Thoughts about hair colour

I just had a really interesting conversation with my Uncle who lives in America. He listens to loads of podcasts and in one of them someone was saying that race - and I would add gender - should be treated like hair colour. As someone who dyes her hair to enhance her personality, this got me thinking.

Race and gender are social constructs. We have a set of expectations from people based on the colour of their skin or the sex they’ve been assigned. We don’t have expectations from people based on their hair colour (I will exclude the blonde=dumb stereotype for the argument’s sake). However, hair colour can be used to express someone’s personality. I see it as similar to traditions for races or specific clothes for genders. Of course, changing your race/gender isn’t as easy as changing your hair colour. But we do that because we feel like red hair is more like us, not because having brown hair is frowned upon by society, for example.

This is a very complex topic for a short post. I just wanted to put these thoughts out there. I know it’s not this simple, so one day I might get onto some research and write a longer article about this. I wonder, what do other people think about this concept?