U City Digest
51
Professor Wendy Greene announced an ambitious goal for Drexel Kline Law’s Center for Law, Policy and Social Action (CLPSA) when she took over two years ago as its new director: Bring faculty, students and community members together to not merely envision a more just society but to play active roles in concretely transforming it.
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Drexel Kline Law professor Wendy Greene was named director of the school’s Center for Law, Policy and Social Action in 2022.
reene has plenty of experience in policy transformation. The scholar-activist has become an internationally recognized leader in the contemporary civil rights movement to end race-based hair discrimination. This centuries-old form of discrimination had been mostly legal until Greene and other activists worked to end it by co-drafting and lobbying for such legislation as the CROWN Act, which has been enacted in 22 states, including California, with a federal version reintroduced in Congress in the spring. Greene is also a legal advisor for human rights legislation in France that would similarly prohibit discrimination on the basis of hair texture, color and style. She traveled to France to advance the bill—the first of its kind in Europe—which was passed in March by the French National Assembly and is slated for introduction in the French Senate later this year. The efforts of Greene and her allies to eliminate race-based hair discrimination gained additional urgency recently with the revelation of the significant health risks posed by the use of formaldehyde, which is traditionally a major ingredient in the hair straighteners used by generations of Black women to achieve the hair styles that have been deemed acceptable in many workplaces and schools. A study by the National Institute of Environmental Health Science released in 2022 found that Black women who used hair straightening products were two and a half times as likely as those who did not to develop uterine cancer. Greene was quoted in New York Times coverage of the story, highlighting the role that workplace expectations have played in forcing Black women to go through the uncomfortable—and, as it turns out, potentially unsafe—process of straightening their hair. “You have policies,” she told the Times in June, “that prohibit ‘extreme’ hairstyles or ‘unnatural’ or ‘unprofessional’ hairstyles. That creates a straight-hair expectation or