On Monday night, 10 Albany county legislators — none of them African Americans — voted against adding eight words to its 2013 Omnibus Human Rights Law in what it calls the CROWN Amendment.

CROWN stands for Creating a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural hair.

The original county law says, “The Legislature hereby finds and determines that the history of our nation is riddled with laws and societal norms that subject those with certain visible characteristics, including natural hair texture and/or use of protective hairstyles, to separate and unequal treatment in professional settings.

“This legislature further finds that, despite the efforts to reverse racist ideologies, natural hairstyles including braids, locs, cornrows, twists, Bantu knots, poufs, and Afros continue to be a source of prejudice that have serious professional and economic consequences for individuals in Albany County.”

With 28 votes in favor, these words are being added to the list of hairstyles: as well as the use of turban wraps.

Before the vote, Legislator Wanda Willingham, an African American who represents Arbor Hill, told her colleagues who may not have Black constituents that the problem of headwraps causing discrimination at work is real. She described a woman who, after being told to remove her headwrap, was ridiculed for the way her hair was fixed.

“You may not have to deal with this … but we do,” said Willingham.

She also said, “We can no longer stand by the side to wait until people are comfortable and understand what we are going through.”

Several of the “no” voters said that the amendment would be problematic for businesses —although it wasn’t clear how — that the discrimination wasn’t widespread, or that it should be dealt with in state, not county, law.

Although the amendment being voted on was solely to allow headwraps or turban wraps in places of work, several legislators voiced concerns about how the amendment would affect hair policies for students at local military schools, some saying this is why they voted “no.”

A similar dynamic was at play during the Oct. 28 meeting of the legislature’s personnel committee.

Norma Chapman, an African American representing West Hill who came forward with the amendment, told the other personnel committee members that the amendment was needed, that women in her district were being discriminated against because they wore headwraps to work.

“It’s happening right now to some constituents ...,” she said. “I’ve had people come to me very upset they cannot wear headwraps.”

When she got some pushback from white members on the committee, with one saying there must have been some reason beside a turban, perhaps a security reason, Chapman firmly said, “No.”

Chapman went on to tell the committeeman that she knew he would not have done anything like that. But she insisted, “It has happened and it wasn’t because of security.”

The majority council, Rebekah Nellis Kennedy, told the committee that an employer can set consistent hair requirements based on health and safety reasons, such as not allowing long loose hair that might get caught in machinery.

Kennedy also cited a survey that she said showed 84 percent of Black women in New York State had been discriminated against because of their hairstyle.

A national survey conducted in 2019 of 1,000 white women and 1,000 Black women — all of them working women between the ages of 25 and 64 — found that Black women are 1.5 times more likely to be sent home from work because of their hair and they are 83 percent more likely to report being judged more harshly on their looks than other women.

Black women’s hair, the study found, is 3.4 times more likely to be perceived as unprofessional, and Black women are 80 percent more likely than white women to agree with this statement: “I have to change my hair from its natural state to fit in at the office.”

No one should have to be policed or feel targeted because of how they wear their hair at work.

We believe the county’s Black legislators were describing a legitimate problem and we commend the other legislators who took their words to heart and voted to amend the law to curb that very real discrimination. We agree with the legislators who said, even if one person is suffering from discrimination, that is one too many, and that the county should serve its constituents by prohibiting discrimination — and the state can follow.

The discussion made us realize there is more work to be done — lots of it, particularly on the part of white people like ourselves.

New York State passed its Human Rights Law, with its version of the CROWN Act, on July 12, 2019, nine days after California was the first state to pass a CROWN Act. Nine other states followed in this order: New Jersey, Virginia, Colorado, Washington, Maryland, Connecticut, New Mexico, Delaware, and Nebraska on May 5 this year.

But the laws alone are not enough. We need a change in attitude. Discrimination based on hairstyle rears its ugly head outside of the workplace, too.

Watch this video of a New Jersey high school wrestler. He was told by a white referee that he would have to forfeit his match unless his dreadlocks were cut. He was shorn by a school official, a white woman, with a crowd watching, but no one intervened — not a single adult.

The shorn wrestler won his match but he looks, in the end, utterly defeated. He was humiliated because an important part of his identity was publicly stripped from him. This is wrong.

Merton Simpson, an African-American Albany County legislator who was passionate at the committee meeting and again during Monday’s legislative session, about adding those eight words to the CROWN Act, puts the act in historic perspective in this week’s Enterprise podcast.

“It goes back to the introduction of Black people into the Americas where there are just different standards of beauty and different standards of acceptance …,” said Simpson. “There’s been a whole movement in rationalization of the enslavement to try to prove that people of color, Black people in particular, were less human and therefore less deserving of human rights than white people. And of course, this was all based on the profit motive of slavery.”

Simpson goes on to say that racism cannot be excused by saying those people were merely a product of their times because there were passionate people like Frederick Douglass or John Quincy Adams in those same times who “pointed out the barbarity of slavery.”

Although the Civil War was fought to end slavery, the artifacts remain. “The real problem is America has never come to grips with this legacy of race ...,” says Simpson. “Black people suffer because of the mis-history, the disinformation about what has happened in our legacy.”

A good place to reckon with our nation’s real history is in our schools, to teach a new generation the truth rather than “mis-history.”

We were moved last May by an anti-hate rally organized by Guilderland High School students and lauded them on this page. Many of the students spoke of being misjudged because of their appearance and, in their younger years, feeling like they wanted to look instead like their white peers.

One Black student, Jessica Airhienbuwa, described how she and her sister had been told they would look really pretty with straightened hair; “Do you ever wash your hair?” a white teacher asked Jessica’s sister.

In a moving speech, Matthew Pinchinat, who was a Guilderland history teacher at the time and is now the district’s director of diversity, equity and inclusion, said, “I never wear a do-rag out in public for fear of being branded a thug.”

What we can learn from this must go beyond the old adage: Don’t judge a person by his appearance but rather by his actions.

We all use visual cues to judge people we don’t know well. We have to teach ourselves to understand the beauty of cultures that are unlike our own.

Last month, the State Education Department issued guidance for schools across New York to emphasize the importance of self-expression through hairstyle.

The guidance cites research showing that hairstyle-related harassment and exclusionary discipline happens — by far — most frequently and most incisively on school campuses and that these discriminatory and exclusionary acts of school discipline have long-term impacts on the educational engagement, access, and future success of Black children and their families — especially on girls of color.

As a society, we’ve been through an awkening with the George Floyd murder.  The 1964 Civil Rights Act did not end discrimination in the United States.

How many women would go to the length Beverly Jenkins did when she was denied a promotion by Blue Cross in the 1970s because she stopped straightening her hair and wore an Afro instead? Jenkins described it, in court papers, as “my natural hairstyle” and indeed it was.

But every Black person shouldn’t have to go to court or shouldn’t have to feel they are branded a thug just because of how they wear their hair.

Merton Simpson gave us some hope. Slavery, he notes, is a legacy we have never honestly grappled with. With the nationwide awakening after George Floyd’s murder, Simpson said, “The hope is for the people of goodwill to use this opportunity to educate themselves and to recommit themselves ….

“What people of conscience can do is teach their children to be critical thinkers, to be open-minded …. to be compassionate — and then they have to be civically engaged.”

Each of us must try to follow that advice if we are to move forward as a society with liberty and justice for all.

We’ll close with words that inspired us at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. They were written by a young poet, Amanda Gorman, who spoke of being “a skinny Black girl descended from slaves.” Gorman was radiant, her hair, braided in cornrows, piled high on top of her head — a crown indeed.

“We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside,” she said. “We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another ….

“If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made.”