Afro Hair Tings - The CROWN Act: A Performance
- Kiing Curry
- Feb 11
- 3 min read
FREE BHM POST
Afro Hair Tings - The CROWN Act: A Performance
We will cover your hair with law
while your body remains unprotected,
still a commodity of the land.
The CROWN Act is a legal tool.
It teaches separation —
cut yourself from what has always been culturally whole
and align with a system
that denies you at every turn,
then asks you to be grateful for the permission to exist.
Before I begin, hear this in full:
The moment we expect the state to intervene
on and within Indigenous Black hair culture,
we have already lost the plot.
Our hair is Closed Practice
yet we open it to regulation, discipline,
and public interpretation.
That’s not protection.
That’s management.
Look at the record.
When Black children are punished for locs,
the courts split hairs about length versus style.
When Black workers lose jobs for their hair,
cases stall, get withdrawn, get buried in procedure,
or are left in limbo long enough for the harm to calcify into precedent.
The law exists.
Relief does not.
So tell me —
what kind of protection only works on paper?
The majority of those enforcing “professionalism”
are often Black bodies themselves,
working within systems that taught them
our bodies require supervision,
our culture requires correction,
our hair requires permission.
Fifty-plus years after civil rights,
whiteness and the state are still treated as outracing grace,
as if proximity to power could wash away
the fact that nothing structurally changed.
We fail to understand our Hairatage
because we keep asking for honor
from those with no investment in Black sovereignty.
We keep seeking recognition from institutions
whose entire lineage is built on our regulation.
And let’s be honest about the lie of universality:
light skin with locs does not meet the same violence
as dark skin with locs.
Thin bodies move through rooms
that fat Black bodies are policed out of.
Texture, shade, size, gender —
the law flattens nuance into language
and calls it equity.
We can’t even agree within our own communities
on how to tend our hair with care,
how to hold the science of moisture and breakage,
how to protect against the cosmetic industry’s quiet poisoning —
and yet another statute is supposed to save us?
This law is colonial wildfire:
a performance of flame.
It burns bright for the audience
while nothing in the furnace is lit.
Business continues as usual.
Our bodies will never find sovereignty
waiting on the same state
that once held us up for sale on the auction block.
Our hair defies gravity.
It reaches for air.
It remembers.
Theirs clings to poisoned ground,
limp tufts tethered to that strange fruit on the poplar tree.
Our hair knows the sky.
The law only knows how to cage the earth.
Recently, Cuyahoga County became the first county in Ohio to pass its own version of the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against natural hairstyles — including afros, locs, braids, twists, and other textures tied to Black cultural identity — in employment, housing, and public accommodations.
On October 14, 2025, the County Council voted to adopt this ordinance, and it took effect on November 13, 2025, with the stated goal of affirming dignity and preventing bias tied to hair texture and style.
But even with this local legal victory, the deeper picture remains unchanged:a law’s existence does not guarantee care, repair, or justice. For any statute — whether in Cuyahoga or anywhere else — to make a real difference for Black bodies means having a judicial system and political ecosystem committed to supporting the healing, dignity, and reparation of Black life. Legal language alone cannot dismantle centuries of anti-Black discrimination or the subjective interpretations that still leave Black people vulnerable.
Ohio is a politically conservative state where racist policy and systemic harm against Black communities are not abstract ideas but lived realities. The passage of a local anti-discrimination measure does not erase the broader structures that depend on the marginalization, exploitation, and policing of Black bodies. Law without transformation remains performance — a claim of protection that still requires adjudication in courts and enforcement by systems historically hostile or indifferent to Black life.
In Cuyahoga County, a CROWN Act may signal progress on paper (performance), but the work of dismantling anti-Black harm — both outside and inside the so-called justice system — remains unfinished. The true measure of any law’s impact is not its passage, but whether it shifts power, changes culture, interrupts patterns of violence, and restores the sovereignty of Black bodies — goals that no statute alone can accomplish.
Thank you so much for making this blog free! I really appreciated how you also made references and links to different areas of your site like the Glossary and the explanation on the Six Waters. Your site in its current form is immaculate.