Once again, Texas is making Black hair history, but this time, for all the wrong reasons.
The Crown Act — “creating a respectful and open world for natural hair” — became Texas law last year after Black legislators and activists spent years trying to protect ethnic and natural hairstyles from discrimination. The law, intended to safeguard braids, locs, twists and other features associated with Black style, declares that “any student dress or grooming policy adopted by a school district … may not discriminate against a hair texture or protective hairstyle commonly or historically associated with race.”
All good, right? Not so much, unfortunately. The law took effect in September, and yet Darryl George, a junior at Barbers Hill High School near Houston who had been suspended in August for having locs and refusing to cut them, was suspended again in December. School officials claimed that their dress codes focused on hair length, not hair style, and that George’s neatly styled locs contained hair long enough to violate the code if he let his hair down. “Male students’ hair must not extend below the top of a t-shirt collar or be gathered or worn in a style that would allow the hair to extend below the top of a t-shirt collar, below the eyebrows, or below the ear lobes when let down,” the manual declared. While George cooled his heels in detention, his mother filed a discrimination lawsuit against the school district. He was transferred to a disciplinary school in October and had just returned to Barbers Hill when he was suspended again.
A state judge recently ruled that the Crown Act didn’t, well, extend far enough. According to the ruling, a right to style one’s hair does not include a right to have hair long enough to style it. But how can that be? The “protective” part of a hairstyle law surely includes protection against cutting it off.
George’s family has said they intend to seek protection in federal court.
Arguably, the length of a high school student’s neatly styled hair should not be a federal case, but regulating Black hair has a long history, not limited to Texas, or America for that matter.
Enslaved Africans were typically forced to cut their hair to remove traces of their original identities. It was one step in the process of breaking their spirits. Colonizing powers in Africa applied similar rules. Even today, in a number of African countries, including my fatherland of Ghana, girls are often required to shave their hair, and boys are not allowed to wear dreadlocks or other styles. The blogger Nambe Patrick wrote that African girls attending European-run “castle schools” in the colonial era were forced to shave their hair to distinguish them from mixed-race children.
The idea that Black hair — and, by extension, Blackness — is confusing, distracting and incompatible with education is global. How insulting is it that we are the only race considered to be so dumb that we cannot learn unless our hair is cut?
But back to the United States. While the Crown Act was intended to protect Black people from discrimination, this reversal, slipped into view on the question of hair length, has the potential to affect other groups for whom long hair on boys and men is a marker of cultural and spiritual significance. Last year, a Kansas school forced an 8-year-old Native American boy to cut his hair short. A state-funded charter school in North Carolina made the same demand of a first-grade Native American boy. In 2016, a Sikh soldier fought and won the right to wear his long hair while serving in the U.S. military. Captain Simratpal Singh was required to pass $32,000 worth of tests to prove he could function with the same long hair worn by Sikh warriors for centuries.
But hair isn’t the only nefarious strand at work here. When Barbers Hill won the state judicial order to require the cutting of George’s hair, the school district superintendent, Greg Poole, drew a huge conclusion from his victory. “The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that affirmative action is a violation of the 14th Amendment,” he crowed, “and we believe the same reasoning will eventually be applied to the CROWN Act.”
A hair-raising warning if there ever was one. George’s removal from school because of his hair is a reminder that Black students are much more likely to be suspended and expelled from school than White students. Because whether it’s about hair at the grade-school level or admissions at the collegiate level, it is about using whatever reason necessary to deny Black students access to education and opportunities. Couple this with the fact that there are concerted efforts to attack diversity initiatives and Black-focused issues. At the root of this all is a White backlash to efforts to promote Black progress.
The Crown Act was a monumental achievement, but we cannot be complacent. Fight on, Darryl George. It’s unfair that you, a teenager, must carry the burden of forcing fully grown adults to play fair.
