Category: Equity and Access

The natural hair discrimination laws for people of color have been spreading throughout the world since the beginning of the 16^th century Trans-Atlantic slave route.  In the United States, natural hair has been deemed as unprofessional, untamed, dreadful, or in need of being “relaxed.” The Tignon Act of the late 18^th century was enacted by the Spanish Governor of Louisiana Esteban Rodríguez Miró, requiring women of color, and especially creole women, to wear a tignon headscarf to cover their hair. Many considered the elaborate hairstyles to be a threat to the status quo, bringing excessive attention to the women, and hence the law was meant to police their hair and ensure that it was covered up.

Looking back at social movements, such as the Black Power Movement during the 1960s and 1970s, where men and women of color were often seen wearing their hair in its natural state, hair was viewed as a symbol of power.  Within the last decade, the rise of the natural hair movement has attained so much attention that laws have begun to be passed around the country to stop discrimination based on natural hair.

The C.R.O.W.N. (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair) Act, was created in 2019 through a collaboration between Dove personal care brand and the CROWN Coalition to protect people from discrimination based on race-specific hairstyles.  This includes all hair textures and protective styles which include styles such as braids, locs, afros, and twists within workplace and in public school settings. According to Dove, “California was the first state to sign the C.R.O.W.N. Act into law on July 3, 2019. With support from the CROWN Coalition, the bill is now law in 6 other states (CO, MD, NY, NJ, VA, WA).”

The C.R.O.W.N. Act Coalition carries on the constant pursuit to support legislative efforts that aim to end hair discrimination throughout the United States.  Today, the C.R.O.W.N. Act has surpassed over 189,000 petition signatures. To continue to see growth within the diffusion of natural hair laws, it is essential for us to understand the history of natural hair within the Black community, in order to continue to see growth and diversity within both school and workplace settings.

As we enter what we all hope are the final phases of the COVID-19 global pandemic, public administrators are presented with countless opportunities to reflect on how government has responded to unprecedented challenges.  While much of the national conversation is focused on large scale federal programs, the response to the pandemic has permeated every agency at every level of government.  Our constituents have focused their attention on our public health and economic recovery programs, but internally we have been forced to take on challenges in personnel management, budgets, information technology, and maintenance of physical facilities.  Leadership in public administration has never been more critical to the success of government programs than it has over the past year.  We now have an ethical obligation to make honest assessments of where we succeeded, where we failed, and how we can be better prepared for the next unpredictable crisis.

The pandemic has also provided opportunities for us to find new ways to serve the public by implementing programs that equitably present the most value to the greatest number of people.  As we transitioned to a virtual existence with online public education, telework, and staying connected with friends and family through our computer screens, access to broadband internet connectivity quickly became less about convenience and more of a critical necessity.  We can also reasonably predict that our world will remain more virtual than it was before COVID-19 as many employers realize the cost savings and other benefits of having a workforce that is at least partially remote.  Inequities in access to reliable broadband internet service that are the result of either inadequate infrastructure or socioeconomic conditions that make access unaffordable create another system of haves and have nots, or more accurately, the connected and the unable to connect.

The digital divide perpetuates geographic and economic inequities that are the barriers to individual prosperity.  Multiple studies conducted by the Pew Research Center over the past two years found more than twenty-one million Americans without access to broadband internet service with rural areas disproportionately affected by gaps in connectivity infrastructure.  Twenty-seven percent of rural populations, forty percent of rural schools and sixty percent of healthcare centers in rural areas lack sufficient broadband access.  Those same studies found that forty percent of low-income children relied on free public wi-fi access to complete schoolwork during the pandemic as compared to just six percent of their classmates in higher income families.  If public administrators are seeking a way to provide opportunities to those citizens who need them the most, addressing the digital divide is a proverbial silver bullet.  By making broadband accessible and equitable, government can bring new opportunities to the communities that have historically fallen behind in education, employment, and healthcare.

The real challenge to broadband accessibility is that it is a private, for-profit industry.  Simple economics stand in the way of infrastructure build outs in rural areas with a small customer base, because they are not profitable for the private sector.  Similarly, the costs associated with internet service prices many low-income families out of the market.  Government investment in public-private partnerships that bridge the digital divide are more than just assistance to the end users who will become connected.  It is a gateway to address some of the most fundamental challenges facing policy makers.  At a time when internet connectivity is widely recognized as a critical resource, public administrators must finally seize the opportunity to bring the internet to those who have been left behind.

Innovation within the public sector, specifically governmental organizations, will slowly emerge as workplace culture shifts to a less authoritarian leadership-driven environment. In the public sector, older leadership regime protects the status quo, content with incremental changes, to preserve their status, trying to avoid major career-ending mistakes, and clinging to old skills in a rapidly shifting environment of new technologies and paradigms. Leadership will need to adapt to meet the needs of the workforce, as well as the needs of the organization as a whole. Leadership style changes are important, but more important is the cultivation of an inclusive, safe, collaborative team-based structure within the department.

While we have made great strides to create a diverse organization, inclusion is not yet a guarantee. Equality and inclusion are often granted as a matter of policy but few embrace it as a matter of culture and behavior. People want, need, and deserve validation. High psychological safety drives performance and innovation. Leaders must first ensure unconditional inclusion safety, which is the foundation of psychological safety, followed by granting learner safety.
Low employee engagement is a common problem in the public sector – according to Gallup, 71% of US government employees are disengaged, costing taxpayers $500 billion annually in lost productivity. The second stage is learner safety, and employees crave developmental opportunities and want to grow within an organization, in turn, they are much more likely to be engaged with their job and bring their best each day.

As employees grow beyond the apprenticeship nature of the learner safety stage they cross over to a contributor safety stage of self-directed performance where the organization trusts them to perform competently and respects their ability to create value, therefore becoming an earned privilege. In the final stage of psychological safety, challenger safety is based on earning the right to innovate based on a track record of performance, where the organization grants permission to challenge the status quo in good faith. Proactive, offensive innovation is a response to an opportunity and is attainable at the pinnacle of psychological safety. Without challenger safety, there is a high cost to curiosity and creativity, usually resulting in embarrassment and emotional pain. The process of challenging the status quo usually involves a degree of conflict, confrontation, and stress. Innovation is not comfortable or frictionless, and it is hard enough because there is no safety from failure. Innovation ultimately emerges from the process of inquiry through collaboration.

The key issue for innovation in government is cultivating an organizational structure capable of elevating cross-sector collaboration through encouraging less hierarchy and more organizational flattening, even if not structurally flat. Leaders must embrace the uncomfortable nature of disruptive questions, cultivate a climate necessary to encourage constructive dissent through challenger safety and endorse open, transparent organizational development. The barriers to innovation will not be the fears associated with risk-taking and how it will impact the budget but rather if we have an engaged workforce that feels valued and safe enough to share their creativity in hopes of innovating a better government.