A judge ordered Wednesday that a trial be held next month to determine whether a Black high school student in Texas can continue being punished by his district for refusing to change a hairstyle he and his family say is protected by a new state law.
Darryl George, 18, has not been in his regular classroom in Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu since Aug. 31. Instead, he has either been serving in-school suspension or spending time in an off-site disciplinary program.
His Houston-area school district, Barbers Hill, has said George’s long hair, which he wears in neatly tied and twisted locs on top of his head, violates a district dress code that limits hair length for boys. The district has said other students with locs comply with the length policy.
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In the ad, Poole defended his district’s policy and wrote that districts with a traditional dress code are safer and had higher academic performance and that “being an American requires conformity.”
They comments are pretty worked up but I’m not quite sure how this is even considered racist.
Unless there is some reason that I don’t know that black people need to have long hair it sounds like everyone is being treated equally. It’s not like they are asking him to shave with pseudofolliculitis barbae.
Hair discrimination is a form of racism, mostly used against black people.
https://www.naacpldf.org/natural-hair-discrimination/
Tell me you haven’t paid attention to the details of the case without telling me you haven’t paid attention to the details of the case.
They changed the dress code partway through a school year in a way that specifically targeted both him and another black student.
Black hair often tends to be more coarse, dry, and curly than others’ hair. A lot of black hairstyles are meant not only as source of self expression, but also to promote moisture retention, scalp health, and cleanliness since frequent washing can easily strip oil from the hair and damage it. It also helps protect the long but brittle hair against breakage.
Unfortunately, there’s a long history of black hair styles being seen as “messy” and “unprofessional” in the US, owing to our colonial past. Many people don’t really understand black hair care and believe the same rules apply to all kinds of hair, requiring or at least implying that hair should be relaxed/straight in a professional setting and anything else looks “nappy”, unkempt, or “ghetto”.
This is the feeling we get when seeing the rule about length when hair is “let down”, the idea that, should George not wear this particular style, his hair would hang down to his shoulders. That’s just not how that kind of hair works, so why is that kind of measurement being applied? “Length” is not deterministic for that kind of hair (ever seen someone before and after they pick their hair?) so the rule seems rather arbitrary. Is this rule applied equally to students with looser curly hair that naturally sits above their hairline when, if straight, it would drop over their eyes? How about people who wear a fro that can be pulled down to their shoulders? His hair is not to his shirt collar or over his ears, nor could it easily become so during the school day, so what exactly is the problem with it? It feels like this rule has been arbitrarily enforced in this case not because of the length of his hair, but because of the particular style of it. Intentional or not, it smacks of some of those old (but still prevalent) conceptions about certain traditionally black hairstyles.