An Example of How Institutionalized Racial Discrimination Works — Texas and (Hair Braider) Isis Brantley

© 2015 Peter Free

 

12 January 2015

 

 

One way that American institutions screw with people — nonsensical regulations

 

From the Wall Street Journal:

 

 

In 2012, Texas officials told [Isis Brantley, an African-American] that unless she got a barber instructors’ license, the students who took her [hair braiding] classes couldn’t legally work as hair-braiders.

 

While she had a license to braid hair, the state said her business itself didn’t comply with barber-schools regulations.

 

And to get licensed, she would need to install at least 10 workstations — equipped with reclining chairs and no fewer than five sinks — purchase barbering textbooks, and relocate to a space more than twice as big.

 

Ms. Brantley refused and instead sued in federal court, claiming the rules violated her constitutional due-process rights. This week, a federal judge in Austin ruled in her favor, declaring the rules unconstitutional.

 

U.S. District Judge Sam Sparks in Austin on Monday said the Texas hair-braiding school requirements fail to “advance public health, public safety, or any other legitimate government interest.”

 

The judge said he was troubled by the fact that lawyers for the state couldn’t come up with a single example of a licensed Texas barber school that specializes in African hair braiding.

 

Judge Sparks wrote that there was a “logical disconnect inherent in a scheme which contemplates the existence of hair braiding schools but makes it prohibitively difficult for a hair braiding school to enter the market in hair braiding instruction.”

 

© 2015 Jacob Gershman, Texas Hair-Braider Who Fought Licensing Rules Wins in Court, Law Blog – Wall Street Journal (08 January 2015) (extracts)

 

Notice Judge Sparks’ observation that the regulation failed to advance any legitimate government interest.

 

One can, therefore, surmise that Texas was repressing African-American entrepreneurship because it wanted to.

 

This is the same kind of malicious enforcement that journalist Matt Taibbi persuasively complained about in his book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap (2014).

 

 

The moral? — Without legal assistance from an organization that could afford to provide it, Ms. Brantley would not have won

 

She was represented by the libertarian Institute for Justice.