Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Angela Mackie-Rutledge back to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.

In 2022, legal scholar Leah Goodridge published a paper, “Professionalism as a Racial Construct” in the UCLA Law Review. In the paper, Goodridge delves into the intricate construct of professionalism, interrogating its latent role as a mechanism to regulate people of color within the legal profession. A similar topic was explored by Aysa Grey in her 2019 article, “The Bias of ‘Professionalism’ Standards.” Grey’s article was premised on the notion that the prevailing standards of professionalism are shaped by the systemic and institutional prioritization of whiteness. In its article, “How Hair Discrimination Affects Black Women at Work,” Harvard Business Review reported on the 2023 CROWN Workplace Research study which found that Black women’s hair was two-and-a-half times more likely to be perceived as unprofessional. The survey also found that more than half of the Black women surveyed felt that they had to wear their hair straight in a job interview in order to be successful and that two-thirds of those [Black women] surveyed changed their hair for a job interview.

In preparation for the Black Hair Big Law Symposium, I conducted research on how Black legal professionals (attorneys, solicitors, law professors, law...

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