It Starts Young: Natural Hair Discrimination in School
Socialization to anti-black sentiments starts young. Natural hair discrimination serves as a conduit for racial bias and perpetuates systemic racism through the pressure of conformity to Eurocentric professionalism and beauty standards (Legal Defense Fund 2023). The 2021 Dove CROWN Research Study for Girls explores race-based hair discrimination and its impacts on schoolgirls aged 5-18.
According to the Study, personal experiences of hair discrimination amongst Black girls are recorded to occur as young as 5-years-old (Dove CROWN 2021, 3). Hair discrimination follows Black girls throughout their life and can influence self-perception. For example, the Doll Test was first performed by Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark, which tested African American children’s racial perceptions (Legal Defense Fund, 2023). The majority of the children held a preference for the white doll and associated it with positive characteristics. It was concluded that “’prejudice, discrimination, and segregation’ created a feeling of inferiority among African American children and damaged their self-esteem" (LDF 2023). These findings still resonate today, with 81% of Black girls in majority-white schools stating that they sometimes wish that their hair was straight (Dove CROWN 2021, 4).
The effects do not stop at internal feelings. Racial hair discrimination negatively affects the academic performance and life trajectory of Black children. The average teenage Black girl misses one week of school per year due to hair dissatisfaction (Dove CROWN 2021, 4). Additionally, school policies often add fuel to the fire.
Black students are more likely to be suspended for discretionary reasons, including long hair violations (which according to Princeton University, has proven to not provide any indication of student misconduct). These punishments then lead to poorer academic performance, higher dropout rates, gang involvement, etc. (Legal Defense Fund 2023). Natural hair discrimination not only strips Black students of practicing essential hair care, but also stifles cultural expression, others aspects of Black identity, and contributes to structural and institutional practices that oppress Black people and reinforces phenomena such as the school-to-prison pipeline.
Institutional contributions to negative life trajectories of Black students relate to the unit on contemporary racial associations. In “Race Science and Surveillance: police as the new race scientists,” Dr. Natalie Byfield examines how state surveillance of minority ethnic and racial groups could be conceptualized as a “new type of scientific racism” (Byfield 2018, 1). The historic role of the policing system in the United States has been to enforce racial and social boundaries, and thus, has been active in excluding and marginalizing those who do not conform to the standards (I.e., White/European) (Byfield 2018, 2). Racism and antiblackness have been and continue to be employed by policing to “maintain order,” and these inevitably lead to the racial discrepancies we see today with arrests, brutality, and lethal force usage. Similar practices are seen with the schooling system and black students. Here, we can see how ideas of race and nation are pervasive throughout various structures and institutions in the U.S. and how it manifests in natural hair discrimination.