Black pupils are being wrongly excluded over their hair. I’m trying to end this discrimination

The UK school system has a problem with afro-textured hair. Across the country black and mixed-black pupils are being excluded because their hair is too short, too long, too big or too full. Pupils have been excluded for fades, locs, braids, natural afros and more – in effect every single style and necessary protective method for the maintenance and upkeep of afro hair has been penalised, often in the harshest possible ways. Whatever we do is never enough.

This is reminiscent of my own experiences in school where I was one of the very few black children. I remember a detention in my first year of secondary school at age 12 (we start secondary school a year older in Ireland). All of the other girls were 17- and 18-year-olds who proclaimed shock at my inclusion in their cohort. “You’re too little to be on detention!” they said. My crime? The sheer devilry of wearing the wrong colour scrunchy. The offending scrunchy was a woefully inadequate measure, one which I had used out of desperation to try and tie back a texture of hair not designed to be tied back, hair that I was made to feel deeply embarrassed by and which needed products and expertise not easily found in the Ireland of the late 1980s and early 90s. So I know firsthand how it feels to be punished for having hair that is deemed deviant simply by growing.

More recently with the advent of the natural hair movement people of African descent have been rejecting the standard that insists we must straighten our hair to fit in, undoing centuries of thinking that stigmatises our hair. Shamefully, the reaction from many UK schools has been to punish and denigrate children.

In 2019, five-year-old Josiah Sharpe was banned from the playground at breaktimes and eventually sent home from school due to his “extreme” haircut (a basic fade). He was eventually allowed return when his hair grew back to what the school deemed an appropriate length. In 2018 Chikayzea Flanders – a pupil at Fulham Boys school – was told he had to cut off his dreadlocks or leave the school. The school only backed down after his mother launched a campaign supported by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. Most recently, Ruby Williams came out of a three-year legal battle with her school in Hackney, where she had been repeatedly sent home because her natural afro hair was deemed to be against uniform policy.

In writing my book Don’t Touch My Hair I found myself uncovering the racist underpinnings of the catagorisation of afro hair, most virulently espoused in the disturbing, eugenics of the Nazi scientist Eugen Fischer.

However, I also wanted to liberate our history from a singular emphasis on the effects of racism and “white supremacy”. In doing so, I examined precolonial African history to discover the deep spiritual and cultural significance of African hairstyling; how the intricate patterns have millennia old histories and have been used to convey everything from fractal mathematics, detailed social historie and even – in defiance of the slave masters of Colombia– secret maps to freedom.

Armed with this knowledge, I’ve become convinced that the draconian policing of afro hairstyles in schools has to be recognised as being firmly in a continuum of 19th-century racist ideologies – dismissing ancient hairstylings that have long been fundamental in black culture as “non-traditional” is frankly ahistorical. There is nothing non-traditional about braiding styles that existed prior to the Magna Carta.

Recently there have been seeds of hope. I was contacted by Desmond Deehan, head of Townley grammar school in Bexley, south-east London, who told me that reading my book had made him re-evaluate uniform policy – ultimately dispensing with unnecessary hair regulations. In addition, the school has decolonised its curriculum. The relationship between the two developments is not irrelevant. A decolonised perspective would allow resistant schools to understand the discriminatory/anti-black logic informing rules around hair.

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Hair texture – like complexion – is one of the markers of African ancestry. According to the Equality Act 2010 – the metric by which discrimination is measured – the “protected characteristics” covered by the act’s provisions for race – include colour, nationality and ethnic or national origins. It would not be permissible to insist that children lighten their skin to attend school, yet policies that forbid black hair in its natural state or ban the use of the protective hairstyles are in effect demanding the same type of assimilation.

Hair is not specifically mentioned anywhere in the 251-page document – this has created a grey area that is confusing for teachers. While afro hair technically falls under the definition of a “protected characteristic”, but without being explicitly named, it is all too easily discriminated against. This reveals the cultural bias at play in the law, and demonstrates a blind spot that ignores one of the defining features of blackness.

That’s why I’ve started a petition to amend the Equality Act so that afro-textured hair is explicitly protected.

It is a simple step and we’ll need to go a lot further to amend this act. But with a genuine desire for change coming from headteachers, parents and students alike, it’s possible to have a real impact on the lives of children and their families, schools and wider society.

• Emma Dabiri is an author, academic and broadcaster. Her book Don’t Touch My Hair is out in paperback on 5 March