Dear Editor: Broad hair guidelines no match for racist beliefs: how MOE erred

“[…] The official Ministry of Education press release announcing the hair code […] works to trivialise the issue and divorce it from its substantive context.

“[….] An interview with former principal of Fatima Collage, Father Gregory Augustine two weeks after the press release illuminates the point. On 20 July he told the Catholic News’ television programme that there were ‘far more pressing issues in education’—sighting of all things, an ‘overgrown school yard’.

“[…] Clearly the MOE’s communication has failed to help well-intentioned administrators like Father Gregory to understand that hair discrimination is a ‘pressing issue’, both in education and employment…”

The following statement on the perceived blind spot in the Ministry of Education’s hair code was submitted to Wired868 by Shabaka Kambon of the Cross Rhodes Freedom Project:

The Ministry of Education launched a new hair code in September 2023, yet only four months later on the 11th of January the Trinidad Guardian reported that the parents of two girls of St Charles High School had lodged a public complaint: their daughters had been, “embarrassed in front of classmates” and “suspended since the start of the school year over their braided hairstyles”.

Two days later, the girls returned to school, but only after an intervention by “the District Supervisor of the Ministry of Education” and even then, the matter had not been fully resolved as there would need to be “more deliberation”, with the “hope of a more permanent concession from the school.” (T&T Guardian 13 January)

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident! While there is evidence that things have improved since the Trinity Moka graduation incident—where 23 students were blocked from crossing the stage to receive certificates with classmates, because their hairstyles were deemed to be in breach of school rules—the Caribbean Freedom Project and the Emancipation Support Committee (ESCTT) have received several complaints from parents, teachers and students since September.

In one particularly disgraceful incident, a teacher at a prestige school resorted to obscene language and called a student a thug for refusing to change an afro-textured hairstyle that should have been protected under the new code.

The persistence of allegations like this necessitate that we reflect on the new code beyond its enlightened provisions to protect “natural afro-textured hair and associated hairstyles such as Locs, twists, plaits, and cornrows” to find out why it has not had the desired impact.

To start with the official press release (6 July) announcing the code identified its raison d’etre as, “keeping pace with accepted changes in societal norms, values and beliefs”.

This rationale works to trivialise the issue and divorce it from its substantive context. It sows confusion among students and ambivalence among administrators who both need a clearer understanding of the issue to ground their actions going forward.

An interview with former principal of Fatima Collage, Father Gregory Augustine two weeks after the press release illuminates the point. On 20 July he told the Catholic News’ television programme that there were “far more pressing issues in education”—sighting of all things, an “overgrown school yard”.

Asked if the matter was an issue of race he said, “I am an Afro-Trinidadian. I love my people; I love myself and therefore not at all.”

Clearly the MOE’s communication has failed to help well-intentioned administrators like Father Gregory to understand that hair discrimination is a “pressing issue”, both in education and employment—and not just in Trinidad and Tobago but across the world as confirmed by recent studies.

• The “good hair study” (2016) demonstrated that regardless of race, people show an implicit bias against afro-textured hair;
• Duke (2020) found that candidates with curlier hair were less likely to be recommended for hire and scored lower in subjective assessments of professionalism and competence;
• Dove and LinkedIn (2023) found that “black women” straighten their hair for job interviews due to pressures associated with hair bias;
• Proctor and Gamble (2000) found that both men and women who perceive themselves to have ‘bad hair’ can experience reduced self-esteem and social insecurity, which may cause them to perform below their level of competency.

All these studies support Professor Verene Shepard’s conclusion. In her capacity as Chair of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), she said that “the ways in which children of African descent are treated in the matter of cultural choice in how they wear their hair, constitutes racial discrimination and contravenes Article 1 of the ICERD.”

Any prospect of tackling this issue successfully starts with the acknowledgment that it is tangled up in history and race, and other countries are seeing the light.

When Anguilla became the first country in the Caribbean to introduce a national policy against “hair discrimination” in April 2022, then minister for education and social development, Dee Ann Kentish Brown explained that “the full acceptance of Caribbean people’s own racial and cultural uniqueness meant addressing ingrained colonial perspectives about the appropriateness of black hair in schools and professional settings.”

When Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) addressed the issue in that same year an official communique conceded that the country had to “shift the bias against Afro-textured hair in the UK’s education system”.

Chief Regulator Jackie Killeen also acknowledged that “discrimination based on hair can have serious and long-lasting consequences for victims and their families.”

In the United States of America, twenty-four states and more than forty localities have already passed the CROWN (“Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair”) Act.

Co-drafter of this seminal legislation Professor Doris “Wendy” Greene explains the issue as, “part of a larger legacy of colonial values that perpetuate racial inequities”. The mere fact that countries in the Caribbean, Europe and North America have passed legislation to address this matter makes it one of the pre-eminent civil rights issues of our time.

From the MOE’s framing of the issue we move to the MOE’s definition of its code as, “broad guidelines for principals in the development of individual School Hair Rules”.

“Broad guidelines” are no match for the transnational, false and fundamentally racist belief, that Afro-textured hair and associated hairstyles are inherently messy, unkempt, unhygienic, disruptive and unsuitable for formal settings.

The insidious nature of this deeply ingrained idea encapsulated in the popular phrase bad hair is rooted in white supremacy from the colonial era when Europeans assigned human worth and social status using themselves as the somatic ideal.

Scottish physician Vincent Tothill observed the odious impact of this epistemic violence in Trinidad in the 1920s noting that, “most women who have crinkly hair will spend all they possess to get it straightened out at a beauty parlour in POS.”

He concluded that the bias against Afro-textured hair was so profound that it was “The real social bar!”—more of an obstacle to social mobility than skin colour, also in the spotlight now after a study published in the European Research Journal (2024) found that skin bleaching was on the rise in Trinidad and Tobago fuelled by the idea that, “a lighter complexion signifies higher social status and enhanced social mobility”.

One hundred years to the decade after Tothill made his observations we find citizens risking their health to lighten their skin and teachers punishing students for wearing their afro textured hair in the appropriate natural hairstyles.

In this environment still haunted by racist colonial values, broad guidelines are not enough to prevent judgements that violate the civil rights of our children. This seems to be clear in both the US and Britain.

In the former, guidelines can be reinforced in some cases by severe fines. In the latter, practical resources have been developed to help school administrators identify “indirect racism” and “prevent it from happening”.

Having established that the code is inadequate let us consider why.

The MOE’s own documentation lists those invited to participate in official deliberations as: the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), Denominational Boards, National Principals’ Associations, the National Parent Teachers Association (NPTA), the Trinidad and Tobago Unified Teachers Association (TTUTA) and other education stakeholders.

Astonishingly absent from the list of invitees are any of the individuals or families who were directly affected by hair discrimination.

Even more shocking was the exclusion of those organisations that championed the cause of these individuals. Those organisations that led the advocacy during the decades when the MOE was unwilling or unable to address the issue.

The sheer absurdity of this last omission is magnified considerably when one considers the fact that as recently as October 2019, Khafra Kambon, then chair of the Emancipation Support Committee, wrote Anthony Garcia, then minister of education, calling for the establishment of a task force “to examine the issue across all schools” as “a matter of urgency”—adding that there was clear evidence that the matter was far more widespread and detrimental than most were aware.

Civil society organisations like the ESCTT, along with relevant academics and those directly affected by hair prejudice all feature prominently in the deliberations that resulted in the development of the CROWN act in the USA and the EHRC’s educational resources in Britain.

Their contributions are well documented and critical to the adequacy and effectiveness of those outcomes.

Trinidad and Tobago’s hair code will have to be revisited and upgraded within a more inclusive process.

A dereliction of this duty will not just result in more children with afro textured hair being harmed, it will also undermine the ongoing national reckoning with our racist colonial past in which we must triumph in order to live up to our stated ideals of equality.

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