Kristen Gyles | Locs are not dirty! Anti-blackness is

Four years after the Supreme Court ruling that the constitutional rights of a five-year-old girl were not breached when the Kensington Primary School told her parents her locs would need to be removed for her to be admitted into the school, the reasoning that was given is still baffling.

The following assertion was made in the written judgment:

“There is no dispute that the school established this policy, not as a way to maintain discipline and order in the school, but as a preventative measure in the case of an outbreak of ‘lice’ and ‘junjo’. It is clear from the evidence that the school had sanctioned this policy on the basis of its own experiences with unhygienic students in the past…”

Such an uninformed view is most unfortunate. It associates specific hairstyles with a lack of hygiene and therefore paves the way for discriminatory treatment of the wearers of these hairstyles. Locs do not promote a lack of hygiene in any way and the notion that locs pose some health-related threat to the school environment is baseless.

The association of lice with a lack of hygiene is also uninformed. Anyone can be affected by head lice and there is no connection between the presence of lice on someone’s head and the cleanliness of their hair. The head louse is a parasitic insect which latches on to hair follicles and draws blood from the individual’s scalp. The louse’s bite often elicits an allergic reaction which causes itching. However, lice do not transmit diseases and are therefore not considered a health risk.

Further, although head lice infestations are not uncommon among school-age children, it is less common among people of African descent than among people of other races, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It is, however, more common amongst girls, than boys, and this is assumed to be because girls have a greater tendency to play in each other’s hair and to play with their heads close together.

To state emphatically, there is no evidence to suggest that an individual who wears locs faces any greater risk of harbouring or spreading lice than anyone else.

So where does this perception of black, loc-haired children being lice-spreaders come from? Probably from the same place as the idea of black people originating from monkeys. Some ‘ideas’ are nothing more than disguised racial biases that have crept their way down through post-slavery generations of African descendants who have identity issues.

Anti-blackness has become a culture for many Jamaicans. And unfortunately, these Jamaicans exist in all spheres of society. They are teachers, nurses, politicians, police officers, school board members and judges. They are crafting and/or enforcing laws and policies that affect all of us and unfortunately, they are taking their biases with them to work and allowing those biases to influence them in the discharge of their duties.

RIGHTS BREACHED

Fortunately, the Supreme Court’s ruling was appealed and earlier this week, the Court of Appeal ruled that the rights of the young student had in fact been breached.

The ongoing issue of the subjectivity of grooming policies in schools is in no way unfamiliar to the government. In April of 2023, the Ministry of Education and Youth released the Student Dress & Grooming Policy for Public Educational Institutions to provide a framework to guide the development of grooming policies within schools. However, the document demonstrates that the government’s position itself needs refinement. The preface of the document starts by saying “Schools are microcosms of the wider society and, as such, provide fertile ground for the socialization and preparation of students for the future. Dress and grooming form a critical part of student development and are closely linked to character development...”

Really? This is the subtle philosophy that lies at the centre of the controversy surrounding school grooming policies. The notion that the way a student wears their hair or otherwise dresses themselves is a reflection of their character, is extremely misguided. An individual’s hairstyle says absolutely nothing about their character.

It is the view that locs are dirty and unhygienic, and therefore reflective of a dirty or less-than-desirable character that makes some school administrators so adamant that their students should not wear locs to school. On the contrary, it is the anti-black mentality out of which this notion is birthed that is morally tainted and dirty.

The anti-black culture which demonises certain African hairstyles is dying, fortunately, but some Jamaicans, especially of the older generation, are holding on to it for dear life. They pride themselves in saying they are well-cultured and understand the importance of discipline, but in reality they are just suffering from the racial biases of their time.

On the note of cultural bias, it is heartening to see that the Court of Appeal’s ruling centred around the issue of freedom of expression and not religious freedom. In 2024, there should be no need to claim association with any given religious group to be permitted to wear specific Afrocentric hairstyles. Students should be free to wear their hair in styles that are comfortable for them, given their hair texture, length, or general preferences. Once a student’s choice of hairstyle does nothing to impede the learning experience of other students, there is no actual reason to make their hairstyle into a problem.

Kristen Gyles is a free-thinking public affairs opinionator. Send feedback to kristengyles@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com.