Student’s dreadlocks controversy focuses on hair discrimination
Deandre Arnold is, by all accounts, a young man with a bright future. He’ll graduate from high school this year and aspires to become a veterinarian.
The Mont Belvieu teenager has also been making a positive impression on Americans in his new role as an accidental activist.
The attention follows the suspension of Arnold, a senior, from Barbers Hill High School, and his being told that he wouldn’t be allowed to walk in the school’s graduation ceremony unless he cut his dreadlocks.
The news took Arnold aback: He’d been growing his dreadlocks since junior high school, without running afoul of district administrators. But recently, Barbers Hill trustees amended the dress code to say boys can’t have hair that would cover their collars or earlobes if let down, even if they wear it up at school — as Arnold had done to comply with an existing policy on hair length.
Sophomore Kaden Bradford — Arnold’s cousin — has also faced in-school suspension as a result of the change; he also wears dreadlocks.
Arnold and his mother have argued that the change makes no sense. And he has decided to transfer to another school district rather than change his hairstyle, which is, he has said, reflective of his culture as much as aesthetic preferences. His father is from Trinidad, and the style is a way of embracing that heritage.
The teen has been widely applauded for taking this stance, and for raising awareness about the hair discrimination that many African-Americans face, especially in schools and the workplace.
“Never cut your locks Deandre Arnold,” tweeted Houston Texans receiver DeAndre Hopkins.
“Deandre deserves better,” tweeted Ellen DeGeneres, after having Arnold as a guest on her daily talk show, where she surprised him with a $20,000 check for his future educational expenses and implored school district officials to reconsider their position.
On Sunday, the 18-year-old Arnold attended the Academy
Awards as a guest of filmmaker Matthew Cherry, whose delightful film “Hair Love” won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.
“Hair Love was done because we wanted to see more representation in animation; we wanted to normalize black hair,” Cherry said onstage, accepting the award.
Cherry also called on the audience to look into the CROWN (Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act, versions of which have been filed at the federal level and passed into law in several states. The legislation seeks to prohibit discrimination based on hair texture and styles, which are associated with race.
Members of the Texas Legislative Black Caucus announced at a Houston press conference last week that they are planning to introduce the measure during the next regular session, in 2021.
“In many ways, hair texture is a defining aspect of blackness,” said state Rep. Shawn Thierry, a Houston Democrat, in an interview this week. “It is a biological fact that people of African descent have curlier hair.”
That fact, she continued, has been used to marginalize black men, women and children for centuries, due to both explicit and implicit biases rooted in Eurocentric standards concerning what hair should, quote-unquote, look like. To apply those standards to children, Thierry said, can have long-term effects on their sense of self.
“You know when you’re being punished for just being who you are,” she said.
The Barbers Hill ISD, located about 35 miles east of downtown Houston, is not the only local school district to face criticism for dress-code conflicts involving minority students. Last April, an assistant principal at Pearland ISD used a Sharpie to fill in a design shaved into the fade haircut of an African-American student; that same month, a Muslim girl wearing a hijab was asked by an administrator to get a note from her imam confirming she wore it for religious reasons. The district later disciplined the administrator, revised its dress code and created a committee to deal with issues of cultural sensitivity.
Arnold’s former school district is a good one, in terms of academic achievement. Barbers Hill High School has a four-year graduation rate of 98.9 percent and an “A” grade, according to the Texas Education Agency. But it’s small, and relatively homogeneous; 70 percent of students are white, and just 3 percent are black. And this is not the first time that Barbers Hill ISD has become tangled in a hair-related controversy. In 2017 Jessica Oates was told that her 4-year-old son, Jabez, who is of Cocopah Indian descent, couldn’t return to pre-school unless he got a haircut.
“Parents have a right to seek an appropriate educational setting for their child, just as Ms. Oates has the right to place her child in a district that reflects her personal expectations for standards of appearance,” Superintendent Greg Poole said at the time.
“We would and should justifiably be criticized if our district lessened its expectations or longstanding policies simply to appease,” he continued.
Poole addressed the current controversy in a guest column for the Baytown Sun, which he forwarded to me in response to an interview request.
“This is an attempt to force unfair or ‘unequal’ treatment based on race or culture such that a child is given preferential treatment based on his ethnicity,” Poole writes.
“Our board of trustees, which has included African-American representation, takes sacred the role of representing their constituents, and we will continue to take our cue from our community not Hollywood.”
Arnold is a member of the Barbers Hill community, too — and the school district, in overlooking that, has done itself no favors.
His locks have clearly not affected his educational achievement in high school. Indeed, Poole himself describes Arnold as “a great kid” whose poise in the media spotlight has been a credit to the district.
Arnold has been a credit to the district, and he’s earned the right to graduate from it. Let’s hope district officials learn from this experience, and revisit their antiquated dress code policy before more students are unfairly penalized by it.