Black Hair, Big Law (Part II): The Harshest Critics Of Black Attorneys' Hair

Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Angela Mackie-Rutledge back to our pages. Click here if you'd like to donate to MothersEsquire.

In order to gain a greater appreciation of the encounters and situations that Black attorneys, paralegals, and law students face, I created a survey in conjunction with the Big Law Black Hair Symposium.

I researched who had already done the serious in-depth quantitative investigations on Black hair and Big Law. There really wasn't much out there. It dawned on me that the research I had anticipated doing would be the only research available on the topic.

The lack of existing research sharpened my focus. It soon became my fervent hope that the initial research I was to conduct would eventually be the basis for another student's master's or PhD thesis. I would lay the groundwork and someone else could pick up the baton and run with it.

The Basics

The survey ran from September 10 through October 9, 2022, and was open to individuals of all races with a concentration on Black attorneys' groups and Black student groups. In total, we received 205 responses. SurveyMonkey did the initial calculations which we followed up with more in-depth analysis by Kingsley Ukwuoma, a biostatistician and expert in systematic review and meta-analysis.

10 Questions

We asked 10 questions on our survey. We left the last question open for individuals to tell us more about their own personal hair situation. Although, we were limited, somewhat, by the free version of SurveyMonkey, the questions got to the heart and ethos of the information were looking to research. This article explores five of the ten questions.

Question 1: How would you classify your natural hair?

A straightforward synopsis of the survey informs us that 50.25% of the legal professionals who responded the survey had type 4 hair on the Andre Walker Hair Typing System. Andre is noted for having been Oprah's stylist for many years.

Type 4 is a category of kinky, coily hair that many Black people have. While my survey doesn't ask for racial classifications, this can be roughly presumed by the type of hair selected. Black individuals may have hair in more than one category, or they may have hair that is not within Type 4. Black and mixed-race people are greatly represented in hair Types 3B and 3C. As a rule of thumb, the closer the hair type is to Type 1, the less likely the person is likely to be of African descent. Of course, this is only a generality, and exceptions apply.

Question 2: What is your occupation?

The "other" responses had answers such as: judicial assistant, law internship coordinator, government attorney, prosecutor, and various types of paralegals.

Question 3: How much do you spend on your hair per month?

This question is relevant due to the volume of recent news coverage regarding the vast amounts of money that Black women spend on their hair. According to a statistic from Essence Magazine, African Americans spend $127 million per year on grooming aids. From personal experience, I can tell you that the higher you climb on the corporate ladder, the more you spend on maintaining that hairstyle that helped you get the job in the first place.

Question 8: How big is the firm you work for?

Question 9: At work, who do you feel judges your hair most harshly?

Of the racial categories selected, white women were deemed as being the harshest critics of Black hair at work (15.61%). Interestingly, this was followed closely by Black women (12.20%), then white men (11.71%). Curiously, Hispanic men and women, Asian men and women, and Black men were found to be the least disapproving in this regard.

Moreover, the write-in answers proved to be enlightening, with some of the responses calling out judges for being critical about Black hair in court. Other write-in responses were more introspective, with one respondent admitting, "When [my hair is] worn natural, I don't feel judged but rather treated as a spectacle in the eyes of my non-Black colleagues." A Black British respondent who wears his dreadlocks in a turban stated that he gets "the odd comment from persons who are Sikh or from the Asian community."

I remain thrilled with the results of our Black Hair Big Law Symposium as well as the research results, which continue to be fascinating. Part three of this series will focus closely on the research that shows the percentage of law firm colleagues at making negative remarks about Black attorneys' hair. In addition, we tackle the hypothesis that Black women attorneys go out of their way to straighten their hair for their job interviews but switch things up once hired.

If you haven't read Part I of the Black Hair Big Law series, now is a great time to start.

Angela Mackie-Rutledge is a dual British & American citizen and the mum of twin boys and a cheeky singleton girl. She holds a BFA from New York University an MSc from the University of Brighton (UK) and an LLB from the University of Law in London. Angela is a former Mastermind contestant where her specialty topic was Morrissey, his life and solo career. She was a winner of the 2017 Choose Law Full Fee Scholarship which gave her a full scholarship to attend law school. She is currently an LLM candidate at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School. She can be reached on LinkedIn.