A White Baltimore arts executive was recently fired in September from the Baltimore Rock Opera Society. The reason was not that Kelly Carnes was chronically absent or failed to perform her duties as the new executive director. Rather, it was the hairstyle that she briefly adopted on vacation. You see, Carnes is white, and co-workers were apparently triggered by her getting cornrows while attending the Burning Man festival. It was not deemed a fun hairstyle choice adopted on a vacation but rather a despicable case of cultural appropriation that warranted her termination.
Carnes was hired on Sept. 8 and was heralded for her more than 21 years of experience in arts leadership, nonprofit strategy, communications, fundraising, and operations.
She said that she adopted cornrows as a ‘protective style’ while attending Burning Man.
We have previously discussed cultural appropriation controversies where people were triggered by cornrows, dreadlocks (and here), food (and here), costumes, big hoop earrings, yoga (and here), songs, opera, or dance styles. Businesses and universities have yielded to these attacks, curtailing a wide array of different forms of free expression in the name of cultural tolerance.
Activists have even targeted artist Bo Derek for wearing cornrows in her Movie “10.” These critics ignore that many hairstyles, like music and dance styles, began with particular cultural groups before becoming popular with general populations.
The Baltimore Rock Opera publicly stated that it knew its new executive director was spotted with cornrows and that it would immediately conduct a full investigation.
The Opera has now triggered a possible hair-raising case in which Carnes could allege racial discrimination. It would also make a novel and potentially important free speech case.
At issue may be Maryland’s CROWN Act, which protects minority employees from discrimination based on traits associated with race, such as hair texture, afro hairstyles, and protective hairstyles. The law must apply equally to all races, including hairstyles adopted by Caucasian employees.
Under the state’s discrimination laws, cornrows are clearly not a matter that would “reasonably preclude the performance of the employment.” It is an objection to the appearance of employees based on racial bias or intolerance.
In my view, this is clearly racial discrimination as well as an abridgment of free expression. This is even clearer after Maryland enacted the CROWN Act, which defines race for anti-discrimination protections to include “traits associated with race,” such as hair texture, Afro hairstyles, and protective hairstyles.
The fact that this was passed with reference to protect African American employees is not determinative. Carnes was fired because of her race and the adoption of a rule barring hairstyles on a racial basis.
Maryland said that it wanted to protect hairstyles. This may not be the litigant that they had in mind, but it is the same form of racial discrimination.
For the left, the Carnes case could be a discomforting moment of having to face racial discrimination done in the name of racial harmony or equity. At one point, the left relished hairstyle freedom as a form of free expression. That was captured in the popular musical Hair, which became a virtual national anthem for the left in the 1970s.
“Hair (hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair)
Grow it, show it
Long as I can grow it
My hairI want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy
Snaggy, shaggy, ratsy, matsy
Oily, greasy, fleecy
Shining, gleaming
Flaxen, waxenKnotted, polka-dotted
Twisted, beaded, braided
Powdered, flowered, and confettied
Bangled, tangled, spangled (and spaghettied!).”
While the Supreme Court has only addressed hair regulations a few times (often in the context of allowable hair regulations for military or prison settings), hairstyles are (in my view) a form of free expression.
A few lower courts have supported that view. In Breen v. Kahl, the Seventh Circuit found in 1969 that “The right to wear one’s hair at any length or in any desired manner is an ingredient of a personal freedom protected by the United States Constitution.” While the appellate court was equivocal on where this right rested between the First and Ninth Amendments, it concluded that “it clearly exists and applies to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
There can also be religious-clause protections for hairstyles, though that is not the case here. However, there remains good-faith debate over the extent to which hairstyles are protected in comparison to free speech.
That is why this case is more likely to be resolved on the grounds of racial discrimination. Baltimore Rock Opera’s firing of Carnes because of her race appears incontrovertible. If she were an African American, she would still be the executive director wearing cornrows. The Opera is telling employees that their hairstyles will be monitored on the basis of their race.
As Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote, “It is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.” While he may have been thinking more about college admissions than hairstyles, it is still true that “The way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Carnes could make a lasting contribution to constitutional law by standing firm against this discriminatory action. Of course, it is not easy to suddenly find yourself the target of a woke mob. She no doubt feels, as observed in Richard III, that “My hair doth stand on end to hear [these] curses.” However, we are all cursed if the mob is allowed to control how we appear in public.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
Long hair is not natural for black people. So then, wearing long haired wigs (especially blonde wigs) must be “cultural appropriation”.
It’s a ridiculous concept. We all borrow from other subgroups, to the betterment of all of us. The idea that one subgroup OWNS anything in perpetuity dumb.
Trump is Satan having his last hurrah with all of the power at his disposal.
And what power might that be that a human has at his disposal?
Authorities Now Believe FlyDubai Copilot Radicalized By Watching Ms. Rachel Videos
“We can now confirm that the attacker had accessed Ms. Rachel videos on Netflix, which started a spiral of Islamic radicalization,” announced a Dubai security spokesman. “This is why stopping terrorism has become so much harder in the modern age. No longer are these extremists traveling to Afghanistan and becoming indoctrinated in person. Today, all they need is a Netflix subscription and the ability to sit through thirty minutes of Ms. Rachel.”
https://babylonbee.com/news/authorities-now-believe-flydubai-copilot-radicalized-by-watching-ms-rachel-videos
This is something satan would say! Deceiver!
Turley is not being consistent.
He is usually gung-ho for punishment when a private entity is the one being the punisher; fairness, reason, and logic be damned.
This is a blatant violation of The CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair) Act, which prohibits discrimination based on hair style and hair texture. Maryland was one of the early adopters of the Crown Act, but it also applies federally. It’s also a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act because had Kelly Carnes been Black, instead of White, she would not have been fired.
The Baltimore Rock Opera is going to be sued up and down, and they will be pulling their hair our after they lose big time.
Until recently, it was thought that Friderich Neitsche was the most insightful thinker about our future. But it turns out that Lewis Carrol was way ahead of him. We have descended into lunacy.
Let’s hope she fights this one out. I imagine there will be a bevy of lawyers eager to take this case and make a name for themselves along with a nice chunk of change.
“The Baltimore Rock Opera publicly stated that it knew its new executive director was spotted with cornrows and that it would immediately conduct a full investigation.”
These people are absurd.
Your comment is beyond absurd.
Baltimore Rock Opera’s firing of Carnes because of her race appears incontrovertible. If she were an African American, she would still be the executive director wearing cornrows.
This is exactly the basis for Bostock, which the right loves to denounce. Contrary to what most people seem to think, Bostock didn’t uphold the “transgender” view, it simply said that if an employer allows female employees to wear dresses then it may not discriminate against male employees, and must allow them to wear dresses too. It can’t say dresses are appropriate for women but not for men. In exactly the same way if an employer allows black employees to have cornrows then it must allow other employees to have them too. I don’t see any way at all out of that reasoning.
Definitely brings to mind the appropriation of the “straight” hair enthusiasts from the black community. Isn’t that cultural appropriation?
Someone is going to have a great pay day.
I suspect the source of the mentality is autonomous but is promoted and buttressed by the lawfare apparatus operating on the part of what Thomas Sowell has called ‘the mascots of the Anointed’. Why not restore freedom of contract and freedom of association? See to it that recruitment and promotion in the public sector is regulated by impersonal, rigorous, and timely examinations; see to it that examinations govern recruitment and promotion in private natural monopolies; and see to it that ‘anti-discrimination law’ applies to transactions between providers and consumers if and only if (1) the provider is a government agency or government corporations; (2) the provider is trading in medical services; or (3) the provider is in the business of providing services specifically for travelers (though non-travelers might find the services useful; see to it that anti-discrimination law applies to certain sorts of provisions in collective bargaining agreements; and see to it that it applies to the operations of accrediting agencies. Otherwise, no ‘anti-discrimination’ law.
One issue we have in this country is the lawn sprinkler of government cash to corporate bodies. Government contracts should be awarded via sealed bids and other corporations should receive insurance re-imbursements and voucher redemptions if they were selected as service providers by individuals and households. And, while we’re at it, governments should as a rule issue vouchers only for schooling and finance insurance programs only for medical care and long-term care. That aside government grants to corporate bodies and vouchers to households for miscellaneous expenses should be limited to disaster relief with some grants going to corporate bodies which provide hands on services and some to corporate bodies which have been injured in the disaster.
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Another issue in this country is the finance of what might be called the ‘philanthropic sector’ (of which actual charity is a subset). As a rule, it should receive no government cash beyond the circumscribed circumstances noted above. Individual philanthropies should be dependent on their fee-for-service income, donations, and endowment income and should be debarred from receiving grants from corporate bodies except in discrete circumstances – viz, campaign committees should be able to receive cash from political parties and contribution bundlers and service providers other than professional associations, trade associations, and labor unions should be able to receive donations from foundations. Foundations should be limited in their activities to disbursing grants and should be evanescent – i.e. liquidated within sixty years of their foundation with none of their assets distributed to other foundations.
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Business corporations should be debarred by law from remittances to any parties other than employees, suppliers, creditors, or shareholders. Anything else should be defined as embezzlement and lead to criminal prosecution of corporate officers and the corporation itself.
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The ‘Baltimore Rock Opera Society’ is one might wager run by clowns who do not merit being taken seriously and who would behave this way without any outside stimulus. The least we can do for social sanity is to make sure their ends do not ride on the appropriation of others means.
This appears to be another case of leadership bowing to the woke views of its staff. Attacks on cultural appropriation are particularly ignorant; as Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the adoption by one culture of the practices of another have often driven change, development and progress. Even when it’s simply a matter of style, it’s nothing to oppose. I hope Carnes brings a claim, but my guess is that she won’t, unless she accepts giving up any prospect of future employment in most of today’s cultural institutions.
This is going to be fun. At some point I fully expect Kelly Carnes to win her case big if she sues. I do not understand the issue over hair. Are people mad because she has some and others do not? If the Baltimore fired her for race based hair, they have lost already regardless of the reason. I hope they hit hit with a big payout. Money talks and just maybe, they will start to listen.
“Are people mad because . . .”
They’re irrationally upset because they’re tribalists. And nothing irritates a tribalist more than an “outsider” infringing on their cultural identity. That is the “warmth of collectivism.”
It would be acceptable to declare Baltimore a “no-go” city where Americans should not go. This is akin to making Baltimore quarantined, just like would be done for any region with a deadly disease. The State Department does this for other countries.
I have always wondered whether the famous musical HAMILTON violates today’s woke standards. How can people of one race purport to portray people of a different race, including wearing the clothes the latter people would have worn?
You beat me to it. And how about black Cleopatra and black Helen of Troy? If they really enforced their own standards on themselves, Baltimore would be full of grass skirts.
The point of all this is, as usual, cultural Marxism. We marginalize you and take your stuff. You can’t marginalize us because you’re being replaced, white boy. This is the ugliest the left has ever gotten in the West, and yet, they complain about racism. “It’s ok when we do it!”
Ooh day can you see my eyes if you can then my hairs too short.
I cannot watch Gayle King on the TeeVee anymore because her straight brunette hair triggers me.
These idiots get bogus college degrees and then automatically think they’re intelligent. Except, they’re not.
BTW, I thought basketball was invented by a white dude. With this idiocy, it follows that blacks should not be able to participate in basketball.
Imagine how Michelle Obama would be received by the cultural hairstyle expert at the opera in Baltimore.
What total nonsense. Except for the firing which seems without cause. It will be interesting to see what the results of the legal hair entanglement are. Other this just seems like a childish hair pulling contest.