Bottleneckers. William Mellor
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and Paul lived a frugal existence, cutting every conceivable corner to provide for their family and pay for the schooling they knew would afford them a better life in the future, but despite their best efforts, more money was going out than was coming in. Jestina cast about for a way to earn extra money. It had to be something with enough flexibility that she could care for her family and continue her education. She also needed to be able to generate income immediately, without significant upfront training. It was then that a confluence of circumstances provided the answer. She would do the thing she had done her entire life—indeed, something African women have done for thousands of years—she would braid hair.8
THE ART OF HAIR BRAIDING
The highly specialized and intricate crafts of twisting, braiding, weaving, and locking natural hair into different styles are types of hair braiding mostly used by African Americans. Today, these distinct techniques are generally grouped together under the rubric of “natural haircare,” because they do not use any chemicals or artificial hairstyling techniques. The history of this type of hair braiding is thousands of years old.9
In African cultures, the grooming and styling of hair has long been an important social ritual. Elaborate hair designs reflecting tribal affiliation, status, sex, age, occupation, and the like are common, and the cutting, shaving, wrapping, and braiding of hair are centuries-old arts.10 Anthropologists have identified the symbolism associated with hair as particularly powerful and important in individual and group identity in numerous world cultures.11
When African captives were brought to America to serve as slaves, the symbolism of and emphasis on their hair was preserved,12 but by the nineteenth century the physical attributes of African Americans—their skin color, facial structure, and hair characteristics—had become freighted with negative connotations. Whites frequently referred to black hair as “wool” in order to differentiate it from the “superior” texture of white hair.13 Blacks were taught to view straight, light-colored hair as the paramount expression of female beauty, which led to racial self-hatred, shame, and pervasive hair straightening in the African American community, typically accomplished through chemical means.14
It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that natural African hairstyles began to reemerge. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, Afros; dreadlocks; cornrows; and braids decorated with chevrons, beads, and mirrors became the symbols of black pride and a rejection of the white aesthetic that had for so long dominated the black sense of self.15 The effect of such symbolism was profound. As Roberta Matthews, an African American woman, now in her early seventies, recalled, “When I first saw a woman with an Afro, I was shocked. I could barely look at her. I almost fainted.” That was 1958. Yet, moved by the symbolism of natural hair, Roberta, too, began wearing her hair in an Afro two years after that encounter. The disapproval among her relatives was immediate and severe. “‘Why do you want to mess yourself up like that?’ they asked me. They thought I was awful.”16
Ever so slowly, the negative view of natural hair changed. Today, although still viewed with some skepticism both inside and outside of the African American community,17 natural hairstyles for African Americans have become so popular that natural haircare has grown into a multimillion-dollar industry, with specialized products and training. Braiding salons operate in cities large and small all over the country, and the number of women (and some men) who braid for money out of their houses may comprise even more people.
HAIR-BRAIDING BOTTLENECKERS
In 2005, Jestina was one of those women.18 When she fled Sierra Leone, she had already been braiding hair regularly for more than a decade. So, when she began looking for ways to make some extra money for her family, circumstances in her small Utah town provided the answer. Her community of about fifteen thousand people had no professional braiding salons, and there was demand for braiding services. Some families in her town had adopted African or Haitian children and had no idea how to style their hair.19 Jestina quickly picked up twelve to fifteen clients and made, in a good year, about $4,800.20 She braided in her home, mostly on Saturdays, while Paul cared for their children. “It’s not like it was bringing me millions, but it was covering groceries,” she explained.21
After earning her degree, she considered taking a job in an office but instead decided to open her own hair-braiding business.22 As Jestina recalled,
I did apply for jobs and had interviews, and I could make 12 to 16 dollars an hour, but the costs of childcare would have meant making about two dollars an hour, plus all of the family responsibilities and added stress, it was just not worth it. But if I could continue to braid, even though it’s not a lot of money, I could do it from home and I could care for my children and not add things in my life I didn’t need.23
So Jestina advertised her hair-braiding services on a local Web site and slowly began growing her business—until the day she received a fateful message.24 While checking her business e-mail account, she came across a chilling anonymous note: “It is illegal in the state of Utah to do any form of extensions without a valid cosmetology license. Please delete your ad, or you will be reported.”25
Jestina was stunned. When she first began braiding for money, she had checked the required credentials and was told by a state regulator that she did not need a cosmetology license as long as she did not cut or use chemicals to style hair.26 Additionally, she had been braiding for years without a single complaint. Her modest income certainly posed no serious threat to established cosmetologists in town. And besides, she wasn’t even doing cosmetology. She thought, “I’m not using chemicals. I’m not doing cosmetology stuff”27—the practices the regulator had told her required a license.
To confirm what the regulator had said, she contacted the state cosmetology board, and this time the answer she got differed. To her disbelief, she was told she had to get a government-issued license requiring two thousand hours of training and the successful completion of a licensing test.28 That disbelief turned into dismay when she began calling cosmetology schools in her area: “I called about six schools along the Wasatch Front and they told me that they don’t teach braiding and that . . . if I want to specialize in braiding[,] I would have to get independent help with that.”29
Like Kim Powers Bridges, the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey, and Pastor Craigmiles, Jestina was caught in a bottleneck. To get the license and continue working, she would have to spend two thousand hours in classes that would cost her up to $18,00030 and teach her nothing about braiding but only about skills completely irrelevant to her work.
The cosmetology laws were not specifically designed to block hair braiders; indeed, they typically contain no explicit language about hair braiding. In this way, they are very different from casket laws, which were created for the express purpose of limiting sales of caskets to funeral directors. In hair braiding, the requirement to get a license is the result of the initial adoption of cosmetology laws in the early twentieth century, at which time African hair braiding as a specialization, let alone an occupation, was unheard of. As the demand for and supply of professional hair braiding increased in the latter half of the century, cosmetology bottleneckers did not bother to change laws in their own favor. They simply used the power of licensing boards, through the vehicle of license creep, to achieve their ends.
LICENSE CREEP
License creep is a phenomenon in which regulators expand the scope of an existing licensing regime to cover a different occupation—one that presents new competition to the established trade.31 In the case of hair braiding, license creep was the result of expanding cosmetology licenses to cover those who offer only hair-braiding services. Because regulatory boards that are established to oversee a licensing process are typically made up of current practitioners in a field and funded by licensees’ dues, the boards have tremendous incentives to adopt and enforce a broad interpretation of a license’s scope. The boards fight to preserve their power and the status quo rather than allowing seemingly complicated innovations that could disrupt the status of current service providers and force them to adapt or work harder. All too often, the result is that new business models or techniques are choked off as