Harvard's dirty secrets on display

The EEOC guidelines are invariably based on case law to highlight examples. The specific court case is Bradley v. Pizzaco of Nebraska, Inc. The Wikipedia entry for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudofolliculitis_barbae comments that the court "found that Domino's Pizza's no-beard policy created a disparate impact by excluding a quarter of black males from employment but almost no white males."

The court case at https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=154197172700982... says "The record shows PFB almost exclusively affects black males. White males, however, rarely suffer from PFB or other skin disorders that make shaving difficult. Medical witnesses for both sides testified that as many as forty-five percent of black males have PFB." The Wikipedia page further adds "Both occur frequently in black men in the military, where it is so common that services often have widely known protocols for management".

Your comment about "latino people" appears to be an irrelevant hypothetical. It also muddies the waters as it requires pointing out that "race" and "ethnicity" are (quoting the OMB) "social-political constructs . . . and should not be interpreted as being genetic, biological, or anthropological in nature", that "Black or African American" and "White" are treated as a race category, and 'Hispanic or Latino' is an ethnic category, while all three fall under US Civil Rights law. That's a very long way for me to say that there's nothing about being Latino which makes one more more prone to PFB - black Latinos will have an higher incidence rate than white Latinos.

In a very real sense, whatever you answer is irrelevant. Neither EEOC law nor consumer law are the same as the laws regarding enrollment decisions. All I'm trying to show is that lalos' characterization of "protected class" - one which you seem to want to be true - is not a valid interpretation of US case law.

Here is another example from the EEOC, if you don't like the shaving one: "since sickle cell anemia predominantly occurs in African Americans, a policy which excludes individuals with sickle cell anemia must be job related and consistent with business necessity". https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/task_reports/best_practices.cfm

Here are some more, from https://www.eeoc.gov/policy/docs/race-color.html :

> Height and Weight: Standards for height and weight sometimes are challenged as having an unlawful adverse impact. For example, a requirement that employees be at least six feet tall might have an adverse impact on Asian Americans due to average height and weight differences, and thus such a requirement would need to be job-related and consistent with business necessity.(152)

> Dress: An employer can impose the same dress code on all workers in similar jobs, regardless of their race or ethnicity, as long as the policy was not adopted for discriminatory reasons and is enforced evenhandedly. However, an employer must treat racial or ethnic attire that complies with the dress code the same as other attire that complies with the dress code.(153) For example, Title VII prohibits employers from banning the wearing of traditional Hawaiian dress that complies with the employer’s dress code requirements.

> Hair: Employers can impose neutral hairstyle rules – e.g., that hair be neat, clean, and well-groomed – as long as the rules respect racial differences in hair textures and are applied evenhandedly. For example, Title VII prohibits employers from preventing African American women from wearing their hair in a natural, unpermed “afro” style that complies with the neutral hairstyle rule. Title VII also prohibits employers from applying neutral hairstyle rules more restrictively to hairstyles worn by African Americans.(154)