Despite finding “disturbing evidence” of racial discrimination, an Alabama judge has ruled that black women cannot sue Dillard's beauty salons as a class for charging them more for hairstyling services than white women.

“Hair services are not the same from one head of hair to the next,” U.S. Magistrate Judge T. Michael Putnam noted in finding that the claims of eight plaintiffs lacked the “commonality or typicality” required for class certification.

The plaintiffs accused Dillard's of having a company-wide policy of charging for a “wash and set” based on the customer's race. A salon in Tuscaloosa, Ala., allegedly charged $35 for clients with “ethnic hair,” while the price for those with Caucasian hair was $20.

Dillard's “specifically instruct[ed] their employees and agents to charge different prices for the same salon services based solely on whether the customer was African-American or Caucasian,” the complaint said.

Putnam found the plaintiffs had presented “disturbing evidence” that the company “at least tacitly approved of discriminatory pricing for a 'wash and set' by managers at some salons.” But he denied class certification largely because

Unlike other tangible products or services that are more or less uniform, hair styling is highly individualized, almost unique, to each customer, whether black or white.

“This means that it is highly unlikely that the salon services received by [the eight] named plaintiffs (which varies even among them) were always or even mostly typical of what other African American women received,” Putnam said in his order.

The judge did not discuss whether the disparity in pricing was justified by any physical differences between the hair of black and white women. Dillard's had argued that the coarser, drier texture of black women's hair makes treating it more "time consuming and technically demanding than fulfilling the minimal (or non-existent) conditioning needs" of the typical white customer.

In another case involving hairstyling services in the South, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled recently that a black woman had a triable civil-rights claim against a Northern Virginia salon for denying services to her mother because it did not “do black people's hair.” Denny v. Elizabeth Arden Salons, 456 F.3d 427 (2006).

By Matthew Heller
10/11/06