Schools that ban dreadlocks guilty of ‘white supremacy’

SCHOOLS that ban dreadlocks and braiding hairstyles are using slave-era techniques to ‘maintain white supremacy’, according to two British academics.

A research paper claims that attempts to police black hair have their origins in colonial days when ‘ slave masters shaved enslaved people’s hair and jealous white women cut t he hair of black enslaved women’.

The controversial study cites the case of Chikayzea Flanders, 12, who was put into isolation on his first day at Fulham Boys School i n West London because hi s dreadlocks did not comply with uniform rules. Staff threatened to exclude the boy unless his hair was cut. But after legal action by his family, the Church of England school was forced to back down and ordered to pay compensation.

At the time, his mother, Tuesday Flanders, said: ‘We would like to make s ure t hat communities know that their identity and religious beliefs matter and they cannot be forced to change these to access education.’

The new paper has been written by Dr Remi Joseph- Salisbury, presidential fellow in ethnicity and inequalities at Manchester Uni- versity, and Dr Laura Connolly, lecturer in criminology at Salford University. It claims the Flanders case ‘casts light on how schools in England police black hair’ and suggests it ‘is part of a broader racist system that places black bodies under forms of social control in order to maintain white supremacy’.

The academics add that by implying that black hairstyles are ‘undisciplined’, school policies feed into a broader narrative that black people themselves lack discipline.

‘White social control of black hair has deep roots in enslavement and colonialism, and that notions of black hair as messy and antitheti- cal to school discipline (and therefore success) are both naturalised and widespread,’ they assert in the Social Sciences journal.

The study is part of a growing movement in British academia to analyse society using ‘critical race theory’ which works on the premise that racism is rife.

The theory often encompasses the notion of ‘white privilege’.

Critics said the views in the paper only served to turn the black community into powerless victims and make everyone else racist.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education and a former headmaster, said: ‘Most people are not racist and not all white people are bad. Implying otherwise can potentially fuel racial tension and can push people to the Right.’

Dr Joseph-Salisbury is no stranger to controversy. In a newspaper article last year he blamed ‘the white gaze’ for police breaking down the door of rapper Stormzy after mistaking him for a burglar’.

He added: ‘ This is a gaze that erases the humanity of black people. Looking through the white gaze, too often, white people generally, and white police officers specifically, do not see black people.

‘ What t hey see i nstead is a figment of their imagination: an imagination that has been collectively constructed for centuries.’