{"id":62282,"date":"2014-04-07T12:59:09","date_gmt":"2014-04-07T17:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=62282"},"modified":"2014-06-09T00:25:51","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T05:25:51","slug":"u-s-army-releases-racially-biased-hairstyle-regulations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/04\/07\/u-s-army-releases-racially-biased-hairstyle-regulations\/","title":{"rendered":"U.S. Army Releases Racially Biased Hairstyle Regulations"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1\"<\/a>Sgt. Jasmine Jacobs of the National Guard in Georgia has always plaited her hair into two twists around her head. She has been in the military for six years and has worn her hair natural (meaning no chemical treatments [perms] or hair extensions [weaves]) for four of those years. But according to the new hair-grooming requirements the U.S. Army recently\u00a0released<\/a>, her hair is now out of regulation.<\/p>\n

And so are the Afro-centric hairstyles of many black women in the Army, who make up\u00a031 percent\u00a0<\/a>of Army women.<\/p>\n

Jacobs, who\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0she is \u201ckind of at a loss now with what to do with my hair,\u201d has started a\u00a0White House petition\u00a0<\/a>asking the Army to rethink its new hair guidelines. The petition has collected more than 7,000 signatures from soldiers and civilians, but needs to reach 100,000 signatures by April 19th in order for the White House to address it.<\/p>\n

The petition\u00a0states<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Females with natural hair take strides to style their natural hair in a professional manner when necessary; however, changes to AR 670-1 offer little to no options for females with natural hair\u2026 These new changes are racially biased and the lack of regard for ethnic hair is apparent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The\u00a0new Army Regulation 670-1\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0was published Tuesday and illustrates with photos the types of hairstyles that are unauthorized for women. Those include dreadlocks, twists or any type of matted or coiled hair. A particularly cumbersome requirement disallows the bulk of a woman\u2019s hair to \u201cexceed more than 2\u2033 from her scalp.\u201d That rules out Afros and most types of non-chemically altered black hair.<\/p>\n

Basically, almost every natural hair option that black women in the Army could wear is now off limits. One of the few traditionally natural hairstyles that was listed as appropriate is cornrows, but a slew of specifications and rules surrounded even that. The diameter of each cornrow can\u2019t be more than one-fourth of an inch, and no more than one-eighth of an inch of scalp may be shown between cornrows.<\/p>\n

The only way to realistically meet the new standards would be to\u00a0shave one\u2019s head, perm one\u2019s hair or wear weaves or wigs.<\/p>\n

Jacobs said twists like the one she wears are very popular among black women soldiers because the style requires little maintenance when in the field. Her hair\u2019s thickness and curliness makes pulling her hair back into a bun (a style popular among white women soldiers) impossible.<\/p>\n

A spokesperson for the Army\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0the grooming changes are \u201cnecessary to maintain uniformity within a military population.\u201d When that need for \u201cuniformity\u201d erases the ethnic differences of a group of women and forces them to constrain themselves to European standards of hair, it presents a serious problem.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think, at the end of the day, a lot of people don\u2019t understand the complexities of natural hair\u2026 I\u2019m disappointed to see the Army, rather than inform themselves on how black people wear their hair, they\u2019ve white-washed it all,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0Jacobs.<\/p>\n

Screenshots taken from Army Regulation 670-1.<\/em><\/p>\n

Anita Little\u00a0is the associate editor at\u00a0<\/em>Ms. magazine, where this post originally appeared<\/a>. You can follow her on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sgt. Jasmine Jacobs of the National Guard in Georgia has always plaited her hair into two twists around her head. She has been in the military for six years and has worn her hair natural (meaning no chemical treatments [perms] or hair extensions [weaves]) for four of those years. But according to the new hair-grooming […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":62283,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[218,251,304,285,1760,309],"class_list":["post-62282","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bodies","tag-hair","tag-the-state","tag-raceethnicity","tag-raceethnicity-blacksafricans","tag-warmilitary"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/04\/14.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62282","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=62282"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62854,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/62282\/revisions\/62854"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/62283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=62282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=62282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=62282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}