By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, January 26, 2020
It seems almost inevitable that long hair is unwelcome at
Barbers Hill High School.
There’s a touch of aptronymic poetry in Texas
public-school dress-code disputes. When I was in school in the 1980s, at the
height of the Satanism panic, the local school-district superintendent
circulated a list of “occult” symbols for teachers keep an eye out for, and one
of those was the Star of David — which would have been bad enough in any case
but was amusing coming from a man whose name was Moses. (George W. Bush would
later make Mike Moses a state education commissioner.) Barbers Hill telling young
DeAndre Arnold that his hair is too long honors the literary convention.
It does not honor good sense.
Arnold, a young black man of Trinidadian ancestry, wears
his hair in dreadlocks. That’s fine with the powers that be at Barbers Hill, so
long as said dreads don’t extend — these things always get hilariously specific
— below the eyebrows, earlobes, or a T-shirt collar. Arnold’s have recently
grown a little longer, and he has been told that he will have to spend his days
in in-school suspension and that he will be barred from his graduation ceremony
if he refuses to comply.
There isn’t anything obviously unreasonable about the
dress code: Schools are right to have basic standards for their students, and
the rules are written in the ridiculous way they are written because the
complaining and litigious nature of Americans makes it impossible to simply ask
teachers or vice principals to use their own judgment. At the same time, there
isn’t anything at all wrong with the way DeAndre Arnold presents himself: There
are guys who wear their hair the same way who work in Silicon Valley or write
for the New York Times.
Barbers Hill seems to be doing some things right: Its
math and reading proficiency rates are 96 percent and 87 percent, respectively,
its four-year graduation rate is 99 percent, and 30 percent of its students
pass at least one AP exam, according to U.S.
News and World Report. It is located in the exurban energy corridor on the
far edges of Houston, in a town called Mont Belvieu, where wages are pretty
good and where households are more likely to be made up of married couples
living together than the national average. So, credit where due, and all that.
But, this being the United States of America, two
additional aspects of the case are inevitable. The first is that there is a big
wad of cholesterol in the bureaucratic arteries here: There is a form, apparently,
that Arnold’s family can fill out to beg for a variance. They’d never heard of
any such thing, but now the student’s mother has filled out the form pleading
with the school district for permission to parent her own child and see to his
grooming. The second inevitability is the charge of racism.
“People want to call us racist,” school superintendent
Greg Poole told CNN. “But we’re following the rules, the law of the land. We’re
certainly not making this up.”
Of course they’re making it up.
These silly rules were not handed down from on high by
the Almighty. The school district made up these rules, and it can revise them.
And while there isn’t any reason to assume racist intent, it is not exactly
unthinkable that it could be the case that the powers that be in a Texas town
that is 90.96 percent white didn’t get the dreadlocks policy exactly right on
the first go. Poole speaks like a man with the soul of a vice principal, who
cannot distinguish a school dress code from “the law of the land” or that from
the permanent things. Laws change.
The question for the ladies and gentlemen of the Barbers
Hill schools is, or should be: What is the Barbers Hill high school for? Does
it exist to produce educated men and women, or does it exist to produce docile
rule-followers?
That is not a rhetorical question. The American
public-school system is guided by cutting-edge progressive thinking . . . from
the 19th century. The Bismarckian conception of the state as a factory is
deeply impressed on our education policy, which is oriented toward turning out
workers for the economy as though it were an assembly line producing widgets.
Conformism is an inescapable part of that kind of thinking: Assembly lines by
their nature impose homogeneity on what they produce. When it comes to dress
codes, there’s a reason we call the most comprehensive kind uniforms.
And uniforms are funny things. For young people, they can
in the right context serve to encourage a more interesting and vital form of
individualism by eliminating the most shallow kind of distinctiveness (Yeah, Caitlyn, you’ve got blue hair now,
congratulations) and obliging them to distinguish themselves in more
meaningful ways.
But, as Pete Townshend knows,
sometimes a uniform is its own reason for being. In the glory days of punk
rock, one could go from suburb to suburb and meet fierce young nonconformists
who were, strangely enough, all wearing the same motorcycle jackets and the
same Doc Martens, all sporting the same haircuts, all listening to the same
music, all mouthing the same political slogans. A lot of those kids went on to
be diversity officers at schools and corporations, and brought with them a
notion of “diversity” that means “You can’t work at the Denver Post if you have unpopular political views.” The instinct
for conformism is very strong.
And so it is fair to ask the superintendent in Barbers
Hill how it is that bullying DeAndre Arnold into conformity with the fashion
sense of the nation’s vice principals makes better students — or whether this is
a case of a rule being enforced because somebody whose occupation it is to
enforce such rules understands such rules to be self-justifying.
A side note: Fighting with the hair police (now a moot
concern for me, alas) as a high-school newspaper editor was my introduction to
journalistic controversy. The other thing I learned in high-school newspaper
was that the spray adhesive we used to paste up newspaper pages could, if
deployed in just the right way, create some pretty good dreadlocks. Funny old
world.
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