manager_1 After survey shows that one fifth of women feel pressured to straighten their hair, firm signs Halo Code.
Unilever, the UK’s largest employer, announced that it would give PS170,000 for black grassroots organizations to combat racism.
Unilever, which also owns Magnum and Dove, launched the Crown Fund UK initiative. This will help to end discrimination based on black hairstyles and texture. In 2021, PS20,000 will be awarded to each organisation that works to remove barriers to progress for black girls and women.
Dove also created a workshop as part of the Dove self-esteem program, which assists teachers in discussing hair discrimination in schools.
Unilever, which announced last month that it would join the nbsp.Halo Code to end discrimination against employees with hairstyles such as dreadlocks or afros, said that it had signed up.
This follows the example of the US’s Crown Act, a similar piece of legislation that was passed in California last year, and later in New Jersey and New York. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of hairstyles.
The Crown Fund UK estimates that 63% of black adults have been discriminated against because of their hair. Professor Carol Tulloch, University of the Arts London, stated that “who would have thought that simply wearing your hair as it’s, a very common everyday practice, was a defiant act?”
“Black hair is always scrutinised and politicised, where our non-black counterparts don’t face such opposition [and] contention,” Wofai JE said, the executive director of Initiative, a dance theatre company.
“There is an air of curiosity and fascination about the act of wearing untreated hair. It’s just what comes naturally out of our scalps.”
It is strange that the British view it as a separate entity. People question or touch it to find out if it is natural. To be truthful, many of my friends have stories, regardless of their style. It is an apparent invasion of privacy that is the overriding feeling. Do we feel like animals? Or are we humans to be petted or stroked?
Tulloch stated that natural hair movements can be “confidence-building” and provide the “reassurance to wear one’s own hair naturally. It is your right. It is about being able to show your visibility.
Tulloch stated that she wore her hair natural in the early 1990s. “I grew dreadlocks. I noticed that white people would sometimes step back from me, though I’m not sure if it was my locks or my black skin.”
