TSA agrees to stop singling out black women for hair pat-downs at airports
The Transportation Security Administration has agreed to stop singling out black women for airport pat-downs based solely on their hairstyles.
The agreement (PDF), announced Thursday in a press release by the ACLU of Northern California, stipulates that the agency will conduct training sessions for TSA agents nationwide, with special emphasis on when hair pat-downs of black female travelers would be appropriate.
The TSA has also agreed to monitor all of the airports it oversees for consistent implementation of its policies and to detect the existence of a racially discriminatory impact, the ACLU says.
“The humiliating experience of countless black women who are routinely targeted for hair pat-downs because their hair is ‘different’ is not only wrong, but also a great misuse of TSA agents’ time and resources,” said ACLU staff attorney Novella Coleman.
“TSA agents were unable to provide a uniform reason to justify these searches when asked to articulate such a policy,” according to the ACLU’s press release.
Malaika Singleton, a neuroscientist in Sacramento, said she was on her way to an academic conference on dementia in London in 2013 when she was subjected to such a pat-down by a TSA agent at Los Angeles International Airport. The same thing happened to her when she passed through the Minneapolis airport on her way home, she told Reuters. At the time, she was wearing her hair in “sisterlocks,” the news service reports, which are very thin, stylized dreadlocks.
Singleton contacted the ACLU, only to learn that Coleman had had the same thing happen to her. Coleman, in fact, had already filed a complaint about the practice in 2012 that went nowhere, the ACLU said. Coleman’s hair had been searched while traveling with white and Latina colleagues, whose hair was not searched. Coleman also had her hair in sisterlocks. She was told by one of the TSA officers that all travelers wearing hair extensions were searched, but her hair was natural, she told Reuters.
Singleton said she is grateful to the ACLU for taking the case and to the TSA for being responsive to her complaint.
“I hope that this agreement and the proposed trainings will lead to a more equitable treatment of all travelers throughout the U.S., regardless of their ethnic or cultural background and or how they wear their hair,” she said.
