Here’s a sentence that shouldn’t still be true in 2026: whether your hairstyle is legally protected from workplace discrimination in this country depends entirely on your zip code.
Twenty-seven states plus Washington, D.C. have now passed some version of the CROWN Act — the Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair Act — which explicitly bans discrimination based on hair texture and protective styles like braids, locs, twists, and afros. More than ten additional states have similar bills filed or pre-filed. Wisconsin is not one of the twenty-seven, and it isn’t clearly headed toward becoming one anytime soon. AB 240/SB 246, Wisconsin’s version of the CROWN Act, has failed to clear both houses of the legislature. It keeps getting reintroduced. It keeps stalling. Notably, according to reporting from Wisconsin Public Radio, no organized group has even registered formal opposition to the bill — it’s not dying because someone is fighting it hard. It’s dying from institutional inertia, which in some ways is a harder problem to solve than an actual opponent.
I want to be precise about what’s actually at stake here, because “hair discrimination” can sound abstract until you’ve lived it or watched someone close to you live it. This is about a Black woman being told her braids look “unprofessional” for a client-facing role that a white colleague’s undyed, unstyled hair would never be questioned for. It’s about a Black kid sent home from a Wisconsin school because his locs violated a dress code written with zero specific reference to protective styles, decades after courts started ruling that this kind of policy, applied unevenly, functions as racial discrimination even when the written policy is technically race-neutral. The federal version of the CROWN Act — reintroduced this session by Senators Cory Booker and Susan Collins, a bipartisan pairing worth noting — has passed the House before and stalled in the Senate before. That’s the pattern nationally: broad, quiet, bipartisan-adjacent agreement that this shouldn’t be legal, paired with a legislative process that somehow still can’t finish the job.
What’s genuinely interesting, and underreported, is that some of Wisconsin’s larger cities have already adopted CROWN Act-style protections locally, even without a statewide law. That’s the workaround a lot of states without full CROWN coverage are quietly relying on — municipal ordinances filling a gap the legislature won’t close. It works, sort of, the way patchwork solutions always work: if you live and work inside Milwaukee city limits, you may have more protection than someone thirty minutes outside it, doing the same job, at the same kind of company. That’s not a civil rights framework. That’s a coverage map with holes in it, and the holes track disturbingly well with where the political will happens to run thin.
I’d push back gently on the framing that treats this purely as a symbolic or cultural fight, because it isn’t. This is an employment law gap with real financial consequences — lost job offers, disciplinary write-ups, kids losing instructional time over hair. It’s also, and I say this as someone who thinks the culture-war version of every story gets overplayed, a genuinely easy fix by legislative standards. Nobody is fighting for the right to discriminate against natural hair in public. There’s no organized opposition testifying against it in Madison. This isn’t abortion, it isn’t guns, it isn’t anything close to the hardest fights the legislature takes on. It’s a bill with no visible enemy that still can’t get a floor vote scheduled, which tells you something uncomfortable about how legislative priority actually gets set — it’s not always about opposition. Sometimes it’s just about what nobody in the room is pushing hard enough to move.
For Milwaukee employers reading this: you don’t have to wait on Madison to fix this. Write the explicit protection into your own handbook now. For Milwaukee families: know that your protection currently depends on which side of a city line you’re standing on, and that’s worth knowing before it costs you or your kid something. And for the legislators who keep letting AB 240 die quietly in committee two sessions running — with no opposition on record — the honest question is simple: what, exactly, are you waiting for?
— Marcus Hart