Wanted: Black-conscious grooming policies
I AM a proud parent of a teenager, and I have taught at the secondary level. Being a parent and a teacher have helped me to better appreciate the need to establish boundaries for children, as well as the importance of putting rules in place that not only enforce good behaviours, but also instil positive values and attitudes. Setting healthy boundaries and establishing rules play a central role in helping our children develop the multiple competencies required to navigate a complex social and professional world.
Boundaries and rules are neither established nor enforced in a sociocultural vacuum, however. As such, it is important to scrutinise them in light of the prevailing sociocultural context in which they emerge and are enforced.
It is from this perspective that I suggest we look at one of the vexing topics that generally dominates national discourse at the onset of an academic year – the grooming of our students, particularly as it relates to their hair.
Our rules with regard to what constitutes appropriate hairstyle have been constructed in a historical, social and cultural milieu in which the natural black body is seen as less than ideal, and in which Eurocentric professionalism and standards of beauty prevail. To the extent, then, that black hair is made to conform to the texture and style of Eurocentric standards, it is to that extent that they are deemed acceptable, appropriate and beautiful. The crime of hairstyles such as Afros, braids, Banntu knots, and dreadlocks, is that they not only fail to accede to beauty standards from the North Atlantic, but they also displace those standards and celebrate the African.
In this our 60th year of national (semi) Independence from a European power, one of the questions we should ask ourselves going forward is this: as a State where more than 90 per cent of its citizens are descendants of enslaved Africans, do we wish to continue with policies that discriminate and exclude our people on the basis of their creative natural hair practices?
The Lukan story of Jesus healing a woman on the Sabbath reminds us that rules are to be life-giving and not death-sentencing, liberating and not oppressive, always sympathetic towards, and immediately responsive to, the need of a people (Luke 13:10-17). There, Jesus was in the presence of a woman with a long-standing physical disability, and under the weight of some external force, but who was being denied an experience of grace in the moment because, you’ve got it right, ‘rules are rules’! Jesus maintained, however, that rules are to be fairly applied and, more importantly, are never to stand in the way of upholding the dignity and worth of people.
Unfortunately, too many of our schools, which claim to be ideologically Christian, either ignore or give scant regard to Jesus’ challenge. Many of us have experienced and/or have witnessed the hypocritical and oppressive enforcement of hair policies in the education system. I, for example, was able to get around growing my hair in the latter half of my high-school years because I S curled my hair to mimic the hair of Indo-Jamaican students! The reports of Afro-Jamaicans students being barred from classes, exams and graduation exercises because of their hair are innumerable.
I am pleased the education ministry is currently engaged in a series of conversations/consultations on the issue, with a view to developing an official policy for our education institutions. Whilst education ministers, over the years, have promised to address the matter decisively, my hope is that things will go beyond talk and promises this time around. I also hope our policymakers, conscious of our historical, cultural and social context, will heed Jesus’ challenge to review our rules, laws and policies that bind as opposed to freeing our people, and that deny them their place in the community as God’s people and heirs of all God’s promises. I hope for policies that facilitate our children developing behaviours and practices that are affirming of their natural hair, and that instil in them positive values and attitudes towards all hair types, including their own.