If you are female in this society, you get used to having your appearance critiqued. And if you are black and female—because of the intersecting nature of racism and sexism, it seems as if you are forever being policed for everything. Sociology professor Patricia Hill Collins once wrote that “the black American woman has had to admit that while nobody knew the troubles she saw, everybody, his brother and his dog, felt qualified to explain her, even to herself.” Such is the life of the black girl/woman in America, that everything about us is up for debate and conversation, including how we wear our hair. And as young black girls around the country are finding out, natural hair styles are often unwanted in schools and considered a distraction.
Mystic Valley Regional Charter School in Malden, Massachusetts, had a dress code which said that hair extensions are prohibited. But critics argue that this disproportionately impacts black girls, who often wear hair extensions for braids. The school made the national spotlight when two teenage girls refused to take out their braids and were kicked off their sports teams and not allowed to attend the prom.
The controversial rule, which prohibits students from wearing “anything artificial or unnatural in their hair” including hair extensions used for braids, made national headlines after Mya and Deanna Cook, 15-year-old twin sophomores, were removed from their sports teams and banned from prom over their unwillingness to take down their braids. The girls also received daily detention for two weeks for refusing to change their hair style. Other students at the school faced suspension over the policy.
This may seem like it’s not a big deal. But braids are an integral part of black culture across the world. Almost every little black girl wears her hair braided at one point or another. In Colombia, enslaved black women used braids to direct people to freedom—women would braid paths into their hair that represented the roads they used to escape. They also kept gold and hid seeds in their braids which helped them to survive after they left bondage. So braids are not just a part of our fashion, but intimately connected to who we are as a people. Punishing black girls for wearing their hair in braids is akin to punishing them for simply being black. And this is becoming a trend.
Dress codes that seem to target African-American culture have started to gain more attention in recent years. A teenage girl in Florida was reprimanded last week by school officials for wearing an afro. Jenesis Johnson, 17, had worn her hair in its natural state for seven months of the school year before the teen was told her hair was a violation of the school’s dress code prohibiting “faddish or extreme hairstyles.”
A school in Kentucky faced criticism last year after it banned students from wearing dreadlocks, corn rows and braids. Only after receiving complaints from a swarm of angry parents, including state Representative Attica Scott, a Democrat whose child attended the school, did the high school do away with the policy.
This is a glaring lack of cultural competency under the guise of helping kids to learn. Mystic Valley Charter School has an excellent reputation when it comes to academic achievement for black kids. Its students of color have higher SAT scores and scores on state exams than other schools in the region. But success doesn’t have to come at the price of telling black girls that who they are isn’t acceptable. Especially when the decision-makers are virtually all white. According to the parents of the two students in the article, the members of the board are four white men and one Asian woman and there is not one full-time black teacher at the school. But seventeen percent of the school’s student population is black. Where’s the diversity? Where’s the representation?
On Sunday, after considerable pressure, the school announced that it was suspending the hair policy and punishment of the students. But in order to become more inclusive, the school should really do away with this policy altogether. And for heaven’s sake—we have to learn to stop policing black girls hairstyles. And then let’s stop policing black girls, period.