Dreadlocks ban is ‘white supremacist’ schools told

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 attempts to police black hair have their origins in colonial days when ‘slave masters shaved enslaved people’s hair and jealous white women cut the hair of black enslaved women’.

The study cites the case of Chikayzea Flanders, 12, who was put into isolation on his first day at Fulham Boys School in West London because his 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 sure that 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 University, and Dr Laura Connolly, lecturer in criminology at Salford University. It claims the Flanders case ‘casts light on how schools 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’.

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

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 also often encompasses the notion of there being ‘white privilege’ in many areas.

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

Campaign for Real Education chairman Chris McGovern, 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.’

‘Fuel racial tension and push people to the Right’