In Malden, Mass., the long-simmering argument of how appropriate it is for African-American women to style their hair as they choose hit a new crescendo. In an attempt to, as the Mystic Valley Regional Charter School
interim director said, “… promotes equity by focusing on what unites and by reducing visible gaps between those of different means,” the school placed a restriction on hair thickness and extensions that seemed to directly contradict U.S. Department of Justice guidelines on race-based policies.
This policy and its uneven enforcement — the school rarely, for example, punishes students for hair color, another dress-code violation — led to the repeat suspensions of African-American female students. Singled out were
Mya and Deanna Cook, who have received more than 16 hours’ detention, were removed from their team sports and banned from their proms — all for having braided hair. This has, since the breaking of this story, led to a letter of condemnation from the state’s Attorney General Office, a lawsuit from the ACLU and the school district suspending the controversial policy.
“The policy specifically prohibits ‘shaved lines or shaved sides’ as examples of drastic or unnatural hairstyles, and ‘hair more than 2 inches in thickness or ‘height’’ as an example of hair that is distracting and thus not allowed,” Genevieve Nadeau, the chief of the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Division of Civil Rights,
wrote.
“These prohibitions appear to specifically reference hairstyles such as ‘fades’ that are commonly worn by Black male students, and ‘afros’ that are most likely to be worn by Black students (both male and female). These styles are not simply fashion choices or trends, but, in addition to occurring naturally in many cases, can be important expressions of racial culture, heritage, and identity.”
Cases such as the one in Mystic Valley seem to go beyond cultural insensitivity and constitute an implicit attack on African-American females’ right to be who they are. A 16-year-old Black student in Montverde, Fla., who happens to have naturally curly hair, was told recently that her hair was a violation of the school’s “no dreadlock” dress-code policy. In 2013, a 12-year-old in Orlando, Fla., was told to either
straighten or cut her puffy hair or face expulsion. The student, at the time, was being subjected to bullying by her classmates for her hair.
As profiled by the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the Ohio State University, African-American students
are more likely to be removed from instruction than their white counterparts for minor infractions such as dress code violations due to implicit bias. In one cited example, Black students in North Carolina public schools were six times more likely to be suspended than white students for dress-code violations. These offenses are, in less-served schools, typically handed over to the police to handle.
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Source:
ABS
