply promptly. It was a promise he intended to keep—until he learned what the process required.
In order to continue braiding hair in the District of Columbia legally, Taalib would have to complete at least 1,500 hours of prescribed training in one of a handful of licensed cosmetology schools, which, at that time, charged between $3,500 and $5,000. He would be required to master chemical and heat treatments of hair—irrelevant to braiding—and spend 125 hours practicing shampooing techniques. Each of the ten people employed by Taalib would also have to get licensed in this way, and as a manager he would be required to undergo further training.
Seeing the training as nonsensical and unable to afford such time and expense, Taalib and his wife decided to stay open without a license. Soon the cosmetology police returned; this time with a cease-and-desist order and a $1,000 fine. He faced a choice: to close his business for months while he went to school or to continue to operate without a license and confront the prospect of more hefty fines and up to ninety days in jail.
By the time Taalib was informed of the licensure requirement, his business was already quite successful. In 1980, he and his wife, Pamela Farrell, had opened Cornrows & Co. with $500 in cash and three clients.65 It was the first hair-braiding salon in Washington, DC. Through hard work and excellent service, they developed a booming business in an urban area desperately in need of successful businesses. They built a clientele of thousands of customers, employed almost a dozen people, and enjoyed a revenue stream of half a million dollars a year. Some customers came from as far afield as Connecticut, six hours away, to receive hair styling.66 Then came those knocks at the door.
The laws that the cosmetology board used to approach Taalib were first enacted by Congress in 1938. The legislation was proposed by the Washington chapter of the national cosmetology trade association and was backed strongly by “an organization composed of most of the so-called exclusive, higher priced shops, and whose total membership today does not represent one-tenth of the beauty shops in Washington.”67
Among those opposed to the bill was a representative of small beauty salons who charged that those in favor were motivated by protectionist impulses:
This bill . . . is sponsored by the owners of the remaining number of exclusive and once high-priced beauty shops that remember the tremendous prices they once received from their fashionable patrons—and I fear that these same persons hope to get control of the situation in the legislation as proposed, limit or control competition, and perhaps somehow get back into the rich green pastures of yesterday.68
The District of Columbia’s health officer was equally skeptical: “In the title of the bill . . . where the language ‘for the protection of the public health’ occurs,” he testified, “I believe that this should be eliminated, to make it quite clear that this is a bill that means to protect primarily the guild interests.”69 Representative Martin Dies closed the debate by proclaiming:
In the guise of sanitation and health, the bill gives the board dictatorial powers which are not needed to accomplish the avowed purposes of the bill, but which may be used to narrow the field of competition so that competent and worthy people will be denied an opportunity to make a living.70
More than fifty years later, Dies’s proclamation sounded like prophesy. Rather than shutter his business, complete the irrelevant licensure requirements, and impose the same on his employees, Taalib petitioned the board to create an exemption for natural braiding.71 Using the same logic that Jestina Clayton would employ almost twenty years later, he argued that since his shop only braided hair, its work had nothing to do with cosmetology.72 He went so far as to hire a lawyer to draft proposed exemptions for African hairstyling, but the DC Board of Cosmetology—at the time made up entirely of licensed cosmetologists73—was recalcitrant. Taalib then lobbied the DC City Council, again asking that an exception be made for braiders. The result was the same. Finally, in September 1991, the DC Board of Appeals decided to uphold the $1,000 fines.74
Unbowed, Taalib sued the DC Board of Cosmetology on November 1, 1991, seeking an exemption from the licensing laws and the cessation of the board’s enforcement efforts, including its attempt to shut down his business.75 By that time, his plight had attracted national attention, so much so that a member of the cosmetology board appeared on ABC’s 20/20 program to defend the board’s attempts to close Cornrows & Co.
The appearance backfired. As the late William Raspberry wrote in his nationally syndicated column following the broadcast:
A member of the District of Columbia’s Cosmetology Board was on ABC’s “20/20” program the other night, looking hidebound and ridiculous. Small wonder. She was defending the city’s attempt to close down Cornrows & Co., a beauty salon that specializes in African-style hair braiding, all because the operators are not school-trained and certified in pin-curling, chemical treatments and a host of other techniques the shop never uses. . . . It looked for all the world as though the members of the Cosmetology Board, almost all of them beauty shop and/or beauty school operators, were more interested in protecting their own interests than in reaching a sensible resolution of the licensing case.76
On February 2, 1992, US district judge Stanley Sporkin reluctantly ruled against Taalib, citing an old Supreme Court precedent,77 but he nevertheless chided the DC City Council for its actions.78 Stating that he was “very disturbed” by the council’s failure to change its regulations, Sporkin wrote, “It is difficult to understand why the District of Columbia wants to put a legitimate business out of operation.”79 He thus urged the district to reconsider the issue:
Certainly the D.C. Council can exercise sound judgment and common sense to accommodate Plaintiffs’ needs . . . the Court would certainly urge the District to consider the plight of Plaintiffs and the good citizens they have faithfully served for over twelve years.80
Taalib appealed the decision, but the suit was eventually dropped when, in December 1992, the city council amended the cosmetology law, creating a less onerous and more sensible specialty license just for natural haircare.81 Although this represented a victory for Taalib and other braiders who would later open shops of their own, it did not come cheap. “I think about all the things I could have done . . . if I hadn’t been so consumed by my struggle just to earn an honest buck,” Taalib said ruefully.82
Although the issue was settled in DC, in the years after his battle, Taalib’s story would play out again and again with the bottleneckers in states across the country, only with different actors and slight variations in circumstance. On October 1, 1997, Cheryll Hosey sued the state of Ohio because it required that hair braiders earn a cosmetology license in order to braid hair for a living. The cosmetology license required about nine months of training at a cost of between $3,000 and $5,000 (at that time) and passing a state test.83 By the time Cheryll opened her salon in 1996, she had already been braiding for eighteen years, having first learned the skill as a young child. As the years went on, she realized the potential to make braiding a career. “I’ve had so many family members and friends who said ‘braid my hair, braid my hair’ that I said, ‘I can make this my business.’”84 And so she did; by the one-year anniversary of her business, she was serving more than two hundred regular customers who kept coming back because she offered a service traditional salons had neither the time nor the skills to offer.85
All of this, however, was irrelevant to the Ohio State Board of Cosmetology. The board slapped Cheryll’s salon with several legal notices of violation and prevented it from receiving a much-needed small-business loan by telling the lender the salon would not be able to continue operating without a cosmetology license. According to Dave Williamson, then executive director of the board, getting the license was necessary to learn about public health and safety,86 but that weak justification did not enjoy much support among legislators.
As the lawsuit made its way through federal court, a bill was introduced in the state House and an amendment offered in the Senate to exempt braiding from the cosmetology law. Senator Eric Fingerhut had learned of the plight of braiders trying to make a living and was appalled and sponsored the Senate amendment. “Then in comes the State of Ohio, the same state that just told single women to get off public assistance, to put them out of business,” he said. “I’m outraged by it. I think it’s terrible public policy.”87 He was not alone. In 1999, the state legislature reformed the cosmetology laws, creating a natural haircare license, thereby making Cheryll’s lawsuit moot.88
While Cheryll faced the real possibility of losing her business, braiders in other states were experiencing even-worse trials.89 In places like Texas and California, investigators, often accompanied by police, threatened to lock braiders up and put them out of business.90 In October 1997, Dallas police arrested Dana “Isis” Brantley, a single mother of five children, who was running a salon as a way to transition from welfare to work.91
As Isis stood in her salon consulting briefly with a prospective client—who turned out to be an undercover officer with the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department—seven more officers rushed in, accompanied by a Texas State Cosmetology Commission inspector, who happened to be a former employee of a nearby cosmetology school. “I was placed in the back of the police car while my clients watched,” Isis recalled. “I have never been so humiliated in all my life.” Things only got worse from there. “I was strip searched, fingerprinted, photographed, and then placed in a holding cell with some really bad people. I just couldn’t believe I was being handcuffed and taken to jail like a common criminal for hair braiding.”92
In another crackdown, three undercover investigators from California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, posing as state police officers, staged a sting operation at a popular braiding salon in West Los Angeles on July 1, 1998. Investigator Ayn Lauderdale spent five hours having her hair braided by shop owner Sabrina Reece, then slipped into the bathroom and reappeared in a police jacket, soon to be joined by two more investigators. The three carried guns and rifled through the shop without a warrant, threatening to arrest Reece. After taking photographs and the Social Security numbers of everyone present, the investigators left with the so-called evidence—styling gel, a pair of scissors, a page torn from an appointment book, and a single hair clip—sealed in a plastic baggie. It wasn’t Sabrina’s first run-in with the state’s cosmetology board. The thirty-two-year-old mother of two had been fined the previous year for operating without a license.93
The motivation for such-aggressive police action was captured in a statement given to the Los Angeles Times by a licensed cosmetologist saying that Sabrina was “a threat to those of us who are licensed and went through the normal channels” and that unlicensed braiders could undercut cosmetologists’ earnings.94 Sabrina herself dismissed any notion of public health and safety concerns in the actions of the police and the state board, observing, “They had to pass a mountain of drug activity at the corner of West Adams to get to me.”95 Instead, she said, the actions were designed to stifle competition.96
But observers at the time identified a second reason for the raid on Reece’s salon: During the prior year, Dr. JoAnne Cornwell had sued the state of California over the requirement that braiders obtain a cosmetology license to practice. Cornwell, an associate professor of French and Africana studies at San Diego State University, is also a third-generation hairstylist and entrepreneur. Both her mother and grandmother owned hair salons in Detroit, and these businesses allowed them to gain a level of independence unheard of for most black women during that time. Cornwell first learned to braid as a young girl and then in the early 1990s created a new braiding technique called “sisterlocks,” using small, finely manicured locks. After trademarking the technique, she designed training materials and led workshops all over the country to teach it to others.
Cornwell then sought to expand her training program by opening her own salon in California, but she chose not to do so since it was illegal for someone who was not a licensed cosmetologist. Expanding her training program would not only have been personally profitable for her; it would also be a way of creating opportunities for black women to pursue entrepreneurship using their cultural heritage of braiding. On January 28, 1997, she sued the California Board of Barbering and Cosmetology, arguing that the cosmetology licensing requirement for African hair braiders violated her rights and the rights of others to pursue their profession free of onerous and unnecessary government regulation.
By July 1998, when the undercover investigators from California’s Department of Consumer Affairs raided Sabrina Reece’s braiding salon, Cornwell’s lawsuit was still ongoing. “That the sting was authorized while the lawsuit filed on behalf of California braiders [was] still pending was a heavy-handed show of authority, rather than a case of pressing public concern,” wrote a commentator for the Village Voice.97
The Village Voice was not alone in its skepticism about the need to impose—and enforce—a cosmetology license on hair braiders for the purpose of public safety. On August 19, 1999, US district judge Rudi Brewster struck down California’s requirement that African American hairstylists secure a cosmetology license. In a twenty-six-page decision, Brewster wrote, “There are limits to what the State may require before its dictates are deemed arbitrary and irrational.”98 On the basis that only 7 percent of the required training was even “possibly relevant” to hair braiding, the judge ruled that the licensure requirements were “wholly irrelevant to the achievement of the state’s objectives,” namely protecting public safety.99 The 1999 ruling confirmed an earlier decision in which the judge concluded that the regulations placed “an almost insurmountable barrier in front of anyone who seeks to practice African hair styling,” suggesting that the effect was “to force African hair stylists out of business in favor of mainstream hair stylists and barbers.”100
BOTTLENECKING INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Despite such positive decisions and legislative changes, braiders continued, at the dawn of the new century, to find themselves caught in the cosmetology bottleneck. Essence Farmer, an Arizona native, sought to open a hair-braiding salon in her hometown of Glendale. To do so, Essence was required by the state of Arizona to complete a 1,600-hour training program, at an approximate cost of $10,000, to earn a cosmetology license.101 The skills she needed to run her business, however, she had learned at the age of ten. As a teenager, she began braiding out of her parents’ home for money, serving five to six clients a week, some traveling forty miles or more for her services.
As Essence recalled about her early years,
There were not a lot of braiders at the time, and my client-base grew by word of mouth. Some of my clients were going to California or other long distances to have their hair done, so even though I was a teenager, I had a talent for braiding and clients liked going to someone local.102
Essence moved to Maryland in 2000 to attend Prince George’s Community College. Because Maryland exempts hair braiders from cosmetology licensing laws, she was able to braid many clients’ hair at Blowouts Salon and a barbershop called Hairstons.103 When she moved back to Arizona in 2003, she began braiding out of her house but soon learned she was doing so illegally. “I was reading an article in a magazine about someone who was arrested for braiding in California,” she explained, “and thought, ‘That’s crazy, why would she be arrested for braiding hair?’ But it made me cognizant of the idea that there might be a license in Arizona.” In a call to the state cosmetology board, her suspicion was confirmed. Moreover, she was informed that her years of professional experience were not sufficient: “They told me anything that involved touching hair was considered cosmetology and required the full license.”104
Essence was caught in the bottleneck, but she refused to remain stuck there. “I was discouraged, but I knew something had to be done about this. So I began looking for representation to sue the state board.” Her search led her to the Institute for Justice, which had represented Taalib and other braiders before her. In December 2003, Essence sued the state cosmetology board over her right to pursue the occupation of her passion. Her suit never made it to trial.
During the 2004 legislative session, Arizona lawmakers—in direct response to Essence’s lawsuit—did what the state board wouldn’t: it allowed people to practice the art of hair braiding without a cosmetology license. Representative Deb Gullett took up the cause, tacking the exemption onto a broader measure dealing with mobile cosmetology salons.105 “It just seemed to me that [forcing braiders to train as cosmetologists] was the stupidest thing that I had ever heard of,” recalled Gullett. “And thankfully people agreed with me.”106 On April 12, 2004, the provision passed Arizona’s legislature, opening the door for Essence and others to braid freely.
Four months after Arizona’s bottleneck was dislodged, Melony Armstrong, a hair braider in Tupelo, Mississippi, sued her state cosmetology board to achieve the same end. Similar to what happened in Arizona, the Mississippi legislature eventually changed the law to allow hair braiders to practice without a cosmetology license, but not before a fierce months-long battle, the roots of which can be traced back to a 1995 hair appointment for Melony.
The $75 appointment lasted about an hour. Melony had never had her hair braided professionally before, but she decided to try something new. One the day of her appointment, she and her husband, Kevin, drove about ninety minutes north into Memphis, the closest braiding salon to their home. While she was getting her hair done, Melony faced away from the mirror and chatted with the friendly stylist as she glanced curiously around the room at the styles other braiders were creating. Upon completion of the relatively simple style, the braider slowly turned her chair to face the mirror. As she did, Melony made a life-changing decision.107
“After having my hair braided and looking in the mirror, it immediately clicked—this hair thing, these braids, is what I want to do,” Melony remembered. “Even during the process, seeing this is a real live business. On the drive back—and that drive is one-and-a-half hours—it’s all I talked about to my husband. I’m going to be a professional hairbraider.”108
“She’s crazy,” Kevin thought to himself. They had a toddler at home. Besides Melony’s formal education was in psychology; she had worked at a battered women’s shelter, a boys’ home, and a state hospital. She knew nothing of braiding. Unlike many black women, she had never learned how to braid hair as a child. But she longed to create a business of her own.109
“I’ve always had that entrepreneurial spirit flowing in me,” she said. “My mind was clicking, ticking. It was just itching, gnawing at me, to do something else.”110 Melony saw the opportunity braiding presented for the Tupelo area. On the ride home from Memphis, Kevin couldn’t get a word in edgewise. Melony was suddenly on a mission that, unbeknownst to either of them at the time, would make headlines.
After a series of workshops, classes, and endless hours of practicing braiding, Melony began working on clients in her home in late 1995—first for free to gain experience and then for a fee. Because she was the only professional braider in the area, clients were drawn to her, especially those once forced to travel for their hairstyling. Melony knew she was on to something. The next step was moving her business outside of her home.111
To work as a hair braider in a salon, Melony needed to earn a license. Regulations required 1,200 hours of classes to obtain a cosmetology license. She had neither the time nor the resources to complete so many hours, but she soon discovered that Mississippi also had a largely moribund “wigology” license that required only three hundred hours of training. None of the training covered braiding, but for Melony it was a less costly means to an end.112 Melony obtained her wigology license and, to prepare herself for her own venture, began working at someone else’s salon on Mondays, when she didn’t conduct her own cosmetology services. This enabled her to work in a salon setting, which otherwise would not have been possible for her. But she soon tired of walking into someone else’s postweekend mess and, with her husband’s expertise in construction, started her own salon at a small shop where she also sold natural hair products. She named her business Naturally Speaking and steadily built up a clientele.113
Opening her own business was an important first step, but Melony wanted to do more. She felt she had a calling to teach other women not only about the hair-braiding trade but also about how to run a business, so that they could take what they learned from her and go out and support themselves. But, as she quickly realized, to fulfill that calling would require a battle with the bottleneckers.114 Before allowing her to teach others how to braid hair, the state cosmetology board required that Melony obtain a cosmetology license, then a cosmetology instructor’s license (another two thousand hours of class), and finally a school license—none of which would actually teach her anything about braiding. Paradoxically, the state awarded cosmetology instructors who had no experience in braiding licenses to teach braiding, even as it forbade experienced braiders from teaching their craft—unless they were willing to sacrifice three years and thousands of dollars to take a class teaching unrelated skills to earn the license. The result was that students of braiding had no skilled and legal instructors from whom to learn.115
For Melony, the injustice was too much. On August 5, 2004, she sued the state of Mississippi to free hair braiding from the cosmetology stranglehold. To protect its bottleneck, the state board introduced a bill in the 2005 legislative session designed to encompass hair braiding under the cosmetology law. Melony responded quickly, finding a sponsor for a bill of her own to exempt braiders from cosmetology regulations. The fight was on.
Throughout the first months of 2005, Melony made weekly seven-hour round-trips to the state capital of Jackson to convince legislators to change the law. She also organized potential braiders to contact lawmakers, responded to opposition from traditional cosmetologists, and engaged in other grassroots efforts, all of which meant spending countless hours away from her family and her business.116
In response, the bottleneckers flooded the capitol building, lobbying legislators aggressively for their cause. “The cosmetology industry is very powerful in this state, and they dictated the policy when it came to that industry,” explained Senator Hillman Frazier.117
“Literally for, I’m going to say, at least a week, maybe 10 days of that 90-day session, the Capitol was consumed by cosmetologists,” recalled Representative Steve Holland.118
And it was not just fully licensed cosmetologists; cosmetology students, too, were among the crowd, sent there by their schools. “Cosmetology students . . . were actually told, ‘In order to receive your hours for today, be at the Capitol.’ Some of them had no idea why they were even there,” Melony reported.119
The showdown finally occurred in a hearing before the House Public Health and Human Services Committee, chaired by Representative Holland, in which the cosmetologists’ bill to regulate hair braiders was considered. “I bet a thousand cosmetologists showed up, and they were not nice, let’s just leave it at that,” said Holland.120 Committee members heard all interested parties throughout the contentious meeting, but it became clear that the need to regulate hair braiders as cosmetologists was illusory. Instead, the bottleneckers were working to maintain their monopoly on hair care. Nevertheless, pressure on Holland to pass the bill out of committee continued.
“In the end, the Senate chairman even came down pretty hard on me,” remembered Holland, who then said,
Look, it’s just real simple, I do not give a damn whether there is a cosmetology law in the state of Mississippi or not, so don’t you come back to my office. It is over, do you understand? I will not put braiding in the law.121
And that was the end of it.
Meanwhile, Melony’s bill made it through the House but ran into trouble in the Senate, where the Public Health Committee voted almost along racial lines to maintain the licensing requirement for braiding. Most of the committee’s white senators voted to sustain the license.122 The only crossover was one white senator, Hob Bryan, who voted with the five black senators to deregulate braiding. The bill was eventually sent to a conference committee, and on April 19, 2005, all of Melony’s efforts paid off: Mississippi governor Haley Barbour signed legislation enabling hair braiders to practice their occupation without being required to take 1,200 hours of class to get a cosmetology license or 300 hours of class to get a wigology license. Currently, the only requirements are that hair braiders pay a small fee to register with the state and abide by all relevant health and hygiene codes.123
It is the latter requirement, in fact, that represents the one thing all parties have agreed on—at least rhetorically—during the decades-long hair wars. When Taalib’s story made national news on ABC’s 20/20, William Raspberry asked, “Why couldn’t [the cosmetology board] just make sure the place was kept safe, clean and sanitary for its customers?”124 In response, Taalib agreed: “I don’t have any problem with government wanting to protect public health and safety.”125 And when Dr. Cornwell sued the state of California, she argued from the beginning that braiding salons should be subject to applicable health standards,126 something even many braiders believe might be justified to include in mandatory training.127
Courts have come to the same conclusion. In April 2005, Lillian Anderson, an immigrant from Cameroon, sued the state of Minnesota over its requirement that braiders earn a cosmetology license to practice. Lillian first learned to braid in a local school in Buea, Cameroon. When she was a teenager, Lillian and her two sisters would sit in a circle and braid one another’s hair to practice their skills.128 After arriving in the United States in 1993, Lillian began braiding to support herself. By 1998, she was operating her own salon that served a loyal clientele of men and women of all races.129 But in doing so without a license, she was subject to up to $1,000 in fines and ninety days in jail, not to mention the stigma associated with breaking the law.130
It was the latter she found most vexing. She wanted to make an honest living, but she simply could not agree to complete irrelevant training. “Why should I have to pay when they don’t even teach this craft?” asked Lillian. “I learned everything I know as a little girl, sitting with my sisters, braiding in a circle.”131 In a judgment made on June 6, 2005, Judge Isabel Gomez vindicated her. In the thirty-two-page decree, the judge described in detail the content of cosmetology schooling and noted that none of it included training related to hair braiding. She also noted that if at some point in the future the state board were to enact genuine health and safety standards relevant to braiders, the court would deem these appropriate.132
Although leaders in the cosmetology industry similarly point to a need for training to protect public health and safety, they do so for strategic reasons. As Judge Brewster’s ruling illustrates, courts evaluate laws such as these based, in part, on intention and effect. Laws that are intended to protect public health and safety, and that are successful in doing so, are often upheld. On the other hand, laws whose primary purpose is or appears to be using state power for the purpose of giving one group an economic advantage are more likely to be struck down.
To fulfill the court’s criteria, industry leaders justify training requirements by rolling out the aforementioned parade of horribles. Where cosmetology bottleneckers diverge from others in this regard is in the amount of training time they believe is required to protect against disease and injury stemming from poor sanitation. As a house editorial in the Las Vegas Review-Journal asked,
Some states require up to 2,100 hours of study . . . at considerable expense . . . to acquire a cosmetology license. And even if it were true that a cosmetology school diploma guarantees the holder will never engage in unsanitary practices—it doesn’t—does anyone really need 2,100 hours, or even the “compromise” 300 hours now required to become a licensed “natural hair stylist” in Tennessee, to learn the importance of basic hygiene?133
Indeed, from the perspective of many observers, the only regulatory requirement that is necessary for braiders is spending enough hours in training to learn proper sanitation, and nothing else.134
But for all of the industry leaders’ talk, it is cosmetologists themselves who most aptly describe the motivation behind their licensing schemes. “If we have to take a minimum of 1,200 curriculum hours and pay up to $10,000 to learn our trade, why shouldn’t braiders?” one licensed cosmetologist asked.135 When Essence Farmer sued the state of Arizona, cosmetologists there reacted similarly. “We have to pay for our licenses to be trained to do things and just because [hair braiding is] the only thing she wants to do [doesn’t mean she should be exempt],” said Arizona Academy of Beauty instructor Elaine Rucker. “We have to undergo training and we pay for our licenses. If people start getting exemptions, what’s left for the rest of us?”136
Another reason that cosmetology schools are reluctant to support exemptions for hair braiders is because the licensing requirements mean big business for them. At the time, JoAnne Cornwell was suing the California state board, for example, total cosmetology classroom revenues and test admission fees came to $544 million in California.137 Practicing cosmetologists and the state boards that represent their interests perceive an economic threat from braiders.138 As Taalib explained, “Traditional cosmetologists are feeling the financial pinch of a rising and popular hairstyle. . . . In the effort to recover lost income, they are pressuring states to act as police agents for their cartels.”139 Indeed, some estimates put the size of the cosmetology industry at more than $20 billion in annual sales, generated by the more than seventy-five thousand salons and approximately half-a-million workers.140
Thus, bottleneckers defend their economic interests to the point of legal threats, fines, and armed police raids. “Regulations are more likely to be broadened by those who administer them than to be removed when they cease to serve a useful purpose,” observed the Orange County Register.141 Such broadening can occur stealthily through license creep, as when cosmetology has swallowed hair braiding, or it can be pursued more openly, such as by requiring licensure in an industry where the relationship between regulation and public health and safety is tenuous. Such an industry is the one focused on in the next chapter on interior design.
