Black entrepreneur reveals reality of hair discrimination in the workplace

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Louise Thomas

Editor

A Black entrepreneur has revealed she was once told her natural hairstyle wasn’t appropriate for work.

Danielle Obe, a 42-year-old business consultant, experienced “intense fascination” and “extreme curiosity” from white colleagues across various roles while in her twenties. She said people would make inappropriate comments about her hair, while sometimes attempting to touch it without her permission.

On one occasion, two senior white male co-workers began touching her hair which Ms Obe described as “borderline harassment”.

To avoid attention, and realising her Afro hair was a subject of unwanted scrutiny, she once decided to put her hair into braids. When she arrived at work, she said her 50-year-old white male manager shouted: “Exactly what was going through your mind to consider dressing your hair like this to work?”

Ms Obe told The Independent: “It was worrying for me because I was a young woman trying to find my identity, leaving home and trying to start a career.

“It never crossed my mind that it was a form of discrimination but this extreme curiosity made me uncomfortable; my hair became the talk of the office.

“What I’m finding out with the work I’m doing is there is a lack of education - and that translates into fear or people who are rigid and think that their culture, language or food is it because they haven’t been educated about the variety and the beauty in diversity.”

These experiences severely impacted Ms Obe’s confidence and many years passed before she overcame it.

Ms Obe is also a co-founder of the Black Swimming Association (BSA), which works to make the aquatics sector more accessible for everyone.

Sport England figures show that 95 per cent of Black adults and 80 per cent of Black children do not swim, as well as 93 per cent of Asian adults and 78 per cent of Asian children.

One of the reasons behind this disparity is a lack of adequate swimming caps to protect Afro hair, particularly in light of how damaging chlorine can be for textured hair.

The risk of chemical damage to Afro hair is something Ms Obe and her daughter Kayla are aware of. They routinely had to thoroughly wash Kayla’s hair after her swimming lessons when she was younger because ineffective swimming caps - designed with white hair in mind - let the water in.

So Ms Obe made her daughter a promise when she was four years old: “We’re going to find a solution for your hair so that you can swim, and if we can’t find one, we’re going to invent one.”

The mother then came up with the idea of creating a waterproof headscarf, called Obé after her family surname, to “empower people with textured hair to feel comfortable in and near water without losing their identity”.

She added: “As women of colour, we wrap our hair to do everything. I do: if I'm cooking a curry or if I'm going out to take the bins out, for example. It's just that sort of care that we give to our hair.

“Somehow that pain I felt about my hair being the talk of the office was an indication of my mission; it became an opportunity to change hearts and minds.”

The product has been well-received around the world, Ms Obe said, and she was initially surprised that people from various ethnic groups with different hair textures have bought one - from white women with thicker hair and people who had traction alopecia, to members of Sikh communities who wear patka turbans.

Some 20,000 emails from customers all over the world highlighted the scope of her headscarf’s impact.

“All of a sudden, it was no longer about Afro-Caribbean type hair, it was all hair types,” Ms Obe said.

”What this product has done is provide an option; I'd been pigeon-holing this all this while, but the versatility and the uniqueness of the product is like Afro hair. We can wear our hair in so many styles. It's our identity, it's our joy, it's our crown, it's our beauty, that we can express in any way we want to express.

“It is a tool to embolden people like me to find their own place in the water, on their own terms.”

This comes as 93 per cent of Black people in the UK have faced microaggressions related to their Afro hair, according to research by Pantene, Black Minds Matter, and Project Embrace.

Moreover, one in five Black women felt the need to straighten their hair for work, according to Halo, a collective working to eradicate hair discrimination.

Last month, celebrities and campaigners including Mel B and Michelle Deleon of World Afro Day began to lobby the UK government to make Afro hair a protected characteristic in the Equality Act to help tackle discrimination.