Is it unlawful race discrimination for a company to ban dreadlocks in the workplace? In a decision that has become a topic of debate among law professors, a federal appeals court said no last month. The case is so important because the court defined race as biology, emphasizing “immutable characteristics” as the subject of anti-discrimination law. But for more than 75 years, scholars have understood that race is as much or more a matter of culture than it is about biological reality. The decision in EEOC v. Catastrophic Management Solutions is therefore built on quicksand — and it’s a mistake to embrace it, even if on some level the result might seem like common sense.

In 2010, Chastity Jones applied to work as a customer service representative for Catastrophic Management Solutions. The job would not have involved any in-person contact with customers; she would be sitting at a computer in a call center.

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Stanford law professor Richard Thompson Ford, a brilliant and influential theorist of race, seemed to buy a version of this argument. He endorsed the decision, writing that “if dreadlocks aren’t part of racial identity — if they are more like a fashion choice — then banning them is no different than banning purple hair or handlebar mustaches, neither of which is unlawfully discriminatory.”

Ford has argued that courts shouldn’t choose between biological and cultural definitions of race. But in a case like this one there’s no escaping the choice. Either the ban on dreadlocks is race discrimination or it isn’t.

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Several things are wrong with this sentence. Maybe the most obvious is that hair texture can’t be separated from hairstyle. Is my natural hair texture the texture it has when I’ve combed it? Washed it? Used conditioner? Added a product? As Ford writes, under the court’s holding, “dress codes can ban hairstyles that result from artifice — such as dreadlocks — but not hair textures that are natural, such as Afros.” That makes no sense. An Afro is a hairstyle, just like dreadlocks.