Let me preface this by asking that we not turn this into a race bashing/insult thread.  Let's not get this thread locked.  What do you think?  Is all racial discrimination bad?  What about the following?:

Dillards salon charges blacks more, says lawsuit

From The Birmingham News Dillard's salon charges blacks more, says lawsuit Friday, May 20, 2005 ROY L. WILLIAMS News staff writer A lawsuit filed in Birmingham federal court accuses the Dillard's Inc. department store chain of charging black women a higher price than white women for beauty salon services. The suit also accuses Little Rock, Ark.-based Dillard's of deceptive sales practices by failing to post notice that black women receiving a wash and set are charged a higher price than whites for the same service. Lawyer Patrick Cooper of Maynard Cooper & Gale, who represents plaintiffs Debbie Deavers Sturvisant of Springville and Vaughan Thomas of Montgomery, is seeking to have the case certified as a class action. Dillard's operates 340 retail department stores in 29 states and had $7.8 billion in sales last year. Efforts to reach company lawyers for comment were unsuccessful. Ethnic hair fee: According to the complaint, Debbie Sturvisant went to a Dillard's salon in Tuscaloosa to have her hair washed and set and was charged $30 as an "ethnic" hair fee. The price charged for the same service provided to white customers was $20. Thomas, the other plaintiff, was charged the same higher price while visiting a Dillard's in Montgomery, Cooper said. Cooper has an auduiotape Thomas secretly recorded a day after her visit to Dillard's beauty salon in which she questioned a Dillard's employee about the higher fee.

It makes sense that Dillards charges an additional fee for thicker hair, since thicker hair obviously translates into more work and more time.  The name of the fee doesn't necessarily single out "black" women, though that's obviously the largest group of customers affected by the fee in that market.  Perhaps Dillards could have just raised the overall fee a little bit for everyone to cover the extra time and work that goes into working on black womens' hair.

Men and women already get charged different fees at most salons based on the fact that most men have shorter hair than most women.  How is that any different that what's going on with Dillards?  Men certainly aren't going to complain.  But I haven't heard of many women filing class-action lawsuits against hair salons for sex discrimination either.

(Personally, I'd love it if the cost of a haircut was based solely on the amount of hair you have growing on your head.  My haircuts would only cost me a few cents.  )

Edited because I forgot an apostrophe.

This is kind of like the grocery store in Los Angeles that got sued for the same thing, but in a different way.   The store is in a mostly black area.

The were experiencing thefts from shoplifting so they "tagged" all of the same class of products being stolen with those security tags and placed magnatomiters at all the entrances/exits.   Guess what, the majority of items being stolen was black hair care products and black style make up products.    The surrounding neighborhoods got together because it made them feel all blacks are thieves.  The store got sued.

Go figure.  

That's not racial discrimination...